Cambridge Friends School/Meetings/2009-03-27

Highlights

What happened this week

Please add any notes you have about the CFS pilot from this week here, including relevant links when possible.

• Sunday, 3/22 - Rick wrote a great New Volunteer SOP (which I have promised a response to; also, SJ gave some good feedback and more feedback would be great!)
• Monday, 3/23 - BU group met; based on that meeting they'd love feedback on their deployment plans for Kenya, see #Help needed. (Anurag, are there any notes you'd like to share? Will there be more meetings?)
• Tuesday, 3/24 - Caroline asked for [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc_boston/2009-March/000359.html SoaS pilot filming help), see #Help needed.
• Wednesday, 3/25 - Mel (as substitute loop team during Harvard's break) met with Peter (CFS head of school), Sally, Rob, and Vicky (CFS teachers) and got much of the next 2 weeks of the CFS deployment settled. Lots of #Help needed.
• Thursday, 3/26 - Owen started looking into project management systems for deployments (starting with CFS). (Owen, Bernie just set up a Redmine test site at SL if you'd like to play with that instance.)
• Friday, 3/27 - Elsa ran a bug-squashing sprint for new Sugar devs. (Don't have more details on how this went - Elsa, any notes you'd like to share? Are you doing it again?) Yifan and Xy got the CFS server running!

What's happening next week

add your upcoming events here!

Wednesday, April 1, 2009 - DEPLOYMENT DAY! Students get their laptops.

Saturday, April 4, 2009 - Colin is once again running a Gurufest at Olin College, featuring Product Management guru Greg Smith on customer feedback on XOs and Sugar. Details here.

Upcoming dates

Monday, 4/6 - Classroom visit day. Sign up!

Wednesday, 4/8 - Independent Period visit day. Sign up!

Support teams status

If you're part of a group doing CFS-deployment-relevant activities, please create a section and post what you're up to!

XS

• CFS's server is deployed (ejabberd and moodle are up) and moodle has been tested.

Curriculum

• Status reports needed. Mack, Sandra, Katelyn?
• Have dates that NEED PEOPLE! Sign up!

Repairs

(Same status as last week.)

• Ready to go.
• We still need to figure out how broken laptops will be delivered to Olin for repair and then back to CFS.
• Xy and Jeff will be training a CFS middle school tech team as soon as team members have been identified by faculty.

Development

• More people have development environments now, yay!
• Need people who want to be Moodle (php) and Sugar (python) hackers to handle patch/feature requests from CFS, see #Help needed

Questions for the loop team

Add questions that you have about the deployment here!

• Some questions from Yifan.
• What needs to be done before deployment day?
• Can you post your research protocol, if you get permission? (It would make a great example to encourage other deployments to record and share their findings too!)
• Same as above for curriculum samples. Should figure out how to utilize many college teams to test and give feedback on lesson plans.

Help needed

Posts things you need help with - make sure to leave your contact info. To take a task, email olpc_boston@lists.laptop.org with which thing you're interested in helping out with.

• Volunteers needed to help in classrooms with laptops (working with students)! Sign up here.
• Curriculum help needed. Email olpc_boston at lists dot laptop dot org.
  • Vicky would like to do a geometry walk and use the laptops while walking around outside to record and measure (and maybe map) geometric shapes that they encounter (tall flag poles, building structures, rocks, etc.) How can XOs be used?
  • About two weeks from now, Vicky will also be doing a unit on muscle and neurological diseases. The kids will be writing case studies. If you know something about these things and would like to geek out with the kids on this topic, that would rock. We still need some ideas on how to integrate the XO's into this.
  • Rob isn't really sure how to use the XO's in his class yet. He's thinking that he can use Moodle on the school server to create resource photo galleries of historical objects and artifacts (ie. mystery objects for the class to discuss and investigate). We should have a better idea of this after the improv. sessions on April 6 & 8. He'd also like to use Metropolis (Sim City) to do a lesson on how civilizations are built, but he doesn't know how to work with this version of Sim City and how tweakable it is. It would be great if someone could work with him on trying out ideas for lesson plans using Metropolis.
  • Sally would like her Spanish students to keep audio journals throughout the year. "Hard drive" space is limited. Ideas for workarounds? Elsa is interested in doing software work on this.
• Caroline needs filming help for the SoaS pilots. Details and contact here.
• The BU team has contacts at a second school in Kenya they can't serve, if any group would like to be a loop team for them (or better yet, help some Kenyan students start one locally). Details and contact here.

Elsa is looking into hacking the record activity to allow kids to make spanish journals with their writing and recordings of them speaking. Any ideas on that front also appreciated. Details and contact here.

• Need contact info for Deb and Liane so we can ask about the teacher's group idea. Mchua 06:30, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
• Developers who want to work on Moodle and Sugar on behalf of the CFS deployment are needed. Training available to those with prior programming experience (if you've taken an intro programming class, you'll be ok). Poke Elsa.