This week, Intel has launched the new Atom CPU. These low power CPU's come in five different flavours and are targeted for mobile internet devices. The biggest advantage of these CPUs is their low power consumption: The fastest Atom CPU has a TDP (thermal design power) of only 2.4 Watts. The Atom CPU's are the smallest Intel CPU's on the market today, as they measure only 13 by 14 mm. The cheapest one, the Z500, will have a clock speed of 800 MHz and a fsb of 400 Mhz. The price of this CPU will be around $45,- . The Z510 will run at 1.1 GHz, the Z520 at 1.33 GHz, the Z530 at 1.6 GHz and the Z540 at 1.86 GHz.

Intels commitment has added much to the low power market, which has been dominated by VIA the last few years. For schools that is very good news: More competition means that they will be able to have low cost computers, which are cheap in purchase and cheap in running them.

The Queen of Spain visits the Open Schools Program, a joint initiative of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport and the Open Institute to use ICT to improve the quality of Education in Cambodia.

Sofía, Queen of Spain, visited today the National Institute of Education (NIE), entity of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport in charge of training all the upper secondary school teachers in Cambodia.

At NIE the Queen visited the installations of the Open Schools Program, an initiative to integrate ICT in Khmer language in the education system.

A delegation from the Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport visited Spain from the 2nd to the 7th of February to see first hand how Spain is integrating and using ICT in its Education system.

At a massive ceremony that took place on 22 January 2008, the Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport presented its new Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Textbook for all schools that have computers, all universities and all teacher training facilities.

The new textbook teaches the use of Khmer language Free and Open Source applications, such as OpenOffice, Mekhala (Firefox) and Moyura (Thunderbird), which have been fully translated to Khmer language (Cambodian). It follows eight months of intensive training during which all new upper secondary school ICT teachers, all ICT teachers at upper secondary schools that have computers, and all ICT Master Trainers from teacher training facilities have been trained to teach this type of software, as well as to maintain their computer facilities. The books are distributed together with a letter from the Ministry indicating that from now on this should be the materials to be taught.

16 November 2007 - 60 ICT teachers from 15 upper secondary schools in Phnom Penh and Kandal province were invited by the Open Schools Program for 40 hours of training on the use and teaching of Khmer Unicode and Khmer language Free and Open Source applications, as well as on Computer Maintenance and Networking.

6 November 2007 - In the framework of its research on the use of low-cost computing for education, the Open Schools Program is developing a large training room at the National Institute of Educaiton which will be equipped with low-power-consumption computers.

In order to equip this room, chip manufacturer Intel has donated to the project 60 "Little Valley" computer mother boards with CPU embedded.

26 October 2007 - 60 ICT teachers from 20 upper secondary schools in the provinces of Battambang, Banteay Menchey, Oddar Menchey and Siem Reap were invited by the Open Schools Program for 40 hours of training on the use and teaching of Khmer Unicode and Khmer language Free and Open Source applications, as well as on Computer Maintenance and Networking.

5 October 2007 - ICT teachers from 12 upper secondary schools in Phnom Penh were invited by the Open Schools Program for 40 hours of training on the use and teaching of Khmer Unicode and Khmer language Free and Open Source applications, as well as on Computer Maintenance and Networking.

29 September 2007 - The ICT Master Trainers of the 6 Regional Teacher Training Colleges and of the 18 Provincial Teacher Training Colleges of the Teacher Training Department of MoEYS were trained by the Open Schools Program on the use and teaching of Khmer language Free and Open Source applications, and on on Computer Maintenance and Networking.

On 22nd August 2007, H.E. Dr. Kol Pheng, Senior Minister and Minister of Education, Youth and Sport, and Ms. Chim Manavy, Director of the Open Institute, signed the Memorandum of Understanding that officialy creates the Open Schools Program as a joint program of the Ministry and the Open Institute.

The goals of the program are:

Using some new computers, but mostly old computers belonging to NIE, which have been refurbished, repared and upgraded with second hand parts, the Open Schools Program has enabled two computer rooms at the National Institute of Education, with 30 computers in each one of them. The computers have been installed with both Windows and Linux operating systems.

All non-IT teacher trainees at the National Institute of Education (550) receive 20 hours of training on the use of Khmer language Free and Open Source applications and on Khmer Unicode.

The Open School program has trained, during the months of July and August all the teaching and administrative staff of the National Institute of Education (110) to the use of Khmer Unicode and the use of Khmer language Free and Open Source computer Applications such as OpenOffice, Mekhala (Firefox) and Moyura (Thunderbird), as well as webmail.

All 56 IT teacher trainees and economics and IT teacher trainees at the National Institute of Education receive intensive ICT training on Khmer language applications and computer maintenance from the Open Schools Program from June to August 2007. These pre-service teachers will be teaching IT in upper secondary schools around the country after they graduate in September.