Sugar Labs announces the release of its Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry which can be loaded onto a 1GB or above flash drive to reboot PC, netbook or recent Mac, turning it into a child-friendly Sugar environment. All this is done without disturbing the existing installation.
Sugar is also available for GNU/Linux distributions. It features built-in classroom collaboration and automatic backup to a Journal. The newest version of Sugar brings in simple navigation, improved wireless networking, and streamlined updating of children’s activities. This is not all as it also offers easier keyboard configuration, better Gnash support for Adobe Flash content, and more.
“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 offers e-book reader Activities which enable finding and displaying e-books in PDF, EPUB, and DejaVu formats. In addition, the Read Etexts Activity coverts users’ device into a text-to-speech aid that reads out e-books aloud for disabled readers.
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.”
Pilot Sugar projects have commenced in American and European schools. Schools planning to deploy Sugar could be interested in OLPC’s recently updated XS school server software that provides ‘safety net’ and connectivity features at school level. To further help schools test this technology, Sugar has partnered with Nexcopy.
Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry is now available for download.
