Re: [IAEP] [SoaS] R: E-Books for Sugar on a Stick (Blueberry)
On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 08:45, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: Caroline, I'm not sure what the state of printing is in SoaS. If I was a teacher I think I'd teach the kids to use View Slides, Browse, and a Paint program and then use another computer running Image Magick on Windows (or Linux or a Macintosh) to prepare PDFs. You'd have to unzip the archives created by View Slides, which recent versions of Windows can do (or use JustZipIt for older versions). Then you run an Image Magick command like this to create a PDF: convert scanImage_1.jpg scanImage_2.jpg scanImage_3.jpg mybook.pdf Note that you can easily do dynamic presentations in Etoys, Scratch, or Turtle Art, with far more capability than ordinary PDFs. Each of them is a programming environment. Each lets students open Journal sessions and stick images and other elements into presentation frames. Or you could print the pictures out one at a time. This could use a LOT of ink and be very slow, either way. It might make more sense to just create ebooks and publish them where parents could download them. All this would be dangerously close to teaching kids how to use PowerPoint. If you had to print everything out it might be cheaper to get the kids construction paper, crayons, glue, etc. Using View Slides is easy enough, I think. Check out the screen shots on ASLO. They're not in sequence, but I think they give an idea of how to assemble images into an ebook. James Simmons On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 9:56 AM, Caroline Meeks solutiongr...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Jim, How low is the floor on this? Could a first or second grader do it? Can they print it out and create a book? I think book creation should be a big part of our eBook message, and nice write ups on a number of different ways for students to do this with Sugar might be a great supplement to our Blueberry press releases. Thanks! Caroline On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: Caroline, I'm unable to watch the YouTube video but if I was a teacher that wanted to have children create their own books I might recommend using View Slides to collect and organize image files created in other tools. For instance, children could get images from the Internet using Browse, create images using Record or one of the Paint programs, then use View Slides to import them into a slide show and arrange them into sequence by renaming them. Once you have images in sequence like that you could use View Slides to read them like a book, copy them to a thumb drive and read them on a non-Sugar computer using a program like Comix, or unzip them and use a command in Image Magick to create a PDF out of them. Once you have a PDF like that you could convert it to DJVU with another free utility. View Slides is consistently more popular than any of my other Activities and since there is very little legal content in .cbz format (and illegal content in .cbz format isn't that easy to find either) I've always wondered what people were doing with it. This might be part of an answer. James Simmons Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:47:25 -0500 From: Caroline Meeks solutiongr...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [IAEP] [SoaS] R: E-Books for Sugar on a Stick (Blueberry) Going along the same lines but in a different direction then TomeuThis teacher asked for a simple book creation tool for kids. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TRcKP1MJQs Might not be hard to create a Turtle Art Template that prints in a way that lets you fold the printed page to create a book. -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://www.earthtreasury.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Wanted: List of Sugar activities for the XO-1.5
On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 18:47, Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero dir...@gmail.com wrote: Also this should be asked to future XO 1.5 deployments, they could have another ideas for activities to be included in the list. Should we ask in olpc-sur? Thanks, Tomeu Rafael Ortiz On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 11:05 AM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: Chris, I agree with Gerald on either Get Books or Get IA Books (not both). Get Books is still being worked on by Sayamindu Dasgupta but perhaps he could get it in shape for inclusion in time. Right now it doesn't work on .82, but I can't see that being an issue. Get IA Books works on either but is limited to the books in the Internet Archive. There are only about a million books there! It is, however, ready to go. It isn't a popular download on ASLO but it deserves to be. You might also consider Read Etexts, because of its text to speech with highlighting feature and its own built in book search. It only works with Project Gutenberg titles, so no pictures. The present version is useable, but I'm working on a new version that supports word wrapping on PG texts and saving font size and speech preferences (pitch and rate). This is a popular download on ASLO. I've never tried the IRC Activity so I'm not knocking it, but I wonder if children would find that useful. They already have Chat and Speak. If you're going to include Read you should consider what evince modules, etc. to include with it. With the right modules Read can do DJVU, .cbz, and EPUB documents as well as PDFs. DJVU in particular is useful for Internet Archive books. James Simmons Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:26:22 -0500 From: Gerald Ardito gerald.ard...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [IAEP] Wanted: List of Sugar activities for the XO-1.5 To: Chris Ball c...@laptop.org Cc: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org, de...@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: 9403b1570911231226j58f91cafhbce60f25d00c...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Chris, I would suggest at least one of the Activities to get books, like Get IA Books. Otherwise, this list looks good. Thanks. Gerald ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar. What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David Farning ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sunflower for Science on XO
