User:Femslade/Weekly updates/June 6, 2008

Saturday

We had the first Open Jam. See notes from the meeting

Monday

Followed up with a bunch of people from the Open Jam. Bill Bogstad is interested in doing school server Q&A. Put Elise from Borderless Education in touch with high school student from Newton who runs an organization called Water Aid International about a partnership for Elise's website called BE Rewarding.

Continued emailing with Dawn Weber about Open Jams and hopefully publicizing them at her children's schools. Created a facebook event, and encouraged a lot of people to email their high schools (so hopefully we'll get a younger demographic this week)

Emailed with Izzi from the North End Action Team about trial school in Middletown.

Tuesday

Spoke with Izzi about goals, and logistics for a pilot. Invited her to Bootcamp.

Sent some more emails about the Bilingual_Cultural_Exchange and got some people to sign up. Still need to poke others. I especially like Michelle's user page.

Spoke to John from Denver about program at his library. He's a geologist interested in getting kids working on laptops. I directed him to some websites about other projects he could look into before he gets funding for laptops. Things like scratch, and lego, and gogo boards.

Wednesday

Spoke to people in New Haven about grassroots efforts there. Spoke to people at the Whitney Museum about getting some of their materials in content bundles, and about supporting various aspects of a New Haven laptop project. Also spoke to people at Yale's service organization specifically people directly connected with public schools in the area. Have a meeting on June 20 to demonstrate "educational features" of the laptop. The idea is specific stuff that will make educators interested.

Went with Cynthia to meet with people at the media lab to talk about scratch and peripherals, and other projects that could be used as models for New Haven and other pilots.

Adam (collaborator from Yale) came by and we made plans for New Haven. Information to be put on the wiki soon.

Thursday

Looked into Yale web space. Did some reading on CT state curricula, and brainstormed ideas of presenting creative learning projects in the context of curricular goals.

Met with SJ and Robert and made up a list of where are the laptops. Need to work on getting as much of that information public as possible, also on making it more accurate

Went to presentation of a 14-week scratch apprenticeship program at the media lab. Spoke to John Maloney about scratch feature requests, and other ideas and projects.

Friday

Wrote extensive email to New Haven people about possible directions for projects. Will publish it soon :)

Met with Cynthia about plans for New Haven.

Emailed back and forth with Elise, and it looks like she is going to be able to set up the Bilingual Cultural Exchange for students who have signed up with a school in Peru.