What’s All This Talk About “Reach Extension?”

Public Impact is a national education policy and management-consulting firm based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They have been working with Project L.I.F.T. in Charlotte, North Carolina where OLPC will be providing connected XO laptops and ongoing training and support to 2,500 teachers and students.

The efforts of Public Impact are aimed at extending the reach of excellent teachers using job redesign and technology. Public Impact believes schools can put in place models to ensure that all students have access to an excellent education. One of these models emphasizes the use of online digital instruction. In Project L.I.F.T. for example, school leadership teams are looking at spaces throughout the academic day where technology can be swapped for a period of teaching time. This will of course free up the classroom teacher’s time, allowing the educator to reach an even larger number of students on a daily basis.

XO laptops will be used throughout The Project L.I.F.T. Zone to support much of this work. Quality online digital instruction and the already available Sugar Learning Platform will serve as tools to ensure that every student receives the support he or she needs to be successful both in and out of the classroom. Both Sugar’s Journal and online program functions will store student work and data, allowing for continuous reflection, review and remediation.

For more information about the transformational work Public Impact is doing in our schools, visit opportunityculture.org.

Sugar Status – Google Code-in, Young developers, 8M downloads, SF summit and migration

By Walter Bender

Sugar Labs is applying to Google Code-in (GCI), “a contest for
pre-university students (e.g., high school and secondary school
students) with the goal of encouraging young people to participate in
open source.”

Why we are applying? Sugar is written and maintained by volunteers,
who range from seasoned professionals to children as young as 12-years
of age. Children who have grown up with Sugar have transitioned from
Sugar users to Sugar App developers to Sugar maintainers. They hang
out on IRC with the global Sugar developer community and are
full-fledged members of the Sugar development team. It is this latter
group of children we hope will participate in and benefit from Google
Code-in. Specifically we want to re-enforce the message that Sugar
belongs to its users and that they have both ownership and the
responsibility that ownership implies. Just as learning is not
something done to you, but something you do, learning with Sugar
ultimately means participating in the Sugar development process. At
Sugar Labs, we are trying to bring the culture of Free Software into
the culture of school. So the Code-in is not just an opportunity for
us to get some tasks accomplished, it is quintessential to our overall
mission.

Learn more about GCI and the Sugar Labs GCI effort.

Agustin Zubiaga Sanchez noted that last week we passed the
threshold of more than eight million activities downloaded from the
Sugar Labs activity portal. I echo his sentiment that “I’m very
glad to be a sugarlabs developer. Congratulations to all the team :)”

In the community

Last weekend was the OLPC SF summit in San Francisco, which was
followed by a three-day Sugar Camp. Although I missed opening day, Day
Two was quite interesting in that there was a lot of good discussion
about how to sustain and grow the various volunteer-run OLPC/Sugar
deployments. At Sugar Camp, although not much code was written, there
was an opportunity to get tangible and actionable feedback from the
likes of Mark Bradley (we pushed hard on Turtle Art as a multimedia
toolkit). I also had the opportunity to catch up with Raul Gutierrez
Segales, Ivan Krstić, and others.

 Tech Talk

The little coding I did do in San Francisco was in support of
migrating more activities to touch. Specifically, I worked on
integrating the on-screen keyboard into several of my activities:
Portfolio and Turtle Blocks. The challenge was that I was using
key-press events directly, rather than accessing them through a GTK
widget such as a Entry or TextView. With help from Raul, I managed to
get things working pretty well: basically, I just drop a TextView
widget under the cursor where I expect keyboard input. The details are
outlined here. I’m generally pleased with the results, but there
is a bit of fine-tuning of the interaction, e.g, you need to defocus
the TextView in order to dismiss it: not such a burden, but at times,
somewhat awkward.

Ignacio Rodriguez has been on a tear, helping me to migrate
activities to GTK 3. Over the past week, we converted: Card Sort,
Cookie Search, Color Deducto, Deducto, Flip, Fraction Bounce, Loco
Sugar, Napier’s Bones, Nutrition, Paths, Pukllananpac, Recall,
Reflection, GNUChess, Sliderule, Story, Yupana, and XO Editor. I also
worked with Agustin Zubiaga on Portfolio, Flavio Denesse on Ruler, and
Daniel Francis on Turtle Blocks. Whew.

