Yearly Archives: 2010

Fundación Pies Descalzos (Shakira’s Foundation) Seeking 5 Interns to Support Deployment

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Description

At Fundación Pies Descalzos, interns will provide on-site technical and/or pedagogical support to a One Laptop per Child pilot initiative in Colombia. Interns will collaborate with teachers and local staff in developing innovative content and activities that optimize the impact of technology in learning outcomes of students and promote the involvement of the community with the initiative.   They will also provide support to the solution of technical problems that arise with the daily use of technology.

The project is implemented in three elementary schools in the cities of Barranquilla, Quibdó and Soacha in Colombia, serving vulnerable and displaced children.

Requirements

We are seeking candidates who possess the following:

  • Knowledge and a keen interest in international education
  • A working knowledge of Spanish
  • An understanding of the XO & Sugar, in particular Scratch and/or EToys

Contact:

Paul Commons (Commons@laptop.org) & Sandra Barragan (Sandra@laptop.org)

Afghanistan team develops new tools for interactive content

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New extensions to the eXe learning platform, recently developed by our team in Afghanistan, make it possible to create interactive educational content in minutes that can be exported as XOL library files or HTML / Javascript, for use in any web browser.

It provides a point and click graphical interface to create a variety of different interaction formats, such as:

  • sorting,
  • assembly of parts,
  • hangman games,
  • moving object speed answer games
  • geography quizzes, and more…

Here are screenshots of the new extensions in action:

eXe creation screen for a mapping quiz

eXe creation screen

eXe exporting a game as an .xol

eXe exporting a game as an .xol

And here is the result, expoerted as an .xol file and working the next minute on an XO:

eXe map activity on an XO

eXe map activity on an XO

Development is actively ongoing, and suggestions and contributions are welcome.  For details see the Paiwastoon project page.

Kasiisi Project: Notes from a technical lead

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“I like to use the computers for English and to know about them” says Daphine of Kasiisi Primary School in rural western Uganda.

The Kasiisi Project helps to promote conservation through education around Kibale National Park, Uganda by building classrooms, hiring extra teachers, supporting healthy environments, providing support for 90 students to attend Secondary School, and working with other school support organizations.  Over the past 15 years, Kasiisi has grown from a small, one-building school to a massive compound with a kitchen, library, teacher housing, and now computer classes. Much of the early success of Kasiisi can be associated with a strong Head Mistress and support from the Kasiisi Project.

My name is Jeff Bittner, and I have been working for the Kasiisi Project since October 2008 helping to support Kasiisi and the 4 other schools in the Project.
I have been involved with a variety of activities since my arrival, including the introduction and implementation of roughly 150 XOs (see our Kasiisi blog for more background). As a person working in the schools before, during, and after the introduction of the XO Laptops, I have seen the way that these computers can excite and engage the students, as well as the complications that come with them.

Continue reading →

New OLPC site in the works

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Our design partners have been developing a new design for the OLPC website, one that draws in contributions from our partner and chapter sites around the world. I saw the latest designs this week, and loved them!  We’ll have more updates about the site soon, once everyone’s back from the Realness Summit and we’ve heard from Mike Massey, our new photo maven.

The biggest change: we’re going to convert the homepage from a big logo to a series of full-screen images from deployments, with background details and links to more information. If you have any amazing photographs or stories you’d like to see featured on our homepage, please post a link to them.

Teasers:

An overview of stories
an OLPC world map

XO-3 news around the world

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News about the Marvell partnership and accelerated XO-3 roadmap are hitting newswires in other languages (in French, in Spanish, in German); they tend to be confused about what will be available when at what cost.  Still, it’s fascinating to read some of the international views on what this means.

In English, there’s a discussion about the new design online:

Charbax: Marvell openly aims to fulfill OLPC’s design and pricing goal,
Wayan: OLPC will be working to sell Moby tablets,
mavrothal: How XO-1.5 will fare, if new big deployments materialize and what the data show can change everything,
sola: It is enough to customize a well-built reference design and port [Sugar] to ARM… sell the new XOs through every possible sales channel

And even Larry Dignan gets in on the chatter — saying that the real impact of the XO-3 will be to drive conversation about what tablets should do once they are omnipresent.