[SoaS] Buenos Aires Greetings

[Caryl Bigenho]

Hi Folks,
Last night we had a wonderful visit to an elementary school here in Buenos Aires. Gonzalo Odiard, one of our Contributors who has already written 2 great Activities for the XO and is working on a third, picked us up at 6:30 p.m. at our hotel and took us to the school which is just outside the Federal Distirict of Buenos Aires, but still in the Provence of Buenos Aires.
We met there with the creative, positive school director, Matilde Joly, and 2 members of her staff including her IT person, Gabriel.  They have a lot of older PCs ranging from 286s to Pentiums, with everything in between, but also 16 brand new Dell desktops with all the bells and whistles. Gabriel is setting up a computer lab with the equipment.
Matilde had contacted OLPC asking for help with finding good ways to use the computers with her 200 students and 13 teachers.  Gonzalo and I showed them several programs available via Sugar on a Stick and I gave Gabriel a Google translation of the instructions for creating both Strawberry and Blueberry versions of SoaS. I was very lucky that my very old version (June 2009?) of SoaS ran beautifully in Virtual Box, and Gonzalo had brought his Contributors Program XO-1 to demonstrate programs as well. 
Matilde and Gabriel were very excited about the programs we showed them including Etoys, TurtleArt, Memorize, Speak, Moon, Scratch, and others.
Gonzalo is part of SugarLabs Argentina and plans to have the group work with Matilde and her staff. They are planning to schedule some teacher training sessions and other good things. Matilde wants to start slowly with two second grade classes and work from there. The teachers of these classes are very interested in participating. 
This is going to be an interesting project to follow.  They have an outstanding technology team that will be working with an equally outstanding group of educators. I'm delighted to have been able to help bring them together!
Caryl
BTW Gonzalo had to pay $88 US to get the CP XO through the Argentine Customs! 		 	   		  
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