Monthly Archives: March 2014

The OLPC project is alive and well in The Queen City.

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Making Digital Literacy a Reality for Everyone

Queens’ Knight School of Communication takes another step toward making Charlotte a model city for digital literacy

WHO:  The James L. Knight School of Communication is launching a digital literacy initiative at Ashley Park Elementary School, a school within the Project L.I.F.T. corridor. Project L.I.F.T. is a non-profit organization that transforms the way students who traditionally perform poorly in school are educated, focusing on nine schools within Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools (CMS).

 

WHAT:  The Knight School has partnered with CMS,  One Laptop per Child, Mobile Beacon and EveryoneOn to clear away digital literacy obstacles for Ashley Park Elementary families and assist parents who cannot keep pace with the technological literacy required of their children. The Knight School will assess families’ technology needs; Mobile Beacon is donating 100 modems and is providing free in-home Internet access for the remainder of the school year to participating families; and One Laptop per Child has already provided students with computers. The initiative aligns with the Knight School’s overarching mission—to raise the digital media literacy rate of the city to improve the lives of Charlotteans—and the launch day will be celebrated by a Mayoral Proclamation.

 

WHY: The focus on Ashley Park Elementary follows the Knight School’s Digital Media Literacy (DML) Index, the first tool of its kind to produce a comprehensive view of DML competency across a municipality—in this case, the city of Charlotte. The community surrounding Ashley Park scored the lowest on the Knight School’s Charlotte area index; a deeper look at the data revealed the neighborhood has the lowest Internet use, contains the highest percentage of adults without a high school degree and has the highest percentage of households with an annual income less than $40,000.

 

WHERE:  Ashley Park Elementary School (Media Center)

2401 Belfast Drive, Charlotte

 

WHEN:  The Second Annual Digital Media Literacy Day, an initiative launched in 2013 by the Knight School

Friday, March 21, 2014, 9-10 a.m. and 4-5 p.m

MEDIA OPPORTUNITIES:

  • Remarks by Dean Eric Freedman of the Knight School on the significance and importance of the initiative
  • Students and parents becoming more digitally literate – receiving lessons on how to use their computers, some who will be using computers for the first time

ABOUT THE JAMES L. KNIGHT SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION AT QUEENS UNIVERSITY OF CHARLOTTE

The mission of the James L. Knight School of Communication is to prepare consumers and creators of communication messages to become engaged citizens, advocates and leaders in the communities they serve. The Knight School offers a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Journalism and Digital Media, a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Communication, and a Master of Arts in Communication. Alumni thrive in such areas as journalism, media industries, advertising, public and community relations, law, human resources, sports enterprise, corporate communication, government and education.

ABOUT QUEENS UNIVERSITY OF CHARLOTTE 

Queens University of Charlotte is a private, co-ed, Presbyterian-affiliated comprehensive university with a commitment to both liberal arts and professional studies. Located in the heart of historic Charlotte, Queens serves approximately 2,400 undergraduate and graduate students through its College of Arts and Sciences, McColl School of Business, Wayland H. Cato, Jr. School of Education, James L. Knight School of Communication and Andrew Blair College of Health which features the Presbyterian School of Nursing.

ABOUT MOBILE BEACON

Mobile Beacon provides fourth generation (4G) mobile broadband services exclusively to educational and nonprofit organizations across the United States. Mobile Beacon was created by a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that is one of the largest national educational broadband service (EBS) providers in the country. Through an agreement with Clearwire, Mobile Beacon provides high-speed data services and mobile Internet access on the CLEAR 4G network. For more information, visit www.mobilebeacon.org.

ABOUT EVERYONEON

EveryoneOn is a national nonprofit working to eliminate the digital divide by making high-speed, low-cost Internet, computers, and free digital literacy accessible to all unconnected Americans. EveryoneOn aims to leverage the power of the Internet to provide opportunity to all Americans—regardless of age, race, geography, income or education level. For more information, visit www.everyoneon.org.