On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 17:16, Danny Kodicek da...@sunflowerlearning.com wrote: Hi there I just wanted to write to let people know we've been experimenting with some success with getting our Sunflower for Science product (www.sunflowerlearning.com) running on an XO. It's a Windows/Mac product but I've got it running through SugaredWine and it's looking very promising. I have a few questions that I wondered if anyone might be able to help with: 1) Screen resolution The biggest problem we have is that the screen res of the XO seems unnecessarily high and can't be changed. This leads to two big problems, one of readibility (which we can fix with a bit of work) and one of performance. Given the low spec of the machines, running full-screen animations, some of them in 3d, is pretty hard work for them at that resolution. Does anyone have any suggestions for ways to get round this issue? For example, I've been thinking about whether we could run the software at half-res and then use a screen magnifier app to bring it back to fullscreen That approach has been discussed and I think that someone got it to work up to some point, I recommend you to search in the de...@lists.laptop.org archives for the keyword scaling, zoom, etc. I'm cc'ing that list in the hope that someone will reply. 2) Launching and packaging Although SugaredWine is great, it would seem that a more sensible option would be to package the software together with Wine as a single activity that can be launched directly from a stick or installed as a .xo. Our product doesn't have an installer, although it does write to the Registry - anyone tried anything like this? I recommend you to make an .xo that contains both wine and you binary, when the activity is launched, wine would be called with your binary as an argument. I think there was a good example running around some time ago, which did just that with an excel viewer or similar. I'm afraid I'm a total Linux novice, so any advice would be welcome, but if you could talk to me like a small child that would be very helpful :) Sorry I cannot give you more precise instructions, I'm really short of time these days. I would suggest you to google around, patiently ask here and in other fora, and go step by step towards your goal, learning on the way. That's what small children do, right? :p Regards and good luck, Tomeu Thanks Danny ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar. What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David Farning ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Please help suggest illustrated eBooks for Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry launch
Sean, The Internet Archive has some really beautiful children's books. Unfortunately, their EPUB offerings are full of typos and the books in that format look anemic in comparison to the DJVU versions. You might consider using DJVU instead of EPUB for this reason. Among the most beautiful books are Abroad and Jack and the Giants. There are ilustrated Oz books as well. For languages other than English, Jules Verne might be a good author to try. The English versions of his works on IA are often illustrated, so it's a good possibility that the French originals would be as well, and they definitely have them. OLE Nepal has its own E-Putashkaya (sp?) website where they have books in Nepali for downloading. The ones I've seen are illustrated at aimed at very young readers. IA is definitely the place to get illustrated ebooks. Their website has animated thumbnails of the books as well as lists of the most popular downloads so you might be better off using the website to find them rather than Get IA Books. Though if you want to sell the idea of getting lots of books easily Get IA Books (or its heir apparent Get Books) might be a good thing to include in Blueberry. James Simmons Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:02:43 +0100 From: Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com Subject: [IAEP] Please help suggest illustrated eBooks for Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry launch Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry will be launched at the Netbook World Summit in Paris on December 8th and Walter will open the summit with the keynote presentation! Sebastian and other members of the SoaS team are working hard on finalizing the master this weekend. In this holiday season with $250 Kindles and $299 Nooks and $$$ eBooks, we want to talk about Sugar's great eBook tools as well as open access eBooks - that eBooks shouldn't be only pricey DRM'd downloads for pricey gadgets. To do this, we want to populate Blueberry's Journal with a small number of eBooks. Small, so the Journal is not overstuffed; eBooks there will help new Sugar users to understand the Journal. We do feel though that it is important that of the handful of eBooks, not all should be in English. We won't have room for every language (that