Antonio Battro – Interview in Madrid

Antonio Battro, our Chief Education Officer, is both an MD and PhD who specializes in the development of basic cognitive and perceptual processes in children and adolescents. He has introduced computers and communication devices in schools in several countries in South America, as well as promoted the use of computers as digital prostheses for the disabled persons. He is considered a world leader in the new field of neuroeducation, the interaction between mind, brain, and education. Battro is an Argentine national and long-standing member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Here, the video of his latest interview in Madrid. (Spanish)

October 20, 2012: One Laptop Per Child Day in San Francisco

San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee has declared October 20, 2012 One Laptop Per Child Day in San Francisco!

The proclamation reads: “THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that I, Edwin M. Lee, Mayor of the City and County of San Francisco, on occasion of the fourth annual OLPC Community Summit, do hereby proclaim October 20, 2012 as… ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD DAY

Read the full post here.

 

Focus Reports in partnership with OLPC to support Sonora, Mexico

Focus Reports, an independent publisher of sponsored supplements for the global energy and healthcare sectors, announced on September the 26th, the launch of its partnership with the One Laptop Per Child Association, Inc. (OLPC).

Under the Agreement, if the donation reaches USD $20,500.00, OLPC agrees to donate 100 XO laptops version 1.75 to support the existing One Laptop Per Child program in Sonora, Mexico – a country where Focus Reports has traditionally been very active, and also country of origin of two of Focus Reports staff members.

According to the terms of the agreement signed between Focus Reports and OLPC, Focus Reports teams will engage in fundraising activities for the entire and exclusive benefit of OLPC from September 1st to December 31st 2012.

To donate directly to the program click here

To celebrate its 10th year anniversary, Focus Reports challenged its employees around the world to organize a social activity of their choice and allocated a specific budget for this purpose. The Selection Committee unanimously decided to put the money into a seed fund. This fund is to serve as the source capital for Focus Reports’ first fundraising campaign that will raise money for OLPC. “By creating this seed fund, not only will we donate more, but we’ll raise awareness and connect people – all for the benefit of OLPC” say Solène Pignet, Leonardo Barquero and Julie Avena, the three members of the Selection Committee.

Focus Reports Project Director, Koen Liekens, was the first to praise OLPC’s cause. He explains: “From poverty to racism and HIV to breaching human rights: many solutions start with education. While it’s one of the necessities for social and human development, educational tools and infrastructure are often still lacking. It’s not a new area to go social in, but we, as a media company, have not only the direct interest but also direct responsibility to raise literacy levels worldwide. To grow our next readers, to nurture the brains of our next generation of journalists, we have a role to play in ensuring that -at least- the tools are there for the less fortunate to be educated according to the requirements of the digital age.”

“The Focus Reports team has decided to allocate the entirety of the budget that was given to them to utilize their great fundraising capabilities and engage with people and companies to transmit the idea of OLPC across the globe,” says Diana Viola, CEO of Focus Reports. “Once again, our team has demonstrated that they are true to their values: bold, accountable, resourceful, trustworthy and hands-on. We are confident this initiative will be a success and the team knows they can count on our full support.“

The first fundraising event will take place in Mexico City.

About Focus Reports
Focus Reports (www.focusreports.net ) serves business professionals in the Pharmaceutical, Oil and Gas, Energy and Aviation industries with a portfolio of 5 websites, as well as country reports independently published as sponsored sections in world class trade publications.

To this end, Focus Report is organizing their first fundraising event in Mexico City to be held on October 24th, during which we will be hosting a raffle in order to raise funds.

Focus Report for SonoraFocus Report – Sonora

 

For any enquiries, please contact:  Julie Avena juliea@focusreports.net

World Dignity Day and OLPC in Johannesburg, South Africa

OLPC participated as project of choice by South Africa’s chapter of the World Dignity Day celebration, sponsored by the Young Global Leaders, a division of the World Economic Forum of Davos. Vuyo Jack, Co-Founder and Chairman of Empowerdex, Phuti Mahanyele, CEO of Shanduka Foundation and Tebogo Skwambane, head of The Monitor Group in the region, shared the panel with Rodrigo Arboleda, Chairman and CEO of OLPCA and with Thsedi Luyabe, CEO of OLPC Foundation, South Africa. The media event, attended by a well qualified group of journalists, educators, philanthropists, coincided with the official registration of OLPCF SA under the South African ministries and tax authorities.

Also in attendance from OLPC were Richard Bernstein, member of the BOD and Chief Legal Counsel, Sergio Romero, VP for Africa and Mark Kaplan, Executive Chairman of OLPCF SA.

The successful event was very well commented by all present and marks a new milestone of the efforts to bring to the children of Africa, a dignified way to Learn-how-to-Learn as the most important way to create the new breed of South African citizens capable of becoming effective participants in the wealth creation for the XXI Century, one that focuses on innovation, discovery, inventions, Intellectual Property.