XO's to the zoo

After about a month of having the XO's, that feeling of the "new toy" has worn off. With the exception of our brightest most curious kids, the children were not engaged with their laptops as they were the first couple of weeks. I am to blame because I didn't have enough time to sort out some of our bugs and I wasn't able to get up to speed with updating and getting to know the XO's and ho to best use them within our curriculum. This has been solved with a trip to the Zoo. last friday we took the kids on a field trip to the zoo and asked them to bring their XO's and were to told to record or document their experience. This was the only instructions they were given and as a group we walked around the zoo and the kids instinctively recorded the sights and sounds and with out a doubt they all became re-engaged with their laptops in a much better way than I would have been able to think up. It was amazing to see how excited and focused they became by using the laptops as a documenting device. On the way back home almost all of the kids were going back and seeing what they had recorded and I must say that I was impressed with the batteries because almost all of them were recording video and playing the videos over and over again and none of the batteries died at the zoo, it wasn't until we were half way home that the batteries started to give out. We were at the zoo three hours and the ride back was about 90 minutes, so considering all the video use, this was pretty impressive. That night the kids were playing the sounds of chirping birds and monkeys beating their chests and comparing their photographs and i must say this was better than any photo class that I had participated in with the kids before because instead of talking about composition and what not, they had seen by trial and error what worked and what didn't.
This was no doubt a success in terms of re-engaging the kids with their laptops and aside from what I described earlier, the children have become more interested in what other activities can be done on the XO's. I have downloaded some new activities like scratch, connect and jump for the kids that are doing good in school (and don't need the extra study session we have at night after dance class.) It's as though we just opened the XO's for the first time , which is very gratifying to see.
Now, what i need is some help in coming up with ways to have the kids work on math or science projects because what I have been able to find within the activities is beyond their abilities, but we are off to a good start and I am still extremely excited about their excitement to learn and explore.