[Olpc-uk] Teacher Questions

[Daniel Drake]

On Wed, 2009-07-15 at 20:55 +1000, michael_jordan50 at bigpond.com wrote:
> Good afternoon,
> 
> The teachers in the pilot class raised a number of questions regarding
> the ability of XO / sugar in the classroom.
> 
> Security
> Is it possible to restrict children, when at home, to the LGFL network
> allowed websites? How? What do we need to do to prepare the XO's for
> this? When do we plan on doing that? Who will be doing that?

This sounds like it might be complicated. Personally, I would try and
encourage the parties involved that this is a social problem and should
be solved without a technical workaround on the laptops. It's the
responsibility of the parents what the children do in their house.

Also note that encouraging the use of internet at home might raise a few
headaches. The laptop is not that great at connecting to secured
wireless networks (ones with passwords), which is typically how home
networks are set up.

> Printing
> What is the best process to follow if students want to print work? Can
> this be done through connection / collaboration with documents on the
> network?

Right now the best approach is to copy the document to a USB disk as I
detailed in a recent mail.

> I know these are simple questions but I would like to respond with
> accurate / detailed answers or directions on where to look for the
> answers

Great, looking forward to it.

> Further, i will be sending more detail on our meeting out later today,
> the important note is that they have been through the XO and
> identified applications that can be used within the current ICT
> curriculum - excellent progress from their end.

Sounds like a good start but please point out to the teachers early on
that the project does not exist in order to teach people how to use
computers. It exists to improve education *in general*. So, in the long
term, we'd look for integration with the curriculum for other subjects
too. ICT is the obvious starting point, followed by Maths and Physics.


There are some great threads on the sugar-devel and IAEP (it's an
education project) mailing lists at the moment. A number of sugar
experts are going into a school ("GPA") and running Sugar sessions with
the kids as part of a summer programme. Instead of teaching the
curriculum, they are just using certain activities on the laptop to
teach certain skills, an extra-curricular activity. It's somewhat of an
experiment as it's the first time the people involved have run this kind
of project.

What I find particularly interesting is that they are inevitably
covering curriculum topics with such activities, however such parts of
the standard curriculum are aimed at older children. For example, they
are introducing the concepts of coordinate systems to 2nd graders,
something which is clearly part of the maths curriculum but only for the
kids who are a number of years older! This is exactly the power of the
laptops; with good software, content, preparation and teachers, the
laptops can be used to successfully teach concepts to young children
which they would not understand as well as otherwise (or might otherwise
only be able to comprehend at a later stage in their development) -- and
computers are currently the only tools which we have in order to provide
such an elevated level of education.

Alan Kay includes some great examples (especially the teaching of
calculus to 10 year olds) in this presentation:
http://download.laptop.org/content/conf/20080520-country-wkshp/Video/2008-05-20/13-Beyond-Printing%20(small).html
or if you want it bigger and have Ogg Theora codecs installed:
http://download.laptop.org/content/conf/20080520-country-wkshp/Video/2008-05-20/13-Beyond-Printing%20(medium).ogg


I guess my point is that while ICT curriculum is a good starting point,
let's try and look beyond ICT as time goes on, and maybe also let's try
and extend beyond the curriculum.

Daniel