Put your Favorite School Ever on the Map!

The greatest project you’ve ever built. The most explosively dynamic volunteer you’ve ever met. The greatest school system you’ve ever heard of. Even your own mom’s Haiti school dream?

How should each appear on our community’s global map of 21st century EduTech innovators? How can you help them visually catalyze OLPC’s informal but global deployment community, from Kigali to Kathmandu?

Put YOUR Learning on the Map!

Put YOUR Learning on the Map!

If you cannot attend Boston’s olpcMAPmaking Sprint Dec 27-31 in person, and Audubon Dougherty’s premier Peru film presentation (preview), we invite you instead to inject your inspiration today — and watch your ideas grow — as our volunteer community sets itself to work, night and day showcasing OLPC/Sugar’s deployment doers’ greatest accomplishments worldwide.

So who’s on the front line of our planet’s DIY Foreign Aid Revolution today? Hint: http://olpcMAP.net was built entirely by volunteers, in the last 2 months, its community stories sparked but barely begun. Now they need your help bringing silent heroes’ creative outpourings to light — in and around rising 21st century schools everywhere, no matter how rich or poor — that you personally know are fighting to make a difference!

Whether you join these educational volunteers worldwide, seeding learning community networks one country at time, co-designing our Open Geospatial Infrastructure — or only have time to follow our grassroots pioneers’ mailing list, or just adding your your local insights into our suggestion box — we thank you profusely for your holiday generosity to our still-new-century’s kids emerging!

Summer Pygames begin again!

The Summer Pygames, sponsored by South Carolina’s Palmetto Project, is growing this year — students from many schools will have six weeks to learn how to make games for the XO, from design and programming to art and sound production.  The results will be judged by elementary school students and teachers.  OLPC has donated some XO-1.5s to the event, which last year produced “Burnie’s Balloons”.  (And check out the video by the Burning Magnetos at the bottom!)
A tip of the hat to Elizabeth Barndollar and everyone who’s helped make Pygames a success two years running.

G1G1 International Update

The first round of international Give One, Get One orders have been shipped out — every order placed before December 16 should have arrived by now, in time for Christmas.  Some were sent from Miami, and the European orders went out from Brussels with EU adapters and a special G1G1 Europe thank-you note.

Orders between now and December 31 should ship out by mid-January.  We are able to ship to all of the 45 countries mentioned in the original announcement, and are investigating and adding more countries as there is specific interest.  If you want to send laptops to a country not currently on our list, leave a comment here, and I will see what we can do.

Barring an extension, International G1G1 will end on December 31st.  Be sure to place your orders now if you are interested.

It currently still appears that one is preordering on Amazon, and that the XO is “available January 15” — that means that orders made now will be shipped by Jan 15 or else refunded.  This is the way information is sent to us for fulfillment – a compromise we have made to cover countries everywhere, since AMZN was only able to handle shipping within the US.  Donors in a few specific countries (Australia, Hong Kong, France) can choose to take part in G1G1 directly through a local site, as a tax-deductable donation.

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