ColingoXO

Colingo is developing an activity for Sugar called ColingoXO. ColingoXO will provide a framework for constructivist language-learning by letting children construct video narratives in English using short video clips. Children will be able to use Colingo-produced, copyleft video clips or record new clips using the XO camera / microphone. Essentially it is an integrated video recorder and extremely simple video editor.

ColingoXO will also provide a framework for sharing video narratives, both between XO machines and online through colingo.org and other websites.

Purpose

ColingoXO will allow children to splice together short video clips into dialogs, along with letting children to submit new videos to a video language-learning library. The package emphasizes networking and collaborative education, so video dialogs can both be shared with other XOs and also shared online via an integrated web portal, [Colingo.org]. To be accessible for children on low-bandwitdh connections, dialogs are shared as XML files and video clip libraries can be mirrored locally on a school server.

Interface

Here is an early sketch of the interface

Interface description

Beginning at the top-left: The logo is a mix of the Colingo logo and OLPC's XO logo. Moving left: the child is prevented with a linkable breadcrumb providing comprehensive navigation between languages and lessons. Moving down to the second row: 3 icons let a child open, save, and share dialogs. An upcoming fourth icon will allow children to record clips within ColingoXO. Clicking on the first icon, open, causes a box to float above the screen surrounded by 75% transparent black. The box allows a child to open a video dialog stored either locally, on a remote XO, or on the colingo.org portal. The second icon, save, causes a similarly behaving window to appear with options to save the dialog as an XML file (small / fast) or as a compressed movie file (bigger / slower). The third icon, share, pops up a similar box allowing children to share the video dialogs between local XO machines and between colingo.org users. A forth icon

Status

Work on ColingoXO is now beginning to get underway. The interface has been designed, some content has been created, but python developers are desperately needed to make this a reality! Any developer interested should post to the Colingo discussion list.