Boston pilots

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This is a stub page for discussion of a (yet to be formally announced) Boston-area XO pilot, and for discussion of Boston-area XO pilot resources in general.

Details

• small-scale; probably saturation in one or more grades instead of the entire school
• teacher-run; not owned by the IT department, but by classroom teachers from the grades in which the laptops are deployed
• launch date Jan. 2009, with prep during fall 2008

Workshops

We are putting together biweekly workshop sessions to help the pilot teachers get ready to run their own deployment, and to provide teachers with a forum to share their expertise on how to integrate technology into their existing classroom plans. These workshops will be open to the public. Scheduling will be announced closer to the actual dates. Some workshop topics:

• A hands-on introduction to the XO and how it's used in other pilots
• Peer production, open content, and open curriculum; how to get, make, use, and get your students to produce and share it
• Community resources and tools for getting grassroots help with your deployment
• Example classroom demos of how to incorporate Activities into your classroom (multiple sessions)

Partners

• The Olin chapter is acting as a pro bono Repairs shop for the first local pilot.
• The IMSA chapter is sending out a deployment team during the first week of the 2nd semester to help setup, flash, customize, and distribute XOs, setup/configure networking, server, and power infrastructures, and hold various orientation sessions for students, teachers, parents, and the local community.
• The local Boston LUG and sysadmin group has volunteers who want to form server and build teams; updates will be posted here as they occur.
• The Harvard and BU chapters are looking for journalists, media producers, ethnographers, and education researchers to document the pilot for the global OLPC and education communities (something the school has generously offered us research access to), as well as fundraising help to raise half the purchase price of XOs for the school; the pilot school will match the rest. These will soon be sorted out into separate pilot support teams.

Meeting notes

• 2008 Oct 10