On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, Wade Brainerd wrote:
My mother-in-law is an 8th grade teacher in Nobleboro, ME. Maine has had an
Apple laptop program for the past few years in which all 8th graders receive
personal iBooks that they can take home with them.
She has a feature where she can silently watch a single student's screen at
a time via a VNC connection (a simplified Apple Remote Desktop). She uses it
when kids look distracted, and simply calls across the room to ask them if
what they're doing is "appropriate" after checking out their screen. Plus,
the child's knowledge that they *can* be watched at any time is generally
enough to prevent them from doing anything really bad during class time.
A secure remote screenshot utility should be considered essential for
teachers to maintain control of their classrooms (IMO). A "TV wall" view
showing a number of kids screens would be even better. I'm not sure if
remote control is needed, as this would be a much greater security risk.
I'm not an educator, but I think the idea of a room full of kids looking
down at their screens waiting to be "called on" virtually seems a little
strange when you can just look up and talk.
I think the thought is to replace the useual situation where the teacher
asks a question and then calls on a single student to answer with one
where the teacher asks a question and then everyone provides an answer,
and the teacher then picks an answer to proceed with.
David Lang
Perhaps if you guys are
thinking about much larger classrooms and/or remote education it would be
worthwhile, but these things can be accomplished through chat as well. The
question / answer idea does seem useful though, perhaps a Pop Quiz activity
where the teacher's instance shows a different interface from the student.
BTW, if you haven't already, I think it's absolutely worth studying these
existing US programs to determine how a classroom is run with this kind of
technology present before designing systems around usage patterns. If you
would like to talk with her (or other teachers) I'd be happy to try and set
something up!
Best regards,
-Wade
2008/1/14 Jameson Chema Quinn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
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§ion=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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