Bonjour from Montreal

The Montreal customs guy asked me questions in French because of my name.

I managed to participate in the Uganda conference call. I need to make doubly sure to document all of my projects, which activities interest students, and find more ways to connect our sensors and mapping to a future conservation project. But that's been my intention from the start - all of my materials are linked on the blog's right sidebar.

Then I patch my research work maps sites, and send them in over e-mail. I'm on the XO and need to do all sorts of crazy workarounds to code and then submit the code over e-mail. The software should allow direct selection of files to upload (instead of the sanitized view which is called the Journal). Journal confuses students too - I saw a Vietnamese school attach the file which said they'd run Record, instead of the photos they took with it.

I'm about to make frantic edits to wiki pages for my Boston-area non-profit, in the last 20 min before boarding the flight to Brussels. Unfortunately I'm missing some of the sensor-using action shots I took earlier, but I ought to have a whole lot of new ones, right? ;)

An Environmental Sensing Class

Quoting from my concept proposal:

Students at the Kasiisi Primary School in Uganda are taking part in an experiment in education. In the fifth grade classrooms, 155 students start the day by opening up lunchbox-sized green laptops. With these XO computers, The Kasiisi Project has taken a leading role in using technology to teach about the environment. Students can access the internet, take photos, plan projects, and type papers for their classes just like their peers in the developed world. The Environmental Sensing class will teach students at Kasiisi Primary School the skills of real-time measurement and monitoring of their environment using sensors. Although data collection, graphing, mapping, and reports will be done with their specialized laptops, technical portions of the project will use open-source software available for any computer.

Students will bridge the gap between technical and personal perspectives by making a creative community map, and then draw several overlays on tracing paper. These overlays will demonstrate multiple uses of water, causes and effects of pollution, and ways to protect the environment. Producing a paper map will lay the foundation towards composing a digital map which can be shared with classmates, pen pals, and online mapping sites.

The Kasiisi Project has supported education in rural Ugandan schools for 14 years. They have experience with visiting educators, novel educational initiatives, and research projects.