OLPC Rwanda has recently spruced up their website, including a list of documents they use for running classes with XOs, and links to their active local blogs.  They’ve also started their own twitter stream – where you can follow Rodrigo’s current visit with Kagame and the national team.  You can sign up to volunteer from afar, and can leave them feedback via twitter, or on Julia’s or Rwagaju’s blogs.
Life in a Day is a film capturing a single day through the lives of people across the planet — filmed by thousands of people and edited into a feature-length documentary. They have been showing the film across the country for the past month, after a preview at Sundance at the start of the year. It’s pretty wonderful – something I wish we would do as a society every year, perhaps with different editorial groups.
The film team recently posted the clip of the young Peruvian student Abel going about his day with his XO, on YouTube, talking about life working on the street with his father, and pleased as punch with everything he can read about on Wikipedia. Abel was one of a handful of young people in Peru who were asked to submit film from their day to the crew.
This is one time when I am glad to see creative groups making full use of Facebook. The film’s facebook page is the best source of new information about he film, and while we have been a casual fan of the film for some time, it was one of their updates there that pointed us to the new clip. Kudos as well for making so many of the individual stories from the film available on YouTube — please continue to do the same for the parts that didn’t make it into the movie!
Since our first partnership with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, which began in 2008, OLPC has seen significant deployments in Niue (the first country in the world to realize one laptop for every child), Nauru, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea.
Last year we expanded our work in the region to start pilots in 12 other countries from the Pacific Island Forum.  One of the pilot projects developed was a well-received program in Kosrae, one of the four states of Micronesia.
As Michael Hutak reports on the OLPC Oceania blog, we are now working with Micronesia to build on the success of that pilot. Kosrae recently secured a $400K Supplemental Education Grant from the United States under the Compact of Free Association agreement between the US and Micronesia. Kosrae plans to implement a full-scale deployment of OLPC to all of their students from 1st to 8th grades.
In July, Kosrae deployed laptops to all 810 students and teachers in grades 5-8. Â The first laptop was handed out at Utwe Elementary School, by Kosrae State Governor Lyndon Jackson (with Department of Education Director Lyndon Cornelius looking on).
A ceremony was held at Tafunsak Elementary School to announce the program, attended by US Ambassador Prahar, who encouraged everyone involved to use their new tools well.  As Oceania expands its OLPC program, this looks like a model to follow, with collaboration from many sectors of the local and international community.
A photo from the handout at Wachung Elementary school, visited by Cornelius and former Senator John Martin.
The second half of the deployment, for the students and teachers in grades 1-4, will take place later this year.
The contest rules are out for the OLPC/Nickelodeon storytelling contest. Â OLPC and Nick will be judging the submissions together. Â All XO users in Latin America are eligible to compete by submitting a story, anination, or other multimedia clip of up to 3 minutes. Â Contest ends August 29.
OLPC Association y Nickelodeon organizan y juzgan el concurso en conjunto (anuncio, reglas completas):
Hat tip to Claudia, Christoph, and Giulia.
Tamin-Lee Connolly plans to travel from South-to-North across Africa, ending in the middle-east, visiting schools and helping to deploy laptops along the way. She may even bring some of her own. Today she begins her travel by flying back to her native South Africa from Dubai, where she has been working, launching a year-long journey by land rover to visit 39 countries. She plans to volunteer for OLPC and perhaps other educational groups along the way, and has been talking to grassroots XO deployments to find those that would benefit from a visit – starting with the amazing team in Kliptown!
If you’re working in Africa, drop her a line on her travel blog, everything except the horn – perhaps you can meet up during her trek.
Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal has a group of teachers and students that have been subtitling and using Khan Academy videos in Spanish over the past year. You can see some of the resulting videos here.
Sam Seidenburg has some suggestions about how we can improve learning with such videos: writing Activities that could be written to support math tutorial and physics tutorial work, or making similar format videos to help people get started with eToys.
Neil Dsouza at teachaclass.org has offered to help anyone who wants to start using Khan Academy videos in their classes.