 

ABOUT ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD 

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide every child in the world access to new channels of learning, sharing and self-expression. In partnership with the public and private sectors and non-governmental organizations and supported by comprehensive implementation and pedagogical services, OLPC seeks to provide each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power connected laptop that empowers individual learning and growth. Fore more information, visit www.laptop.org.

OLPC concentrating on its core values: education

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OLPC’s mission to empower the world’s children through education is far from over. OLPC is thriving and making more inroads at bringing education to those who can’t easily access it. OLPC recently formed a strategic alliance with the Zamora Teran family through many of their enterprises and their philanthropic foundation, the “Fundación Zamora Teran to deliver XO laptops not only to Central and South America, but also to Africa.

Aside from distributing more laptops in several schools in Costa Rica, Uruguay is receiving its first 50k units of the XO-4 Touch (running Android) in a few weeks’ time. In addition, the XO Tablet is currently available directly through governments and NGOs, as well as in Europe and Canada and through all major retail outlets in the United States including Walmart, Amazon, Toys ‘R Us among the others.

OLPC also has outsourced many of the software and development units because the organization is becoming more hardware and OS agnostic, concentrating on its core values – education. As an example, we’ve partnered with the Smithsonian Museum to bring feature-rich, interactive and more targeted content to our young learners.

We have more exciting things planned in the horizon including the implementation of very large scale projects in several regions of the world, so be sure to stay tuned.

WEB’ DOCUMENTARY CHRONICLING THE WORK OF ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD TO PLAY IN MIAMI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2014

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Miami, FL – March 4, 2014 – Righteous Pictures, a film and new media production company founded by Miaminative, Michael Pertnoy, will be bringing its documentary, WEB, to Miami International Film Festival, presented and produced by Miami Dade College, this March.  The film, which has been described as “engaging, informative and provocative*,” follows Peruvian families living in remote villages in the Amazon Jungle and Andes Mountains as their children experience the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program, gaining access to the Internet for the first time. 

  “From the beginning, we wanted to make a film that explores both the positive impact and negative consequences that may arise from the spread of technology to the furthest corners of the globe,” said WEB Producer Michael Pertnoy. “The OLPC program became the lens through which we were able to tell this story in real-time as it unfolded on the ground.”

  One Laptop Per Child, the world-renowned project to provide a modern education to children through a connected computing device, launched the project in Peru in 2007. The program, which is run by the Ministry of Education, has deployed around 900,000 XO laptops in Spanish and local indigenous languages.

“OLPC project in Peru was able to connect communities from the Amazonian to the Jungle regions,” said Rodrigo Arboleda, its CEO. “Empowering them with connected solar powered devices in their native languages, both kids and adults are exposed to learning that otherwise would not have happened.”

The film plays on Saturday, March 8th at 4pm at the Regal Theater on Alton Road in South Beach and again the following Saturday, March 15th at 1:45pm at the Paragon Theater in Coconut Grove.  Tickets can be purchased directly from the Miami International Film Festival website.

Web The Film: As children in some of the most remote parts of the world connect to the Internet for the first time, Web considers both the benefits and complications that arise from digital connections. Alongside the poignant and sometimes humorous local stories, the film includes interviews with leading thinkers on the Internet including Foursquare Founder Dennis Crowley, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales and OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte for an insightful look at our times.

Righteous Pictures is a film and new media production company that produces social issue films and public engagement campaigns to serve as platforms for dialogue and catalysts for change around the most critical issues of our time. We are dedicated to producing and disseminating content across media platforms to inspire, inform, entertain, and ultimately change the way the viewer sees the world. 

One Laptop per Child (OLPC at http://www.laptop.org) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide every child in the world access to new channels of learning, sharing and self-expression. In partnership with the public and private sectors and non- governmental organizations and supported by comprehensive implementation and pedagogical services, OLPC seeks to provide each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power connected device that empowers individual learning and growth.

*Haute Lifestyle:  http://bit.ly/1fQKU4F