Classroom tools

[Jameson "Chema" Quinn]

The idea of activity sharing supports several important forms of classroom
interaction, and can be stretched to accommodate many more. However the
focus on constructionism means there's a lack of support for teacher-centric
interactions, even ones which are useful in constructionist learning. Raising
hands

The fundamental model that's missing is the idea of questions or
assignments, posed by the teacher and answered separately by each student or
team of students. It is possible to accomplish this 'manually', but the
technical shuffling makes it impractical to do so in a real-time, classroom
situation, especially if it is desirable to keep data for later.

For instance, I as a teacher want to be able to pose a question and have
each student individually type a response. I could see, and record for
later, who responded what and who didn't respond. After giving a brief
interval, I could 'call on' a student either by my choice or randomly, and
continue the discussion based on their answer. There are several obvious
variations on this pattern - for instance, instead of typing a complete
answer they could just indicate whether they have an answer, ie, 'raise
their hands'; teams could present shared answers; etc. The software would
help the teacher to keep track of each student's participation and to 'call
on' students in a systematic manner.

This type of interaction is so fundamental that it would be great to have it
available independent of the currently shared activity. The obvious place to
put it, therefore, would be in the bulletin board. This means the bulletin
board would have to have some support for active logic. There are 3 ways to
do this that I can see: somehow using AJAX for the bulletin board
(advantages: highly flexible, tools exist; disadvantages: memory and
processor hog, needs some server technology on the teacher's side);
hard-coding this one case into the bulletin board (advantage: can be
optimized better; disadvantage: inflexible); or somehow making a plugin
system for the bulletin board (advantage: flexible; disadvantage: security
issues, the world doesn't need yet another plugin architecture)

(One disadvantage of using the bulletin board is that it could perpetuate
the UI chasm between on-line and off-line communication. In-class questions
are no more then small versions of out-of-class assignments, and the
interface should be as similar as possible. But that is a bigger problem,
one which permeates the XO, and deserves a separate discussion.)

Homnq <http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Homunq> 08:12, 14 January 2008 (EST)
[edit<http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=Software_ideas&action=edit&section=16>
] Classroom management

Motivation and interest are the best ways to achieve engagement, but social
pressure and good examples are also a part of the picture, and these are
impossible without transparency. If there is no easy way for teachers (or,
for that matter, other students) to tell the difference between a student
who is working on the laptop, and one who is playing DOOM, bad things
happen.

Intel/Microsoft's "Classmate" competitor is rumored to have tools for the
teacher to freeze or take over the student's laptop, "to guide them through
the interface". Regardless of whether this is a desirable relationship, it
would be hard to accomplish within the security model and memory constraints
of the XO.

However, it would be good to have tools for all members of a shared activity
to see the current state and recent history of all other current members.
This protects privacy (after all, you can just quit the shared activity for
privacy) while creating transparency. For it to be useful, it has to be
simple and fast. Useful things to see are which activities have been used,
and whether out-of-band communication has happened, over the last minute.
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