Patukae College/OER Reef and Rainforest wiki in Marovo Language/OLPC formats
Project Portal for the Reef and Rainforest OER wiki
A collaboration between UNESCO and the Solomon Islands Ministry of Education
Formats Available using OLPC Laptops
This page is intended to illustrate the various formats that could be used by school students to create content for the Reef and Rainforest wiki. They can also be used to explore and reuse existing OER content for educational purposes.
An accompanying page, Non OLPC Formats, has details of formats and applications that the teachers, students and support team have available when using standard PC computers.
Note that the activities (applications) on the OLPC laptops run using the Sugar graphical interface [1]. Thus strictly speaking the below are "Sugar" activities, not "OLPC" activities.
Note that some formats can be displayed on any computer. Some formats require the Sugar interface (as on the XO laptops). Sugar can be run from any PC using Sugar on a Stick - SOAS [2] (boot from USB flash drive) or Sugar emulator. SOAS will be made available at all the participating.
All outputs that we are describing below can be uploaded to the UNESCO Reef and Rainforest wiki (and locally on the OLPC school server).
Below are some examples. More will be added later.
| Sugar (OLPC) Activity | Format Type | Comments and examples |
| Write [3] | Text | Writing text documents, can be done collaboratively, or from teacher’s templates. Main tool for creating text contributions. Files created and saved with Write Activity are in ODT format and can be read and edited by Open Office and Microsoft Word. Sharing is enabled (students and teacher can work collaboratively on a single document, and can also easily share documents created individually. |
| Record [4] | Multimedia | Records images (photos), short 2 minute audios and videos. Digital photographs are saved as jpgs (640x480px), audio recordings (quality best with external microphone) is formatted in Ogg Vorbis [5]. Video is low reolution, in Ogg format with Theora codec[6]. Audio saved using Record can be imported into Audacity and then exported as mp3 using the LAME libraries (Audacity will be available at each school/community on a PC laptop). |
| Memorize [7] | Multimedia | Matching pairs game, using images, text and sound in any combination. Games can be created with the student/teacher's own sets of pairs, which could be plants, animals, cultural or other objects with their names and sounds (or spoken names) in Marovo. The laptops themselves are used to capture the images and sounds used to create a game. A game can then be saved in memorize format. It requires the Sugar interface to display it (OLPC laptop or Sugar on a Stick). |
| eToys [8] | Multimedia | Very powerful tool for creating visual simulations and models and animations in rich multimedia. Based on Sqeak [9]. Could be used to model understand or illustrate environmental processes. Also very good for creating interactive ebooks - called "active essays"Output files are called projects, they can be played on Sugar on a Stick and there is also a Windows eToys player available. |
| Speak [10] | Audio and text | Audio chat and speaking text. Could be used to help children develop correct Marovo phrases and to help understand text from the wiki, if there is a language on the XO with similar phonetics. We can even develop a special phonetic plug in for Marovo. |
| Chat [11] | Text | Text only chat. Can be used to aid understanding and grammar. Chat history can be saved, so could be used ins structured way in class to create some form of Marovo language content for the wiki . |
| Browse [12] | Multimedia | Firefox based browser to explore the wiki and other online and cached resources |
| Poll [13] | Graphical | Simple multiple-choice type research tool, students can use it to do research polls using Marovo language. The results of polls (presented as nice coloured bar graphs) can be saved in various ways for the wiki. |
| Joke Machine [14] | Text, images and audio | Interactive scrapbook builder, with questions and answers accompanied by images and sounds. |
| XO Map [15] | Maps, images | View Google Maps, download photos from around the world, and add your own map markers. |
Examples of content created using some of the OLPC formats
We will work with Patukae teachers students to create and display here some examples of the above formats in the "Reef and Rainforest" Marovo context.
(work in progress!)
