Lanedo enriches One Laptop per Child’s multitouch experience

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Open source experts from Hamburg improve the devices’ software platform. Code will be available under free license to the worldwide community.

Lanedo, Hamburg-based Open Source firm, is proud to announce their contribution to OLPC’s newest device, named XO-4 touch. The 7.5“ convertible notebook, expected in 2013, focuses on multitouch technology as one of its main features.

Lanedo was involved from the very beginning to extend the OLPC sofware platform called Sugar, enhancing the user interface with touch functionality and therefore laying the foundation for future developments. The team not only improved the X.org graphical subsystem with numerous multitouch-related bug fixes, but also extended the respective functionality of the GTK+ toolkit, used for drawing windows, icons and other UI widgets.

Sugar has been a significant diferentiating factor in the worldwide user community for the XO laptop. We appreciate the support of Lanedo to continue the development and enrichment of the Sugar platform, says Rodrigo Arboleda, CEO of OLPC.

One of the most exciting features is the new intuitive text selector, that allows on-screen selection using handles for exact positioning. Furthermore, several commonly known gestures like zoom, rotate and swipe have been added to the Sugar environment, available throughout the system. Lanedo has also contributed to XO-4′s word processor, based on AbiWord, which not only had the same text selector implemented in native code, but also saw improvements in scrolling and other multitouch functions. Likewise, many other bundled applications have been enhanced.

Martyn Russell, one of Lanedo’s founders and managing director, is excited about the work done: Lanedo is proud to have had the opportunity to engage in such a noble project as One Laptop Per Child. It has been a great experience and we are thrilled at the prospect of contributing to the Open Source based platform in the future.

Following the principles of free sofware, developers can take advantage of those new features in their own projects, as all code writen will be made available freely to the benefit of the worldwide community – the GTK+ enhancements have already been incorporated in the 3.6 releases.

 

The Step by Step Project, by the Golodrian Foundation and the Marina Orth Foundation

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The Step by Step Project, developed by both the Las Golodrian Foundation and the
Marina Orth Foundation, has had a truly positive impact in various communities, especially the “Comuna Ocho” in Medellin. The Comuna Ocho is one of the most difficult areas of the city, where violence and the infamous “invisible frontiers” have caused many hardships on the community; nevertheless this has not been an obstacle in our mission to continue educating the 650 boys, girls and adolescents who have the opportunity to interact with the technological advantages of this program. It has been extremely gratifying to witness the development and positive impact the kids have had in interacting with others using the internet. They have had the opportunity to learn from various sites and programs, such as Wikipedia, Scratch, Tux Pain, Memorize, Tux Math, Gcompris, Falabracman, among other, all thanks to our classroom projects and their teachers.

The students arrive everyday full of energy, anxious to share with their teachers and
classmates the new games, techniques, and solutions they have discovered using
their computers. The joy of learning transcends the classroom; even their parents
have expressed their happiness in seeing their young ones use these programs. It has
encouraged them to enroll in the different workshops offered by the Foundation so that they too can benefit from learning to use these computers, thus the learning experience can now continue at home.

The most adventurous, creative, and resourceful students have not only gained the
personal satisfaction of their teachers’ recognition, they have consolidated a monitor group in the Step by Step project, a status which places them in a privileged position inside the learning community. It enables them to assist their teachers, work with the younger students and help repair certain computer problems. They also have the opportunity to attend specific workshops such as robotics, English lessons, informatics, and repair and maintenance of both conventional and XO computers: they are our biggest helpers inside the project as well as a source of inspiration to the younger ones.

Our students generally range in age from 5-13, a range which by no means has been
an obstacle to the younger generations’ hunger for learning. These small technological geniuses have benefited from the new learning techniques offered by these computers.
They regard these computers as their most prized possession; for they know it represents the opportunity to pursue their education using more advanced methods. They take very good care of their equipment, carefully storing them inside their own bags, cleaning them on a regular basis, and even imprinting their own personality and individuality on it. The whole process has been a reflection on the values that we try to implement on the community (solidarity, respect, responsibility, compromise, tolerance, team work…) and is the result of a day to day interaction with them, not only inside the classroom but also during their breaks and walks home. Up to date, NOT A SINGLE COMPUTER HAS BEEN UNACOUNTED FOR, this shows how well the community has responded to our informational campaigns where we have outlined the importance of social and educational changes.

