Invite to E-Toys Training and Teacher Volunteer Project Boston/Haiti February 14, 2011

Dear Boston OLPC Community,

What: Class to train adults to train teachers/create content with E-Toys

E-Toys is a childrens’ programming environment used extensively around the world including Haiti with Waveplace.org.

Who:  Techies interested in education, Educators interested in technology.

We are working on a project at the Haitian Coalitian and the Clarendon Hill Apartments housing project in Somerville, and we need your help! Read on if you’re a techie, teacher, Haitian translator, or anyone else who’s interested in educational software.

The focus of this class is an educational program called eToys – I’m sure many of you have heard of it. For those of you who haven’t: eToys is a multifaceted program that is currently being used in courses in Haiti on XO laptops. With it, kids can learn basics of programming, animation, and logic, but it’s so much more than that. Waveplace has created an innovative curriculum that extends eToys to virtually every subject…math, science, social studies, even language arts.

Teach Kids in Somerville: Our goal is to run our own eToys classes for children here in Somerville. For the kids of all ethnicities at the Clarendon Hill Apartments, we want to run an eToys course on storytelling that will use a similar curriculum to that being taught in Haiti.  We have donated computers for the students to use.

Teach volunteers who will be going to Haiti this Summer: We would also like to run a series of classes for those interested in traveling to Haiti to do their own training – namely adults at CHA and possibly local high school students. That’s where Sprout comes in – we need your help to run these “train the trainer” sessions! These trainers would then bring their knowledge to Haiti to enrich childrens’ education.

Create Curriculum for Haiti: There are a good number of curriculum units available and being used in Haiti with E-Toys, but the need is extensive!  Curriculum needs to be written, turned into interactive E-Toys projects, and translated into Haitian Creole.  Somerville has a wealth of people with each of these skills. We would like your help bringing them together to provide free educational materials for children in Haiti.  All content will be under open licence and will also be available to be translated for use in other countries, and of course here in Somerville!

Learn More about E-Toys and the Existing Curriculum:  You can find examples of existing curriculum and students’ projects at an Illinois school here: http://etoysillinois.org or some tutorials from Waveplace here: http://waveplace.com/resources/tutorials/.

We will be running an eToys training class soon for anyone interested in learning more about eToys or working with us and the Haitian Coalitian. You’ll get to learn how to use basic eToys functions, from creating sketches to animating them by using scripts. You can even create your own games – eToys is LOTS of fun! You will also learn more about education work in Haiti through organizations like Waveplace and locally with the Haitian Coalition.

When and Where? Soon and in Somerville! We will be working with interested people to figure that out.  Please contact me at redfern.derek@gmail.com or Caroline at caroline@solutiongrove.com if you’re interested.

Thanks for your help!

Derek Redfern/Caroline Meeks
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Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline@SolutionGrove.com

How can you start a project with OLPC? February 12, 2011

We received a letter from Lindy in Australia, she wants to start a project with OLPC computers in Cambodia. There are a lot of people who want to do the same thing, just countries differ. How can OLPC help these people? The answer is either to guide them through the process or direct them to existing deployments. Please, see correspondence below and submit your comments.

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 Hello,
 I recently spent 3 months volunteering in a small school in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The school is a Not For Profit run by an NGO.
The school is about to celebrate it’s first birthday and has already  made a huge difference to the lives of the wonderful children who go there. I would love to see the children with your computers, while they are learning so much now there is a desperate need for books and educational materials. I am concerned that the children only get to  look at books while at school and have often thought how much more quickly they would develop if they could work at home as well.
There are currently 140 children at the school and most of them are under 12. I know that they would be extremely grateful for the computers and make very good use of them. Is it possible to apply for a donation of the computers to the school and if so how do I go about it?

Kind regards, Lindy

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Dear Lindy,

How wonderful of you to think of a present for the school in Cambodia. Please, remember that everything in life is visualized first and then becomes real. If you really want to make it happen and you work on it, it will come true but you need to know what the steps are.

