Jeff Elkner of the DC Learning Club is already saving the date for next spring’s Scratch Day DC, at their traditional haunt. Local teachers are already signing up to run workshps; for details see their event page.
The OLPC Community Summit is back for a second year, hosted again by OLPC San Francisco. It promises to be the year’s best rundown of OLPC efforts around the world, large and small.
You can see the schedule online at olpcsf.org, and should register now if you want to attend. Last year was pretty packed!
OLPC Mexico notes the great work by a team at San Luis Potosà who finished localizing Sugar into Téenek, the indigenous language of a people in Mexico. The whole post, drawn from a recent report on the OLPC deployment in the region, is worth a read.
Tech Camp, an effort by the US State Department to support civil society initiatives across the globe (to develop a world of “Civil Society 2.0”), organizes camps around the world for the local civil society groups. The program explores the use and development of mobile and online ICT in education, and supports open source toolchains and communities.
Tech Camp Montevideo was organized last weekend at LATU headquarters, with participation from and a focus on the community of OLPC students and teachers there. It drew a solid crowd of presenters from around Latin America. The tech camp agenda focused strongly on children’s learning and engagement — not surprising considering the wave of capable Gen-XO students in Uruguay. But this is the most child-centered Tech Camp I’ve seen so far.
Right now they only have the list of speakers, but that wiki should soon have updates from the sessions and the problem definition they started with.
OLPC and Nickelodeon have selected the winner of the OLPC Stories contest: fourth-grader Giuliana Violetta Pozzoli Daiub, age 10, from the class of Liliana Ortega in Paraguay.
You can see the winning submission, a Scratch animation, featuring a narrator, SpongeBob, neon lights, and an XO on a dance floor.
As the contest winner, Giuliana will be attending the 2011 Halo Awards organized by MTV and Nickelodeon in LA next month. Congratulations to her and to the other four finalists on their work. Asked what message she would send to other children, she thanked her parents and teacher for supporting her, and said ‘always remember that with your XO and imagination you can be who you want to be and realize your dreams!’ (recordar siempre que con tu Xo e imaginación puedes ser quien quieras ser y lograr todo lo que sueñas!)
Gary Stager writes a short, readable rant about the state of support for exploration in primary education in the US, inspired by watching an episode of “Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Maker Show“. The show is a sporadic video blog about “everything cool and worth making” by the daughter (now 10) of a veteran tech ninja.
Stager wonders whether educational computing (and now ‘edtech’) is a proper discipline or “just a shopping club”. He suggests many teachers might not support such a bright and curious student in their class, if it meant dealing with distractions or diverting from a fixed curriculum they were committed to teaching. I suspect others would love such a student and find ways to work with them outside of class, but feel constrained within it. Here’s his post:
Super-Awesome Sylvia in the Not So Awesome Land of Schooling
Hat-tip to Juliano Bittencourt.