saving Write files to a second USB stick

At this early stage I want the students to explore the Sugar OS and Activities and then write about what they have discovered in their blogs.

Problem:
For Mondays lesson (27th July) I didn't have internet access through Sugar on a Stick (SoaS). Also at this stage collaboration is not working out of the box (will discuss this later).

So my plan was for students to record their impressions in Write and then transfer that file to their own USB stick so that they had text as a basis for a future blog. Apart from this requirement they were free to explore whatever they wanted.

I did a review of these basics:

• F3 Home
• F4 Current activity
• Point the mouse pointer to a corner to show the Frame which contains the journal icon, the icons of open activities and other useful information (even the IP address of your computer!)
• Everything is saved automatically in the Journal - showed them how to access the journal
• Hover over icons to obtain options such as Quit
• Favourites View and List View options from Home screen

I asked them to open Write and to begin to record some impressions.

Here is how to save your Write file on a second USB stick

What I found out (afterwards) is that the Default save is in ODT format. Since we don't actually have Open Office installed on all machines at my school then this is an issue for when we swap back to our Windows environment. Just checked then, Word is unfriendly to the ODT format in line with their tradition of sabotaging open standards. This provides me with another opportunity to talk about the hostility of MS to open standards.

Click Activity tab, hover over the icon, wait until the RTF option appears and save as an RTF. Then navigate to the Journal, find the RTF file, click on the corresponding arrow on the right hand side (RHS). Then hover over the Copy icon, wait until your second USB icon appears and click on that. This will save the file to your second USB.

This workaround provided a good opportunity to show the students some of the features of the Sugar system, that the USBs can be seen in the Frame, that you can copy files to a USB through the Sugar GUI (Linux Terminal not required)

Footnotes:
In a future lesson I will point out that this same method can be used to transfer a screen shot to their own USB stick. Just press the Prt Scr key to take the screenshot.

The main activity that students are playing with is Physics. Initially they just played with the gravity feature. Some of them made games with Physics. In this last lesson they were using the motor feature. We tried to save a Physics screen but it did not save, sadly. This will limit what we can do with it.