While OLPC doesn’t offer donations, it mentors along the process. The main steps in the process are:

1. Make sure the school is ready to handle the project  
2. Raise money to buy computers
3. Find volunteers to provide training to teachers
4. Enable on-going support
5. Develop curriculum to teach

More detailed:

1. The school has to  have electricity and teachers willing to commit to learning computers and teaching them (extra load for teachers) plus other resources, including on-going financial (teachers salary).
2. You can always create a project plan and post it on Kickstarter.com to raise money to buy computers (maybe not all 140 at first, you can always start with lower number to test it out). Several on-line fundraising sites are good for that.
3. When you have the computers you will need to find volunteers, who will teach the teachers at Cambodian school how to use computers, so that teachers can teach children year-round.
4. You will also need to have someone on your team of volunteers who knows how to fix computer when kids break them and have spare parts ready, also provide support (repair, technical support, teacher support, maybe long-distance).
5. The last thing will be to develop curriculum and be able to revise it as software changes rapidly.

See more deployment guides on http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployment_Guide

You can’t just give XOs (OLPC computers) to kids without giving thorough instructions, as XOs have their own unique software. Also unsupervised, children lose interest in developing their skills, so teacher guidance is needed…

We will post similar instructions and sample project plans on http://olpcMAP.net that we created especially for people like you. The map also serves as a tool for communication with other volunteers and current deployments, so that you can contact them and learn from their experience. Feel free to look up schools and volunteers in Cambodia. If you collaborate with them, maybe you can combine or share resources.

Last year I volunteered in Saigon, Vietnam for three months teaching children in a shelter how to use XO computers, they have only 5 XOs and it was still a lot of work. I had to have a translator, set up Internet connections, educate teachers who were not interested in teaching, and deal with children’s resistance to be motivated to have after school classes, not integrated into their school curriculum.

I also went to Seam Reap and helped an NGO to demonstrate three XOs they have. Unfortunately, those XOs are unused, because teachers didn’t receive training  plus the school doesn’t have electricity to run computers, never mind money to pay teachers to give computer classes.

If after reading all above mentioned you are determined that you can make it happen and run the project well, you should pursue it.

Also, if you first want to try yourself as a volunteer, you can help an existing deployment, acquire skills needed and then implement OLPC computers in your school in Cambodia.

Let me know if I can help you with anything else.

Sincerely, Marina.

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Dear Marina,

Thanks so much for your reply. I was actually going to send an email back with the question – how do I make it happen? – you have answered before I had a chance to!

As you say, visualizing it is the first step. I would love to make it happen so I’ll have a really good think about it and see if it can be done.

While I’m really keen to go back and volunteer again I’m not good with computers myself but I’ll do my best to search out for some people who are.

Thanks for your encouragement.

Kind regards, Lindy

OLE Nepal, Vietnam and Boston: Part One May 31, 2010

I already mentioned OLENepal earlier on my blog. Sunday was a beautiful day in Boston. Nancie and I were lucky to meet Rabi Karmacharya, Executive Director from the Open Learning Experience Nepal. Rabi went to MIT, where he received his B.Sc. and M.E. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.  Then he worked as a design engineer for 3Com in CA for three years before he returned to Nepal.  He co-founded a software company HimalayanTechies, and seven years later he met Brian Berry through a running club and they together started OLE Nepal  in 2007.

Both Nancie and I were interested to meet Rabi, because he is running such a  successful OLPC deployment and just returned from Hanoi, where he attended the OpenCourseware consortium meeting on May 5-7, and met with Serge, who is contributing to the OLPC Vietnam project.

Serge  Stinckwich has lived in Hanoi for almost two years and is a professor at a university. You can find more about him here: http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/. He follows the localization efforts to get Sugar running in Vietnamese and other languages. Serge wrote:

“Right now, I’m mostly involved in the Squeak/Smalltalk community and I know very well the people behind Squeak EToys.
I’m part of a project called SqueakBot : http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/SqueakBot where kids could use
EToys to control robots. I have also made a seminar in Hanoi some months ago about Etoys&Dynabook vision: http://www.slideshare.net/SergeStinckwich/an-instrument-whose-music-is-ideas-2036947“.

Serge has put a Google group together for OLPC Vietnam. He is visiting Vung Vieng village right now and will report his observations and suggestions to other OLPC Vietnam members during an upcoming meeting on June 5.

Finally OLPC grassroots’ movement is taking off in Vietnam, thanks to Nancie, the OLPC pioneer in that far-away country. Hurrah!