10

10 - Cross-posted from Biking to School, where you can catch up on my retirement thoughts, starting in 20, and counting backward:


XO laptops, a big part of my classroom for four and a half years...That's a long story, perhaps most completely told with this link.

Now that I'm retiring, I had to decide what to do with all those XOs. First off, nobody in the school - or district for that matter - knows very much at all about them. I'm the man in Seattle, when it comes to the XO laptop in education.

So I decided to take them with me, and to redeploy them in another country, most likely in Latin America. Fine.

All was going well with that plan until an email came out from http://olpcnews.com/. Among other things, the message linked to a blog post about donating unused/unwanted XOs to my classroom:

In the three days that followed that post, I have received offers of XO laptops from three individuals wanting to donate their XO laptops to my classroom. Sheesh! This is what I have told them:

Wow, thanks for the offer! You should know that I am retiring in 2 weeks, after being a teacher for 31 years. I am taking my classroom’s 30 XOs with me, and I will be redeploying them in a classroom somewhere in Latin America, where many schools are still using the XO. If you would like yours to be included in that redeployment, by all means send it my way. I am making sure all the XOs are operating and in good working order, and would be sure yours had the latest operating system on it.
 If you can get it here by June 25, the mailing address is:

One more thing to do, but this one is special. I hope they come. They'll be going South, to do good work.