CEO of One Laptop per Child received award “Los 100 Colombianos” from President of Colombia

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Rodrigo Arboleda honored as 2012 “100 Colombians”

Photo: Kien&Ke

Rodrigo Arboleda, Chairman and CEO of One Laptop per Child
Association) was honored last Wednesday December 5, in a ceremony presided over by President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia as a 2012 recipient of the “100 Colombians”.

President Juan Manuel Santos

The award annually recognizes Colombian-born individuals living outside Colombia for their exceptional contribution to the country and the world. Arboleda was recognized for his leadership of OLPC and for his thirty year effort to introduce IT technology in the schools in Colombia, his birthplace.

Arboleda’s first project in IT technology for Colombian children began in 1982 when he convinced then President Belisario Betancur to introduce an online learning platform developed by his classmate Nicholas Negroponte and the French government.

Rodrigo Arboleda, Nicholas Negroponte, Alfonso Ospina

In 2008 Arboleda worked with then Minister of Defense Santos to launch an OLPC 1:1 learning project in a previously FARC guerrilla controlled part of Colombia. Today through his efforts there are over 30,000 OLPC laptops in use by children across Colombia, most
recently in the town of Itagui, Antioquia, and new projects with government, non-profit
and private sector organizations are being added monthly.

Itagüi

Arboleda is also a founding member of the Give To Colombia Foundation, and an active member of their Board of Directors. He was, for 6 years, a member of the board of Trustees of Save The Children Foundation, one of the largest charities in the world.

“I have worked tirelessly for my native Colombia to improve the quality of children’s
education and the support of so many organizations has been instrumental to this
success” said Arboleda. “I am honored to be recognized for my efforts and for President
Santos’s involvement in this event. I look forward to giving back to my native Colombia
for many more years to come”, said Arboleda.

One Laptop per Child Launches Social Program with Colombian Government

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Miami, FL. One Laptop per Child Association (“OLPCA”) announced today that it
has entered into an agreement with the Colombian Government through La Agencia
Nacional para la Superación de la Pobreza Extrema –“ANSPE.” ANSPE is responsible
for the development and implementation of a strategy to alleviate the most severe
poverty in Colombia. The ANSPE initiative is under the direction of the President’s
Office and ANSPE Director, Samuel Azout.

Under the agreement, OLPCA will provide its XO laptops to children in Chia,
Colombia. The project aims to support children as the catalysts to improve the
overall welfare of their families. The children will use specially designed software
and games on the laptops to facilitate greater use of the laptops by their parents.
Through the provision of education to both children and their parents, ANSPE hopes
to find that the overall welfare of the family improves. Children will use the laptops
in school and they will take the laptops home after school. Traditionally, 70% of
laptop usage in an OLPCA project occurs outside the classroom. This is one of the
first projects that will formally evaluate the benefits to the parents and the family
from the availability and use of a laptop in the home.

“OLPCA has always played a significant role in increasing social inclusion through its
projects. To work with the national government and ANSPE on a project that could
be expanded nationwide is a great opportunity for OLPCA,” said Rodrigo Arboleda,
CEO of OLPCA. “OLPCA has a long history in Colombia, with over 30 projects in
different locations, and we are honored to be selected by the Government to start
such an innovative program for the alleviation of poverty,” said Arboleda.

OLPC Selects MyCityWay To Deliver Creative Urban Content for Kids Ages 6-12

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As part of its expansion, One Laptop Per Child, has selected MyCityWay, a mobile tech company that produces personalized mobile apps to guide people’s experiences around cities, as a core technology partner. MyCityWay will develop a platform and apps that combine MyCityWay’s signature high-tech location-aware services with a compelling interactive family-oriented education experience that helps young students explore their dream profession in context with their city and surroundings.

This partnership marks one of One Laptop Per Child’s first major efforts to develop education content and other programs for American students across the US and then worldwide in OLPC deployments, beginning next year.  MyCityWay will deliver a location-aware educational experience on Android-based devices offering multi-dimensional content on the themes of exploration and discovery related to a student’s environs.

