Director, Michael Kleiman, is on his way back to Peru to visit the villages featured in the film and share the finished product with them. Stay tuned over the next few weeks for pictures and videos from his journey. You can check out the film’s trailer below and/or here.
Teaser 2
I am awe’ed with the results of Elaine Negroponte’s dedication to the children and communities served by Cambodia P.R.I.D.E. Cambodia PRIDE, “Providing Rural Innovative Digital Education†maintains a low profile in a country which has many NGOs and many obstacles to success. I was so personally inspired by my visit to this project in 2011, that I have become more involved. This year, I joined Cambodia PRIDE’s Board of Directors as a “special advisor.â€Â I am passionate about OLPC and its XO laptop project because it impacts so many children. The children that Cambodia Pride reach, even those children that don’t complete their school exams, are learning how to think, to learn, to work together with others, and to solve problems. …
Continue reading the original post here.
OLPC OS 13.2.0 is a new software release focusing on cleaning up a few edges from our previous release, and finishing off support for the new XO-4 laptop. As usual, we maintain support and consistency for older laptops models, with XO-1.75, XO-1.5 and XO-1 also included in the release.
This is our core power saving technique where we suspend the processor after a few seconds of system inactivity (“idle suspend”), but we leave the screen and wireless interfaces running to provide the illusion that the system is still running as usual.
The new XO-4 laptop comes with bluetooth support as a purchase option. While such Bluetooth support is not immediately available in the user interface, we have enabled this functionality in the underlying system, ready for developers and deployers to use in their custom applications.
In the Clock activity, you can now use the touchscreen to drag the clock hands to another time, a useful exercise for learning about time. Drop-down lists are sub-optimal for touch, they have been replaced by more intuitive and touch-friendly UI elements in Record. The pinch-to-zoom touch gestures in Image Viewer behave much better than before. FotoToon has been improved to interact with the touchscreen on-screen keyboard.
A new activity has been added, presenting a piano-style musical keyboard to the user. The piano can then be played using the XO’s physical keyboard, or with the XO-4 touchscreen by directly placing your fingertips on the notes you wish to play. You can even play multiple notes at the same time by using more than one finger, thanks to the XO-4’s multitouch capabilities.
We are exploring methods to improve common classroom situations of teachers handing out assignments, and teachers collecting in the students work. While this functionality should ideally be part of the core Sugar desktop, for now we are prototyping a solution in the form of an activity called Journal Share, which is new to 13.2.0. To hand out an assignment to the students, the teacher starts the Journal Share activity, shares it, and adds the assignment to the session. Students join the shared activity, and with a single click, the assignment appears in their Journal. When the teacher wants to collect in the student’s work, the teacher starts the Journal Share activity and shares it. Students join the shared activity, and add their completed work from their Journal. The submitted work is automatically transferred into the teacher’s journal for later assessment and evaluation.
Several activities (such as Read, Write and Paint) are now usable when the screen is rotated. Scratch has been updated to a new version, bringing in the latest functionality and extending the library content. The Help activity content has been updated.
How to install? (Installation is distinct from update. If you have user data on the laptop that you wish to preserve, you may want to follow the Update instructions.)
Thanks to  Superchef, CuidarMe and ParticipAcción video games available in the SugarLab activities platform to download, children belonging to the Red Unidos are becoming agents of change. Through these interactive games that have had great success in the network, this strategy has helped to foster social innovation, learning healthy habits related to nutrition, and good practices in the field of family dynamics.
The three games are part of the transforming project implemented under the agreement signed between the National Agency for Overcoming Extreme Poverty – ANSPE, the organization One Laptop Per Child – OLPC and the city of Chia, a program that primarily benefits 240 children and girls from 7-12 years of the municipality of Chia, belonging to Red Unidos.
Children who are part of this program will receive laptops under the training model implemented by the OLPC community worldwide, including training workshops also involving their parents. The results of these workshops and initiatives for children will be published on the website www.anspeolpc.com designed especially for the program.
The success of the games has been evident after being available for two weeks in SugarLabs activity platform. Those were classified within the top ranking downloads. This expands the possibility that more children know and can start the process of transforming their lives and their environment.
It is hoped that this experience can be replicated and scaled up in other  zones of Extreme Poverty, to contribute to improve the quality of life for children and families “Unidas”.
During the last school week in Armenia, Mrs Nelly Khachatryan, NUR`s referent teacher at Eurnekian school in Etchmiadzin, carried out a poll among students, teachers and parents regarding the incorporation of technology through the XO in their classes.
Below you can see the pupils results.
NUR team www.nurarmenia.org
