[Olpc-open] XO experience in the classroom - Carol Lerche's daughter

[Kent Loobey]

Robin,

This kind of feedback is priceless!  Thank you so much for taking the time to 
write.

On Friday 04 April 2008 7:18:52 pm you wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> My name is Robin Lerche, and I am a kindergarten teacher at a charter
> school in the South Bronx (I'm using my mom's e-mail to be able to write to
> this list). This is my first year as a head teacher, so I am still getting
> a feel for things, but as of right now, things are going very well. My mom,
> Carol, bought four XOs to have in my class as a center, and for the past
> week she has been in my class teaching my kids how to use them. I thought I
> would write about how it went. Let me just give a little rundown of the
> kids in my class: There are 20 5- and 6-year olds, but I think their
> experience could easily be applied to a 1st grade class as well, since all
> of them except two are reading on at least a first grade level, and most of
> them have very good handwriting, so good fine motor skills.
>
> First of all, let me say that they certainly are durable! Of course,
> Karissa, while trying to take a picture of my reading group, dropped it on
> the floor, and it was quite fine afterwards. She's not very tall, but still
>
> :-) They were all very intrigued by the rabbit ears and the little people
> : on
>
> the back, and several of them incorporated the logo into their pictures
> during writing time, which was cute.
>
> They really liked the computers. They were so excited when they went to use
> them, they couldn't wait until they started up to start pressing all the
> buttons. Each group had four kids at a time, and my mom was constantly
> supervising them so if they had any problems, she could troubleshoot. Which
> happened quite a lot, as they are very impatient. Their main problem was
> that they didn't want to wait for the programs to come up; when it didn't
> pop up immediately, they would click on something else to try it, which of
> course made it start even slower, and so they got very frustrated and my
> mom had to close out everything before they would be able to try again.
> They loved taking pictures of everything, but some of them had trouble
> getting the mouse to sit well enough on the little button to take the
> picture, especially when they were trying to do it semi-upside down so that
> the subject of the picture was looking at the screen and the taker was not
> (it would be great if the picture was taken no matter where on the screen
> you clicked). However, they all got very into the chat feature, though
> there was really only one group that was patient enough to learn the
> orientation of the keyboard in order to write messages. The other ones just
> got excited when they made something come up on the other screen, and
> pretending to "type" really fast (one of my kids kept saying, "Oh look, I
> got e-mail!"). A few of them figured out how to do the puzzle, and they
> liked messing around with Paint for a few minutes, but their fine motor
> skills weren't good enough to get anything recognizable out of it, and they
> were especially frustrated with the difficulty of switching colors. They
> really liked Tux because of the sounds and the stamps; unfortunately, my
> mom said it didn't work on the new release. But ultimately, even that
> didn't hold their interest for that long, because they couldn't really draw
> pictures. They loved the memory game and the cartoon builder, but there
> weren't enough pre-built images for them to explore for long.
>
> Some of them understood pretty well how to open the computers and get them
> started, but less of them understood that they needed to close out their
> applications and shut them down before they closed them. I could see that
> this could be a big classroom management issue unless they were either
> completely independent on the computers, or like me, the teacher had a
> full-time person in the room whose job it was to troubleshoot. Sadly, since
> I don't have the luxury of having such a full-time person in the classroom
> (my mom does have to go home), I will not be continuing to use these in my
> classroom, at least not this year. I don't think that at this age, it would
> be a useful tool to have the whole class on at the same time, since they
> need really concrete, hands-on methods to figure things out, rather than
> more abstract things on the computer. I do think this could be a great way
> to reteach concepts to a small group, especially with math concepts like
> patterning if there was a program for this sort of thing. My mom also says
> that a lot of the issues I experienced in class are probably going to get
> better with new releases, so maybe next year we can try again! I wish I had
> a full time person in the room to handle them because they really did have
> fun and they will be sad to see them go.
>
> Sincerely,
> Robin