“We see this opportunity opening up the world in new ways for young Americans,” said Sonpreet Bhatia, co-founder of MyCityWay. “This project utilizes our location content and personalization capabilities for educational purposes, which we believe will make a significant difference in the lives of the next generation of Americans.”

This is a significant U.S. initiative for One Laptop Per Child whose mission is to empower the world’s underserved children through education.  The organization’s aim is to provide each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected device.

“MyCityWay’s platform and apps offer new ideas and possibilities for American students,” said Rodrigo Arboleda, CEO, One Laptop Per Child. “We see this partnership allowing us to spark larger conversations with students and their families about the future, and realize that there is not just one path to achieving a goal.”

MyCityWay

Founded in 2009, MyCityWay, based in New York City, is a mobile tech company that produces self-learning, personalized mobile interfaces and apps to guide people around cities.  Today, the company’s apps service has grown significantly connecting with consumers in more than 85 cities around the world. MyCityWay’s platform delivers unique mobile apps and targeted engagement for major brands in media, travel & hospitality, and events.  For more information visit our website

Occidental Mindoro pupils enjoy world connectivity

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From the Office of the President of the Philippines

A laptop for every pupil of Occidental Mindoro is now a looming possibility. Thanks to the mayor who dared to dream and the governor who is turning that dream into bigger reality.

Mayor Juan Sanchez of Lubang, Occidental Mindoro is a hands-on town executive who sees to it that the elementary school children in his municipality are equipped with the latest technology to improve learning. Thus, the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) project was born to benefit Grade IV pupils of Lubang Central School and Maligaya Elementary School in 2010- becoming the first OLPC adoption in Southeast Asia.

Now on its second year, Lubang’s OLPC project has provided 210 XO laptops units – 100 from National Computer Center Community Outreach and another 110 XO laptops from Sanchez’ friends who chose to remain anonymous. These were distributed to another generation of grade IV pupils in the same pilot schools. Last year’s recipients are now computer-savvy.

The XO is extremely durable, functional, energy-efficient and fun.

Sanchez observes – which the teachers confirm – “the use of the XO laptop has given the pupils not just computer-literacy but better appreciation for education.” They learn, share, create and collaborate. The XO laptop is designed for the use of children ages 6 to 12-covering the years of elementary school.

Education Secretary Br. Armin A. Luistro FSC said: “We need a broader collaboration to reach our school children through the social investment of individuals and business communities. We see this as a key step in what could eventually lead to an information communication technology (ICT)-enabled education for the youth of Occidental Mindoro.”

The XO has been designed to provide the most engaging wireless network available. The laptops are connected to each other, even when they are off. If one laptop is connected to the Internet, the others can follow to the web.

Children can share information on the web (if provided with internet access), gather by videoconference, make music together, edit texts, read e-books, take photos, make videos and produce projects using Sugar software.

Encouraged by the many benefits of OLPC, Occidental Mindoro Governor Josephine Y. Ramirez –Sato has decided to expand the project to include the provision of XO laptops for Grade IV pupils in the remaining ten municipalities of the province.

North Carolina teachers and students will now have access to Common Core aligned lesson plans

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Charlotte, North Carolina teachers and students will now have access to Common Core aligned lesson plans that emphasize the use of The Sugar Learning Platform.

In early 2013, over 2,500 teachers and students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Project L.I.F.T. Zone will receive a connected XO laptop with the latest Sugar Learning Platform software. Nearly 200 exemplar lesson plans and onsite pedagogical support will accompany these laptops.

This collection, available free of charge, includes lesson plan samples for teachers and students from kindergarten to fifth grade. Math and reading lesson plans are aligned with the recently adopted Common Core, a national blueprint for teaching and learning that has now been adopted by 45 states and three territories. The Core aims to ensure that all students, no matter where they live, are prepared for success in postsecondary education and the workforce. Science, social studies and arts plans will be accessible and aligned with North Carolina Essential Standards.

Project L.I.F.T. Zone Superintendent Denise Watts recognizes this collection as “the beginning of a new way of teaching and learning.” Watts, a former educator herself, sees these tools as “the support teachers need to ensure effective implementation of technology into the classroom.”

