Deployment Team/Small deployment guide
Introduction
This guide addresses the issues, step and procedures of a small deployment of sugar. (please free to add your own ideas and experiences)
Getting started with Sugar
Getting connected to the Sugar community
- Take a look at Sugar and OLPC Mailists,
- IRCs (#sugar, #sugar-meeting, #olpc-help @ freenode),
- Meet local Communities of developers, teachers and students.this can be done at local events, local IRCs and local mail lists these are some examples:
- olpc-jamaica
- olpc-brasil
- olpc-colombia
- olpc-uruguay
Getting Sugar into your classroom or community
For starters you will need some sugar live CDs or live USB, this could be of great help in doing introductions to Sugar.
If a LiveUSB image can be given to each teacher and child:
- They can use the image both at school and at home; and
- Through a shared ejabber server, they can collaborate as a class even when they are at home.
Tip: In order to reduce wear and tear on your computer's USB drive, use a USB extension cable. This moves the wear to a replaceable part and has the added advantage of making the USB connection more accessible.
Once you have been working with Sugar for a time you can then try it in a Laptops as a more definitive solution, the kind of systems you can look is listed on Supported systems
- Also, please see the discussion here.
Once you have a live system and/or laptop to work on you should begin with the next step.
Small workshops with parents and teachers
One of the best ways to get advantage of all the powerful ideas that are the basis of sugar is through the creation of learning communities, but this communities have to start from the knowledge of how Sugar can be used in education and what are the technologies that can be used to do so.
For initiating Sugar's use, teachers, parents and students (learners) have to be introduced to all it's principles.
20 quick learning ideas to try with Sugar
- Sharing Activities
- Journaling
- Gaming
- Programing with pippy and etoys.
- Turtle Art
- Using mails (gmail activity)
- Gcompris
- Other activities.
- Using memorize
Advantages and disadvantages of Sugar
Why Sugar?
Sugar comes with hundreds of tools for discovery through exploring, expressing, and sharing
- Web browsing; reading; chatting; playing movies and music; playing games; word processing; reflecting and assessment (Journal); creating graphics; creating rich media; and programming.
Sugar comes with a built-in collaboration system
- It features collaboration with or without Internet access.
- Benefits of Sugar include peer-to-peer learning; always-on support; and single-click sharing.
Sugar comes with built-in tools for reflection
- Features include an auto-generated journal (all your work is auto-saved and can be annotated and tagged).
- Benefits of the Sugar Journal are that it serves as a portfolio assessment tool, a place of reflection, and a forum for discussion between children, their parents, and their teachers.
The Sugar learning platform is discoverable
- It features a scalable interaction model that is iconic and discoverable through hover menus:
- Benefits include that you don't need to learn everything at once—you can progress, using simple means to reach to complex ends: no upper bound on where you can reach.
Sugar is designed for local appropriation
- It features free and open-source software, a view-source mechanism, and built-in tools for making changes and improvements.
- Benefits include a growing global community of support;
Sugar puts an emphasis on learning through doing and debugging
- Benefits include a more engaged learner able to tackle authentic problems.
- Sugar is available in a wide variety of forms:
- Getting Sugar for Fedora, Ubuntu, or Debian.
- Run Sugar in an emulator: QEMU or VMWare.
- Run Sugar from a LiveCD or Live USB.
Roadblocks
What are the roadblocks to running Sugar in your school?
- --Impossibility to run existing content?
- --Another conventional contents and tool used?.