Little Bloggers

The blog Rising Voices recently posted a story about children in Uruguay being trained to blog using their XO Laptops.

Pablo Flores of Ceibal, the governmental organization in charge of distributing OLPC laptops in Uruguay, will organize a series of workshops which will gather national and international bloggers with the young laptop-toting students to show them how to set up a blog and take advantage of other social media tools.

So now, what happens when those students have a global voice? What do they say and to whom? And then what happens?

Good Overview of What XOs Can/Should Do

A recent posting on OLPC News outlined a strong overview of what educational computers should do. It then assesses the XOs against those expectations.

I found the discussion really clear and useful. You can check it out here: 
The Future OELPC: One Educational Laptop Per Child

Let me know what you think.

Interesting XO News

A recent posting to the XO Blog includes a restatement of OLPC priorities. I thought it was interesting:

This restructuring is also the result of an exciting new direction for OLPC. Our technology initiatives will focus on:

1. Development of Generation 2.0
2. A no-cost connectivity program
3. A million digital books
4. Passing on the development of the Sugar Operating System to the community.

They also mention a $0 laptop for certain parts of the world.

Very interesting.

Laptops influencing researching and writing

A recent article in the Argus Leader (from South Dakota) talks about the impact of a recent 1:1 laptop initiative in Pierre.

Here are two highlights:

"We're seeing an increased amount of research by students on the Internet," said Wade Pogany, who directs curriculum and technology programs...

and

"What we know is, there's more writing going on," he said. "Is it going on everywhere? No, and that's an issue we have to address."

Click here to read the article.