Continue to visit the site for new, innovative approaches to teaching using The
Sugar Learning Platform. Professional development communities will continue to
work throughout the year to perfect lesson plans and project ideas.

Sugar 0.98 with touch support in the UI is the new version of the Sugar learning platform

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The release of Sugar 0.98 also incorportates many improvements to the GTK3 port. The Sugar Developer Team deserves a resounding celebatory cheer of thanks for their effort.

OLPC has been incorporating Sugar 0.98 in the 13.1 series of builds, available for download to run on the XO.

What is new for users?

Alphabetical ordering in the Home View

The icons in the Home View are now ordered alphabetically. This change has been applied to the favourites view and the activities list view.

What’s new for developers?

Activity Authors guidelines

The most important change is that the GTK+ 2 based sugar-toolkit has been deprecated since Sugar 0.96. Newly written activities should use sugar-toolkit-gtk3, which is based on GTK+ 3 and Pygobject3, now. There will be only bug fixes being available in the future for the old toolkit no new features will be made available for it and it will probably go away at one point completely. Detailed guidelines for porting existing activities can be found at Features/GTK3/Porting.

Tutorials

There is a brand new step-by-step guide for developing Activities under Fedora 17.

For more details click here.

One Laptop Per Child Graduate students Academy Program

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One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit global social entrepreneurship founded by M. Nicholas Negroponte and first conceived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. OLPC designs, manufactures and distributes children early education platforms consisting of rugged, low cost and powerful “XO laptops” combined with rich and empowering educational activities.

Since its inception, OLPC strives to reduce the gap between the digital world and the world of knowledge, reaching out to 6 – 12 years old underprivileged children with an empowering educational platform for self-learning. Over 2.7 million children in 45 countries use their XO laptop to learn in schools and at home.

OLPC Academy Program

The OLPC Academy program was launched in 2010 to provide University students with the opportunity to travel across the world and support the development and growth of a global and inclusive education for children. The OLPC Academy targets students at the Masters and PhD programs in in the specialty fields of:

  • Computer science;
  • Information and communication technologies;
  • Economy and Business administration;
  • Political science;
  • Education and learning;
  • Social science and Psychology.

The participants are placed in target communities to work at the frontier between education and technology. The students are active actors in creating and enhancing education opportunities for of the world’s poorest children.

Focus Areas

The OLPC Academy program exposes students to exceptional research and fieldwork opportunities. Students can partake in a range of project areas for a period of two months to one year, with potential to receive academic credit. There are five core focus areas within the Academy;

Pre-field and field assessment - Students conduct in-depth studies and interviews to define the education baseline and landscape in countries post OLPC deployment projects.

Monitoring and evaluation – Students track the progress of existing deployment projects; an exercise which aims to report the impact of the projects and support applications for funding.

Curriculum development – One of OLPC’s founding pillars is constructionism; learning should allow children to explore, create and share. Participants will work with country partners to develop and implement innovative curriculums, tailored to specific locations and demographics.

Technical support – Technical support teams will work with country partners on projects such as implementing laptop repair centers, designing support infrastructure, developing software programming and advancing the use of the school server.

Social inclusion & sustainability – Targets the development and the learning skills for children with special needs, indigenous languages and children with disabilities.

Special student proposals – Covers work and research proposals adjacent to OLPC focus areas, include more than one area or have the potential to evolve into a subject of interest for OLPC.

 Participating and Potential Locations

Mexico, Rwanda, US, Cameron, Armenia, Honduras, Peru, Canada, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Argentina, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Colombia, South Africa, Chile, China, India, Brazil and other countries.

 Benefits and Rewards

The OLPC Academy program offers beyond personal satisfaction when helping underprivileged children access quality education, other benefits and rewards including:

 

  • Credited contribution to the OLPC mission
  • Life experience and foot print in a community
  • Unique experiential research environment
  • Direct contact with the host communities
  • Live experience of laptop deployment projects
  • Logistic and financial support
  • Contacts with government and NGOs officials
  • Sponsored gathering at MIT event for program kickoff

Application Timeline and Program Start

To Join the Program

OLPC Academy team looks forward to hearing from motivated and committed students willing to experience a unique and life enriching experience.

