Dec 8 2009
PARIS, December 8, 2009 — Netbook World Summit — Sugar Labs(R), volunteer- driven nonprofit provider of the Sugar Learning Platform for over one-million children around the world, announces the release of Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry. Available for download at http://www.sugarlabs.org, Sugar on a Stick can be loaded onto any ordinary 1Gb or greater flash drive to reboot any PC, netbook or recent Mac directly into the child-friendly Sugar environment without touching the existing installation. Sugar is also available for GNU/Linux distributions, runs under virtualization on Windows and Apple OS X, and features built-in classroom collaboration and automatic backup to a Journal. The latest version of Sugar offers simpler navigation, improved wireless networking, streamlined updating of Activities for children, easier keyboard configuration, better Gnash support for Adobe Flash content, and more. New Activities such as Physics and OOo4Kids join updated favorites such as Browse and Read, suitable for reading e-books.
“Sugar on a Stick is a great way to experience Sugar”, commented Walter Bender, Sugar Labs executive director. “In this holiday season, we wish to remind parents and teachers that e-books are not only for costly reader units for the well-to-do, but freely available as part of the open-access to knowledge movement to help children everywhere develop critical learning skills and to bridge the digital divide wherever it exists.”
Sugar on a Stick includes several e-book reader Activities to find and display e-books in PDF, EPUB, and DejaVu formats. The Read Etexts Activity can read e-books out loud, converting any old PC or inexpensive netbook into a text-to- speech aid for disabled readers. With Sugar, children can even make their own e-books. Thousands of e-books for children are available on websites such as Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive Children’s Library, epubBooks.com, Feedbooks.com, and ManyBooks.net. Other sites offer online reading, such as the International Children’s Digital Library.
Pilot Sugar projects are underway in American and European schools. School administrators wishing to deploy Sugar will be interested in OLPC’s recently updated XS school server software, which provides “safety net” and connectivity services at the school level: backup, content distribution, filtered access to the Internet, and Moodle integration. To assist schools interested in testing this technology, Sugar Labs has partnered with Nexcopy, Inc. of Rancho Santa Margarita, California, an industry leader in USB duplicator solutions, to open http://recycleusb.com. Nexcopy will collect used USB sticks, reload them with Sugar on a Stick, and forward them to Sugar Labs for distribution to schools. Nexcopy has also donated a 20-stick USB duplication unit to Sugar Labs.
Greg Morris, President of Nexcopy, commented, “Nexcopy is proud to partner with a nonprofit organization such as Sugar Labs. We believe the Sugar Learning Platform is clearly a step in the right direction for getting children involved with personal computers. Our objective is to give Sugar Labs the back-end equipment support needed to make this philanthropy successful and help with producing the large number of Sugar Sticks needed for global deployment. I am very honored Nexcopy is a part of this process.”
About Sugar Labs: Sugar Labs, a volunteer-driven, nonprofit organization, is a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Originally part of the One Laptop Per Child project, Sugar Labs coordinates volunteers around the world who are passionate about providing educational opportunities to children through the Sugar Learning Platform. Sugar Labs is supported by donations and is seeking funding to accelerate development. For more information, please visit http://www.sugarlabs.org.
About Nexcopy Incorporated: Nexcopy Incorporated specializes in developing and manufacturing the finest and most feature-rich flash memory duplicators in the market. Pioneering the solid-state memory duplication market, Nexcopy supplies Central and South America, Europe, India, Asia, Pacific Rim and serves the U.S. market through its headquarters in California.
Sugar Labs is a registered trademark of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Other names are trademarks of their respective owners.