OLPC:Newsroom

Welcome to the OLPC newsroom, where news is revised for inclusion in future newsletters. Please submit story ideas or sign up to help out with one of the beats below.

Blog

Stories wanted from major deployments.

Birmingham, AL: Notes from people in the city on regional impact; photos from school events. Stories of cross-school effects as teachers from different scohols compare notes and methods.

Chester, PA: Notes wanted from lead teachers from any grade, who have the task of integrating XOs into their daily work; and from techies improving the network to handle the new demand for traffic and biulding-to-building connectivity.

For Chetser and Birmingham: personal anecdotes from students and parents, links to relevant social and non-school blogs.

Nicaragua: Hello Laptop, Daniel Drake, and Jennifer M. have all been there working in schools over the past month; the latter two will stay there for some months to help the local deployment. Stories wanted about the national mood, the country project progress, or any individual school.

Haiti: 60 schools are on the official list to take part in the original XO deployment. A number of teachers have engaged in training programs since the start of the initiative. Local stories in Kreyol, French or English would be welcome. An update from the maintainers and developers of the haiti website would be interesting -- who are their users and contributors? do they engage with other schools and XO users? what have they been doing since the quake? -- personal voices and personal blog sites wanted.

Peru: A pair of documentary makers have been filming "The Web", a visualization of introduction to the Internet across Peru, including rural plains and jungle schools that have received XOs. Where are those schools in the national deployment? Where do they fit into the overall scheme of XOs in Peru? Posts wanted leading up to the final work this coming fall.

Mexico: Stories of localization and culture from individual regional deployments within the country. Comments from Mochiladigital organizers about how their XO and Classmate programs have gone, and what it was like setting up their collaborative sites.

All LatAm stories most interesting posted in Spanish and then translated.

West Bank and Gaza: Stories from someone involved with a deployment; any angle would be of interest. Follow-up on the 5k to Gaza announcement.

Nigeria: Stories from past organizers and visitors to early Galadima, on XO hospitals and general response, wanted for contrast. [A pity that Galadima isn't in line to receive new XO's, they would put them to good use.] News from currently deploying schools welcome - from a parent or teacher.

Ethiopia: News and photos wanted on what the teachers and schools have been doing since the update last summer.

Oceania: Videochat one year on -- how has the experience held up? Are classes still experimenting with it? Niue: do kindergartners get XOs on graduation? Do they feel patroirit competition with Uruguay?

India: Lots of tiny deployment schools have showed up on the map! What's going on with them? A story from someone who has travelled to individual cities, perhaps Sameer or a local university student, would be excellent. Great photos have come from here in the past; more needed.

Pakistan: Where's Waqas now? and similar stories. Bonus points for a video clip with Habib.

Mongolia: Some of our partners have been active there in the past year; updates and photos! wanted from someone on the OLPC team, or story from a student at one of the rural offline schools.

Sichuan: Some fantastic photos have come from here. Very much wanted: a chinese-language blog from a participant.

Newsletters

Larger stories with multiple perspectives are sometimes in text/media pairs.

February 8

suggestions

hardware. 1.5 bringup, photo. color: new chargers/buttons	countries and deployments. Peru, Nicaragua?
activities and collections. TimeLapse, french content? ...	work from students in Rwanda?
Older stories. CEIBAL conference/December reports (blog pots by martin?) Haiti update, regifts & school data

January 25

Corps headline: http://laptop.org/en/olpcorps Corps picture: http://www.youtube.com/olpcfoundation#p/c/35409E778F587ED0/0/NR6udGcnxyg moved to the blog.	Interns headline: http://laptop.org/en/interns Interns picture: http://laptop.org/en/interns/interns2009.shtml moved to the blog.
Haiti headline: to http://laptop.org/haiti Haiti picture	Video: documentary from Peru Video: OLPC is for Hope
Older stories.

Beats

Regular beats:

• Documentary work - videos, journals, and storytelling from children, families, teachers, and visitors in the field
• Country updates - the latest news about Mexico, Argentina, Brasil, Ghana, Nepal, and all the other active OLPC countries.
• Hardware - someone to nudge Richard, Wad, Ed and others to release images and give short talks on camera about the latest and greatest
• Software - notes about Sugar, Xugar, SOAS, and F11 on 1.5
• Content - new great collections and activities, digital books, and Stevia updates
• Community - local meetups and efforts across chapters and regions
• Projects - new Projects and Contributors efforts

Regular updates

Updates from various parts of the OLPC community are always welcome! If you are working on a local project, a global barnraising, campus advocacy or school coordination, please let us know how you are doing.

These updates will be filtered into regular compilations like the visual newsletter, and will help us design public announcements and prioritize campaigns. If you have a longer story to share, you are welcome to draft it here and post it as a guest contributor on the OLPC blog. More technical or info-geeky detail than would go out in the newsletter is well loved by those who have been in the trenches.