XO at school: building shared knowledge – lessons learned

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In this link you can download an e-book written by Professor Valente’s group at UNICAMP about the usage of the XO in one school.

The book registers the research done by his group with 520 XO’s donated by OLPC in 2009/10, around a participatory methodology to deploy laptops at schools.

The book is in portuguese only.

 

This book chronicles some search results “ XO in school and beyond: a proposal for semiochemical participatory technology, education and society“developed in EMEF Fr Emilio Miotti, Campinas (SP), between 2009 and 2012.Considering that digital technology has transformed the way we interact, communicate and live in contemporary society, the school as an institution and social organization, can not remain oblivious to these changes. In this space, building knowledge and skills sets technology serves as a catalyst for change. The book summarizes the studies and proposed solutions to problems raised by members of the school community – teachers, administrators, students, parents and researchers – from the use of a participatory methodology based guided the deployment of laptops through educational settings where technological resources are used in a significant way to school and bringing benefits to society.

Authors: 
Maria Cecilia Calani Baranauskas, Maria Cecilia Martins, Rosangela de Assis (Orgs.)

Via: Juliano Bittencourt

OLPC trains the teaching team in Honduras

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The OLPC team conducted a training program with the Educatrachos teachers team from November 12 to 15, 2012 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The training focused on integrating the Sugar Activities into the existing curriculum with an emphasis on Spanish and Mathematics. Teachers were instructed on the various teaching resources contained within the XO laptops.

The OLPC program in Honduras will benefit 54,000 students in grades 3 to 6 in 545 schools throughout the country. These students will all have access to XO laptops and digital educational programs.
This program is funded by the Inter-American Development Bank in coordination with the Government of Honduras.

The main goal of the Elementary Education and Technology Integration Program is to improve the learning of students in the poorest elementary schools in Honduras. The program will involve training activities and will provide ongoing support to the teachers. In addition, the program is working to provide textbooks and other educational materials to these schools. The project has a special focus on the incorporation of new technologies in education.

Melissa Henriquez (OLPC educational coordinator) and Patricia Rivera (Gerente Pedagógico Unidad Coordinadora de Programas y Proyectos UCP-BID)

OLPC looking for students to participate in the Sugar Labs Google Code-In event

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Sugar Labs has been selected as one of ten projects to participate in Google Code In. We join, among others, our colleagues at Fedora et al., in soliciting the participation of high-school (and in our case, middle-school) students to work on projects during a six-week sprint beginning on November 26. This is a great chance for the youth who have been so instrumental in our growth over the past year to show off their talents to the world (and two of them will hopefully win a trip to visit Google). Please help Chris Leonard and Walter Bender finalize the project and mentor lists over the next few days. We are offering coding projects, documentation and training projects, outreach, quality assurance, and user interface, so even if you are not a developer, you likely have some skills to devote to the Code In.

NOTE TO MENTORS: Please create an account and fill out the Request to be a Mentor form.

NOTE TO COMMUNITY: Please add to our task lists and please recruit participants.

Why we are participating

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

If you are interested visit wiki.sugarlabs to read the details.

CNN – How fast can you learn? Fareed Zakaria

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Original Post here.

Ethiopia has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world, and the village of Wonchi is no exception. Nobody there can read or write. That’s why I was astonished when I saw what Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child organization did there.

They dropped 20 Motorola tablets, preloaded with mostly literacy apps in the village with no instructions. Within four minutes, one boy had found the on/off switch – an unknown entity in these parts – and he then taught the others. In a few days, they were each using about 50 apps each.

Watch the video for the full Look.

Universal Children´s Day Celebration: #OLPC

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We would like to celebrate the Universal Children´s Day declared by the United Nations next Tuesday.
How? We will meet in twitter and have a great conversation about OLPC. This means we will meet and mention a #hashatag: #olpc and make a session of Questions and Answers regarding OLPC and our deployments.
When? November 20th, 7p.m. EST.
Why? We can share our websites, studies, photos, videos, wiki links, etc. about kids in projects
Please find attached invitations and feel free to share and invite your friends and followers!