Updates from OLPC Greece: multimedia, programming, and plans

Since 2009, OLPC Greece has provided one laptop per child in 35 classes and groups around the country.  580 XOs in all, with the inolvement of many teachers.  They have kept us updated via our wiki and regular emails, and shared some interesting work from their students.

My favorite post is from the 3rd graders at the Sminthi School —  they made large tiles of stencil art, rearranged it on a school wall, and turned it into stop-motion animations with Scratch (video).   Their professors Psychogios, Rigas, and Aspioti, brought this work into with their math, informatics, and art classes.

Recently the OLPC Greece team published a short summary of their work from the first two years, and their goals for the coming year.  They note the need for local hardware labs, software updates, and technical support.  You can follow their work, in Greek, on the public mailing list for the pilot.  (An excellent practice!)

Students and teachers work on a stencil in Sminthi

Students and teachers work on a stencil in Sminthi

 

 

OLPC Greece supports 28 schools

OLPC in Greece has distributed 550 laptops to over 30 classes in each of 28 schools, and will soon be done with the deployment phase of their program.

In each participating class every student gets their own laptop, but no school has saturation.  I am curious as to how it will turn out.  Each school seems to have done its own internal training and planning, with a high ratio of participating teachers to students — many teachers are engaged in each school.  They all share a country-wide mailing list to discuss their work.  They have made a lovely visualization of their national network, linking proudly to the individual sites of each participating group.