OLPC UK/Meetings/20090527

Meeting 3, May 27, 6.30pm

Attendance

Attendees: Kunal Vora, Warren Pimm, Martin Dengler, Peter Robinson, Dom Baker, Michael Jordan, Amir Ansari, Paul Dorrell

Pilot September 2009

• School pilot discussions to be held with 2 schools next week
• Peter on top of deployment issues; managing the technical aspects of the deployment
• The pilot discussions to be managed by Warren Pimm, Peter Robinson, Amir Ansari
• Paul advised that the pilot should include XO's for other teachers to encourage future involvement in OLPC

OLPC UK Promotion

• Marketing was discussed by the group and the decision was to set up separate committee meetings focused on Marketing and PR to plan the post pilot marketing activity
• Decision that OLPC UK needs to have runs on the board prior to full marketing effort being launched; but that the planning process for that marketing need begin immediately
• Request for everyone to email in to the mailing list all suggestions, thoughts and ideas for the marketing of OLPC UK for consideration at the Marketing and PR Meeting.

• Time and date for this meeting has been sent to the mailing list separately.

OLPC UK Organisation

An expert in charity structure and management has been engaged to identify the most relevant structure and plan this component. This will be presented to the group in the July meeting

Any other business

We had the pleasure of an educator attending - Paul - and he gave some interesting feedback on a variety of topics:

• for the "pitch", reams of paperwork / slides = bad; sit down with cool hardware = good
• teachers still developing their lesson plans are more apt to be receptive (and enthusiastic about the possibilities)
• Year 5 is a good target
• budget for a larger rollout won't be a problem, probably
• the new national cirriculum is like 5 pages long from hundreds of pages, so it leaves teachers with a large amount of leeway (good and bad)
• the new cirriculum has some significant emphasis on collaboration, which of course is a strength (...for XO/Sugar)
• the form factor - that kids can move the laptop around and/or use it in their own classroom, rather than an ICT room, is great - space for hardware is evidently a big limitation in a lot of schools (much more so than budget).