Carnegie Mellon University’s iSTEP internship program is working with Plan Ceibal in Uruguay to develop and deploy English literacy activities and web apps that work well on XOs, for children of all ages. They are also creating tools to help teachers customize these apps. The interns have been living and working in Montevideo while doing this work.
This is just the latest in a series of projects by CMU students to support OLPC initiatives around the world.
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.
Nick’s last post from Uruguay waxes poetic about the always-active Ceibal headquarters, recalls his first day in the country, and quotes from some of the great thinkers of our age. Worth a read.  He may have less time for OLPC in the coming 18 months, but olpcmap is only getting better.
The eduJAM! convocation is going strong, with 2-3 days of Sugar camp and discussion among developers and teachers from across the world. Keep an eye on the ceibalJAM site in the coming days for videos and notes from the event.
You can browse some of the presentations on the edujam2011 slideshare account.
eduJAM! invitacion
We’re hosting an olpcMAP discussion session at our Cambridge HQ on Wednesday night, with students (and future collaborators!) from Tufts. If you can’t be there, catch up on recent additions and developments to the project with this month’s olpcMAP update.
Meanwhile, mapping maven Nick Doiron shares the view from his seat in Montevideo, where he is a resident hacker this month with Plan Ceibal.
Ian Quillen writes in Education Week about the varying motivations and sponsors of major global edutech projects. He notes the work of Plan Ceibal in Uruguay (with OLPC) and Kennisnet in the Netherlands (with OpenWijs and related programs), in addition to projects driven in part by for-profit corporations.
I will add a link to a free version of the story when I find one.