Teach For China is non-profit working on Chinese education inequity and founded in 2008. They are currently looking at developing some e-learning solutions with the schools they are involved with this year and we have been invited to present Greenboard during their mid-year professional development conference. The conference is happening this weekend (22/33 February) in Shantou, China and we will most likely spend the whole Sunday discussing with their fellows. As we already had a pre-meeting last weekend we feel there are a lot of things which could be used from the work we did in the Beijing area and we are looking forward to share our experience on the matter. Hopefully, we'll have more to tell soon!

While we did a soft launch two weeks ago and obviously people subscribed to our mailing list also found out about it, we are glad to officially announce Hardware Freedom Day 2014 registration opening! As usual one need to create a wiki page before filling up the registration form. For our second edition we have move the celebration one month earlier and hope that more hackerspaces will join the event. We have had a few ideas submitted to the mailing list to enhance the celebration and we definitely need to see how those can be implemented. In the meantime, get your team ready, your hackerspace in order and celebrate HFD with us!

Education Freedom Day! So it is time to look around and see if there is an event nearby. If not, you have a few choices online. There are of course the projects we mentioned previously, but you could also decide to get in touch with one of the many projects we have listed on our resource page. Last but not least, if you're just discovering Education Freedom Day and still want to do something be aware that there is an Open Education Week running in March, date around which we will run our second Education Freedom Day next year. Note as well that a few event organizers had to take the decision to delay their event because of local incompatibilities (summer holidays, Chinese New Year and the likes). So make sure you look at the dates events are being run. With all that being said you can as well just pick today as a day to contribute to one of the many Free Educational projects you are familiar with. Don't hesitate to join us on #EFDAY and talk to us in case of doubt, or just to cheer us up!

And of course, Happy Education Freedom Day to you all!

Still presenting a few of the exciting things to contribute to on EFD and this time we will cover our own projects: Greenboard and RUR-PLE. They both cover the needs of the younger generation, one in generic teaching and one in programming. You could summarize Greenboard by saying it mixes technology with traditional teaching while RUR-PLE is really about teaching programming to kids. As our own events will be happening early March, we will work on our projects on Saturday 18th and welcome anyone interested to join us on the EFD IRC channel to participate. Our work will span from maintenance tasks such as upgrading some of the software we use to marketing and translation work such as better wordings and splitting some of the courses to allow easy deployments. All this being very high level we definitely encourage anyone interested to join us and update the agenda to better focus our work. We are planning to be available from 14:00 UTC+8 to when it is over... So see you all on Saturday!

Yet another day and another project needing some love on Education Freedom Day: the Open Education Handbook! Started in September 2013 and initiated by the Open Education Working Group from the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Open Education Handbook initially intended to cover Open Data use in education but has quickly evolved into a document extending to the different aspects of open education, such as resources, data and culture and how those fit together. While it is currently the second version, the targeted final release is for October 2014.

So on Education Freedom Day, the people from Campinas in Brazil, together with interested participants either locally or remotely, will work on a Portuguese translation of the Open Education Handbook. Note that the event is actually happening on Monday 20 January and should you not live in the area feel free to contact them through our Portuguese mailing list. Of course if you are more generally interested in contributing to the Open Education Handbook then looking at the Open Education Working Group mailing list is probably a good way to start.

As previously mentioned Education Freedom Day is happening in many other places and can be a very good way to get involved in Free Educational Resources building or advocacy.