Waveplace Blog : June 2010

And I mean that when I say it, too. Last night, we all sat up in the yoga pavilion (ie, gazebo high on a hill overlooking maybe one of the most beautiful views on Earth), watched some movies Bill made in his various trips to Haiti and then talked about something that has been simmering throughout the whole Realness Summit. This “thing” is the creation of an organization, a co-op, or some sort of group that would help seed, support and follow up with small deployments that are directly or tangentially related to the OLPC community. We all are beginning...

Last day in St. John. Had a blast swimming with Tim's daughter's nanny, Nicole- renting kayaks and snorkeling equipment and finally hitting the water!!! At Gifft Hill today. Class is going well but everyone is rowdy. End of the school year activity I suppose. We're all working on our storybooks and they're actually going extremely well. The kids are adding animations and pictures to their stories which are really fun. Not sure if they really did it simultaneously with the Basic Etoys lesson, but regardless of that fact they seem to be learning very quickly. Having some severe problems with...

Catch a few notes about Realness and our Waveplace workshop in St. John: First places to look: -Waveplace in the St. John Source on May 30: http://stjohnsource.com/content/news/local-news/2010/05/30/one-laptop-child-comes-st-john -Waveplace in the Tradewinds on May 26: http://www.stjohntradewindsnews.com/index.php?limitstart=6 Some writings/bloggers that have been keeping us busy: Students and faculty at the Columbus School for Girls: http://csgolpc2010.weebly.com Some great blogging by Christoph Derndorfer of OLPC News: http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/education/waveplace_mentor_workshop_on_s.html Sugar Labs' own Bernie Innocenti with pictures and some comments: http://codewiz.org/wiki/blog/2010/06...

See John Engle's post in the Haiti Partners blog: http://www.haitipartners.org/2010/06/xo-laptop-exchange-in-virgin-islands/...

Ready to head to São Tomé e Príncipe, the small, two-island nation off the west coast of Africa. Will stay a month to help teach Etoys to the kids that I kickstarted a program with on behalf of the non-profit organization, STeP UP (http://www.stepup.st). Now we're taking on new challenges, bringing more computers to the kids at the São João School (have about 20 in hand, which is 20% more computer than we started with, yay!) and developing a summer program with the students and teachers of last year's program, then slowly easing them into another year of fabulous learning....

Well, a lost bag, a mix-up at the check-in desk in Lisbon and a canceled flight later, I have finally made it to São Tomé! TAP USA and TAP Portugal had trouble communicating with each other, and the message about my laptops had somehow not traveled from the former to the latter. I had smartly (or perhaps luckily) decided to check in a whopping four hours ahead of time, and well worth it- it took nearly two hours of Skype calls from my computer to TAP USA, a really frustratingly busy supervisor at the check-in desk to Portugal and a...

The five USB flash drives that I purchased for my teachers are stuck somewhere in Boston or Lisbon in my checked baggage, among other small things like that for class. I say to myself over and over, “At least it wasn't the computers that were lost. At least it wasn't the computers.” Today I scrounged around in all my bags and ended up finding a perfect total of five used but still functioning emergency flash drives that I had hidden in various bags in case of emergency during our time in Haiti. Thanking my lucky stars right now as I...

Stopped by São João this morning around 10:30, after students' exams were over for the day. Four of our five teachers met me at the school and we moved into an empty classroom so we could talk a bit about how we want to organize this summer program. The teachers explained to me that students are in exams this week and then next week is a sort of evaluation period, so students won't be available for the summer program until the week after that (what I believe will be two weeks before I leave). This is both good and bad...

At 10am I began my walk from the STeP UP office to the São João school. Walking there takes about 30-40 minutes total, and though my bags are heavy I somewhat enjoy it- passing through neighborhoods, a long stretch of bakeries, shops and a garage, the bustling market with many taxi and motoqueiro stands, then waterfront, with old, rusted ships that beached ashore long ago and soft waves lapping at the sand below a short cement barricade. And then, of course, the São João School, a pinkish colored cement building behind gates, outside of which women sell jaca and bananas...

After class today, the teachers pull me aside. “We just wanted to say,” they begin, “That...before you came along, we had no idea how to use Etoys. We are learning a lot. It's great!” I'll be honest; I swelled with pride upon hearing that. It was such a relief to know that the teachers are appreciating class. Today was a particularly difficult day. We covered lesson 4 in Etoys, which I think is when things start to get a little bit complicated. First, I showed them how to save things to the Squeakland Showcase. This took a good amount of...