Our first book sprint was a great kick-off for our effort to write the Etoys Reference Manual. Here you can read how it went and how we plan to go on: We started the sprint on Monday, December 7th, with a first discussion about the structure, target audience and FLOSS Manuals. We started writing the first parts then and met again for an audio call on Tuesday. We had a longer discussion and agreed on the structure now available on the wiki page: http://wiki.squeakland.org/display/sq/Book+Sprint On the other days I had audio chats with Cherry, Randy and Stephen Thomas, mostly about...

(by Rita Freudenberg, from newsletter) When I first got word about the creation of a new organisation with the mission of taking the gift of Etoys and helping it evolve, I was very interested. I thought about it a week and then spoke up, "I definitely wanted to be a part of this." That was last November and since then I have spoken with so many interesting people about Etoys and and the Squeakland Foundation. I'm very enthusiastic about our plans. One of my chief goals will be the development of the online Etoys community for every Etoys user out...

(by Mike Lee, from newsletter The OLPC Learning Club of Washington DC, a diverse grassroots group of XO laptop users with a passion for education, held its first content jam session as part of our January meeting at the Arlington Career Center (ACC) in Virginia. Though OLPC-style jams are typically intensive work sessions focused on producing content for the laptop, this time we chose to ease into the world of Squeak and Etoys by conducting a qualitative review of a series of Etoys-based activities created several years ago for the NASA Connect series. Our project took on the name "Etoys...

Here is a link out of Uruguay showing how to use Etoys to create "books": http://ceibalflorida.blogspot.com/search/label/etoys They are still using XO SW release 656 in Uruguay and I'm not sure which version of Etoys they have (maybe you can tell from the screen shots?). Its great that they have learned how to create books, include images from the XO camera and post that to the Web. That's not trivial with XO 656! There are also some posts on using eToys to teach geometry. Lastly, I saw a thread on using EToys to create concept maps on our Spanish language list....

Our friends at Waveplace have organized the first Waveplace Awards program where children from the U.S. (Florida), St. John, Haiti and Nicaragua have created Etoy storybooks they will share live via the Waveplace website. www.waveplace.com/awards Judges from several continents will participate in a live webcast today starting at 1 PM Pacific Time, 4 PM Eastern Time. Watch live or check the site later to see all of the projects!...

Here's an interesting piece of news. As of last weekend, XOs have been deployed,or soon will be, in 31 countries around the world. They are: Afghanistan, Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia,Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, India, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Mali, Mexico, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nepal, Nigeria, Niue, Pakistan, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Senegal, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Thailand, United States and Uruguay....