[Olpc-uk] Teacher Questions

Wed Jul 15 07:44:54 EDT 2009

More excellent points - we will be sending across to the teachers some links to good information sources for curriculum.

please note that most of what is being discussed by teachers (lesson plans and detail to follow in september) is not ICT based, they really appear to be making the most of it...

Michael

---- Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote: 
> 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
> 
> 
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