Children often attend schools intermittently in rural areas in Africa and India due to socio-economic conditions which make pupils augment their family income by working. An e-Learning solution could aid in raising the level of education by making it easier for children to fit schoolwork into the day, acting as a complement to when they are able to attend school. Traditional distance learning solutions based on computers are not suitable due to lack of infrastructure support. In this paper, we evaluate both text and voice based smartphone prototype environments which could provide the tools and services for pupils to download educational content, interact with teachers as well as other pupils to discuss topics. These have been implemented as a proof-of- concept and the initial evaluation feedback, although not from target users, was very promising. We intend to re-implement the prototype and do a proper evaluation with rural-area school children.