[IAEP] Sugar distributions for teachers and volunteers [WAS: Congratulations to OLPC Australia!]

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 05:09, Sridhar Dhanapalan <sridhar at laptop.org.au> wrote:
> On 1 April 2010 08:42, Martin Sevior <msevior at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I came across this article in the mainstream Australian National
>> Newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
>>
>> http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/joy-as-computer-power-comes-to-yirrkala/story-e6frg6nf-1225848236378
>>
>> A massive congratulations to OLPC Australia for this. Those are 3 very
>> powerful heavy hitters you have in your corner!
>> (And normally companies Australians are very cynical of.)
>>
>> Congratulations!
>>
>> Martin
>
> A belated thanks, Martin!
>
> Our deployments are really hotting up, and we could use some
> assistance from the Sugar community. We are looking at better ways to
> distribute Sugar, as a means of making people more comfortable with
> the software found on the XOs.
>
> We have a two main use cases:
>
>  1. a teacher who is using or intends to use XOs in their classroom
>  2. any random person who wants to try Sugar
>
> The version of Sugar used should reflect what is available on the
> XO-1.5 units (we will no longer deploy XO-1s), to provide consistency.
> This will mean that we will not be distributing the latest version of
> Sugar. We want to be able to hand out media with Sugar already
> installed, so that it can be easy to get involved. On top of that, we
> want to provide:
>
>  1. documentation for using Sugar and XOs for educational purposes
>  2. tools and files to create more of the media (e.g. ISO file and USB creator)

I think the people at La Rioja were doing exactly that? Maybe it's a
matter of a few adjustments and translations from Spanish.

Regards,

Tomeu

> Some considerations:
>
>  1. it should be as easy to use as possible
>  2. it should be cross-platform in terms of hardware and OS
>
> At the moment, I have three ideas in mind:
>
>  1. Sugar on a Stick, on a USB stick with some persistent storage
>  2. a virtual machine image (e.g. for VirtualBox)
>  3. a LiveCD
>
> The First idea is for the teachers we will be training to use XOs in
> the classroom. This will allow them to use Sugar even before they have
> an XO. It also lets them use the VGA port on their laptops to project
> the Sugar UI so that they whole class can see. The Second idea lets
> people test-drive Sugar without going through the trouble of
> rebooting. The Third idea is useful simply because it is cheap: we can
> press CDs in the hundreds and give them away whenever we want.
>
> We'll take care of the production of the media. The end result should
> be a professionally-looking USB stick or CD.
>
> A challenge I have found is that there appear to be many ways to
> acquire and use Sugar, scattered across multiple pages on
> wiki.sugarlabs.org. I'm somewhat confused as to which are the best
> paths to take.
>
> I'd appreciate the Sugar community's assistance with this.
>
> Thanks!
> Sridhar
>
>
> Sridhar Dhanapalan
> Technical Co-ordinator
> OLPC Australia
> p: +61 425 239 701
> w: http://laptop.org.au
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>