I got some XO's for my disadvantaged American kids

[weetsy]

Hey Everybody,

I work for a home for abused and neglected children in Texas, and a few days ago a donor, whom shall remain nameless, gave us 8 XO's. This is plenty for the number of kids who are of the proper age to use them in our facility, and having heard about the OLPC program for a couple of years already I was pretty psyched to see if we could do some educational activities with them.

Has anyone else used XO's to educate American kids yet? What are some things you've been able to accomplish? They seem perfect to help very young kids learn about computers, but what about capacities for doing some basic office work? Can you write a resume on these machines and then e-mail it to perspective employers?

It would be really nice to be able to give some of our older clients capacities such as these, as limited as they might be, when they "age out" of the system and have to fend for themselves in the big bad world (assuming we can get more donations).

Also where can I get books that work on an XO? I tried loading a 45mb pdf file on one of the machines I have at home to experiment on, and it has cause all kinds of problems when I tried to open it.

Anyways, if I get feedback I'll keep posting. Lets experiment together!

-Weetsy

[ektoric]

Weetsy,

Which city are you in? I am in Austin, TX (and travel to Houston occasionally). Austin had a meet-up awhile back, but hasn't had one recently.

Not having a kid myself, I couldn't answer your first question with actual experience.

As for adult usages, consider pointing Browse to http://docs.google.com/

Finally, keep in mind that the unit has 256mb of RAM, and no swap (technical jargon for "that's all you get!") So a huge PDF file like that is something I haven't tried loading. I understand that people have loaded books of that size before, but you'd be at the whim of the PDF file's complexity and rendering instructions.

Good luck, and grats!

[weetsy]

Hey Ektoric,

I'm in Austin too.

I installed the latest version of sugar on all my machines and was able to open the PDF file I mentioned in my original post with few problems.

Im going to instruct the other teachers here how to use the XO's and just see what comes up. Maybe I can write a manual of activities to do with younger kids at some point?

Are there other web sites that might be of use? I've seen the OLPCnews site, are there others? Are there books available that are known to work well with the XO? Has anyone talked to UT Computer Science students about making some kind of new activities? Are there other classrooms that have adopted the XO in the Austin area that I might be able to observe?

-Weetsy

[ncarrol]

Take a look at this recent post:

http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=4246.msg28596#msg28596

Other ideas:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Waveplace
http://www.roomtwelve.com

Large programs in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Birmingham AL - search wiki or olpcnews.com/forum.

[scifi2nite]

Take a look at this recent post:

http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=4246.msg28596#msg28596

Other ideas:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Waveplace
http://www.roomtwelve.com

Large programs in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Birmingham AL - search wiki or olpcnews.com/forum.

This was very handy - thank you.