needs to wait for a later version of Sugar or SoaS which could have filter logic by language). But an eBook in half a dozen languages, with instructions for parents and teachers where to find others, will effectively demonstrate Sugar's potential as an eBook reader solution. Books written in the native language will be preferable to translations of books originally written in English - we'd like to show that Sugar content can be localized and not merely translated. Please suggest eBooks! ideally, an illustrated eBook in EPUB format (although we may be able to convert from other formats by hand since there will only be a few). Send links! If it's possible before Sunday, it would be fabulous if we could include an eBook created by children in the classroom! Even a collection of scans could be fairly easily bound into an eBook file. Thanks for your help! Sean Sugar Labs Marketing Coordinator ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [SoaS] Please help suggest illustrated eBooks for Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry launch
Max Moritz is in the public domain. It would be a wonderful addition to the collection, if possible. Does anyone know whether it is available? 2009/11/26 Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry will be launched at the Netbook World Summit in Paris on December 8th and Walter will open the summit with the keynote presentation! Sebastian and other members of the SoaS team are working hard on finalizing the master this weekend. In this holiday season with $250 Kindles and $299 Nooks and $$$ eBooks, we want to talk about Sugar's great eBook tools as well as open access eBooks - that eBooks shouldn't be only pricey DRM'd downloads for pricey gadgets. To do this, we want to populate Blueberry's Journal with a small number of eBooks. Small, so the Journal is not overstuffed; eBooks there will help new Sugar users to understand the Journal. We do feel though that it is important that of the handful of eBooks, not all should be in English. We won't have room for every language (that needs to wait for a later version of Sugar or SoaS which could have filter logic by language). But an eBook in half a dozen languages, with instructions for parents and teachers where to find others, will effectively demonstrate Sugar's potential as an eBook reader solution. Books written in the native language will be preferable to translations of books originally written in English - we'd like to show that Sugar content can be localized and not merely translated. Please suggest eBooks! ideally, an illustrated eBook in EPUB format (although we may be able to convert from other formats by hand since there will only be a few). Send links! If it's possible before Sunday, it would be fabulous if we could include an eBook created by children in the classroom! Even a collection of scans could be fairly easily bound into an eBook file. Thanks for your help! Sean Sugar Labs Marketing Coordinator ___ SoaS mailing list s...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/soas ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Wanted: List of Sugar activities for the XO-1.5
Hi, It's done..let's see what people says there. Rafael Ortiz On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 18:47, Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero dir...@gmail.com wrote: Also this should be asked to future XO 1.5 deployments, they could have another ideas for activities to be included in the list. Should we ask in olpc-sur? Thanks, Tomeu Rafael Ortiz On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 11:05 AM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: Chris, I agree with Gerald on either Get Books or Get IA Books (not both). Get Books is still being worked on by Sayamindu Dasgupta but perhaps he could get it in shape for inclusion in time. Right now it doesn't work on .82, but I can't see that being an issue. Get IA Books works on either but is limited to the books in the Internet Archive. There are only about a million books there! It is, however, ready to go. It isn't a popular download on ASLO but it deserves to be. You might also consider Read Etexts, because of its text to speech with highlighting feature and its own built in book search. It only works with Project Gutenberg titles, so no pictures. The present version is useable, but I'm working on a new version that supports word wrapping on PG texts and saving font size and speech preferences (pitch and rate). This is a popular download on ASLO. I've never tried the IRC Activity so I'm not knocking it, but I wonder if children would find that useful. They already have Chat and Speak. If you're going to include Read you should consider what evince modules, etc. to include with it. With the right modules Read can do DJVU, .cbz, and EPUB documents as well as PDFs. DJVU in particular is useful for Internet Archive books. James Simmons Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:26:22 -0500 From: Gerald Ardito gerald.ard...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [IAEP] Wanted: List of Sugar activities for the XO-1.5 To: Chris Ball c...@laptop.org Cc: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org, de...@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: 9403b1570911231226j58f91cafhbce60f25d00c...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Chris, I would suggest at least one of the Activities to get books, like Get IA Books. Otherwise, this list looks good. Thanks. Gerald ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar. What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David Farning ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
