As Uruguay was the first country in the region to return to in-person classes in 2020, in one year education went through three stages with different learning modalities: in-person, distance and blended, placing Plan Ceibal centre stage with a future perspective of an even more strategic role.

Ceibal president Leandro Folgar reflected on the projection of the plan and the need to rethink what it is and how we conceptualize technology in education. He stressed the importance of generating synergies and agreements that lead to new projects and services, always with a focus on innovation for education and the leveraging of technologies to benefit the service that Plan Ceibal offers.

“After this, it became clear that Ceibal is a fundamental part of the education system, and what it brings and the spaces it occupies are a prevalent aspect in the teaching and learning experience at all levels.”

Plan Ceibal leadership and teams stressed the need to work to consolidate a more flexible, resilient education model, with strategic interdependences, that makes it possible to sustain learning and understand teachers as designers of experiences and content, with capacity for interaction from different media platforms.

Resilient innovative projects

In line with the Plan Ceibal strategy, education projects were identified that adapted to changes in learning environments, with participative proposals designed by students to address relevant issues for the education community, which benefited from the significant appropriation of Plan Ceibal resources. 

This is the case of the Liceo Capilla del Sauce, where thanks to guidance in Plan Ceibal workshops for making applications, students worked on the development of a solution to investigate why young people drop out when they switch to secondary school, in collaboration with fellow students at Escuela N°28 about to finish primary school.

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The experience proved very motivating for students, who adopted the roles of researchers and developers, working in a highly-committed team to give continuity to the project, despite the challenges. According to the testimony of Alexis Nuñez, one of the teachers responsible for coordinating the activity, “the pandemic took us by surprise but in the case of our new project it wasn’t a difficulty… quite the contrary, because we were able to improve our handling of different digital communication tools, such as for the work in this project.”

Teachers’ and students’ testimonies from this initiative show one effect of the pandemic: the mobilization of all educational figures, resulting in the school becoming closer to its community.