On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 6:10 PM, John Landis <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks so much for the warm welcome. Particularly to Patricio, > Harriet, and Kevin for sharing such fascinating links. > > If it's okay, I'm going to use this list as a sounding board for my > thoughts as I explore Sugar. Again, if there's a better place for > this type of thing, please let me know! > > So far, I'm getting the impression that Sugar on A Stick is more or > less limited to experimental university-school partnerships, and > hasn't yet reached a phase of wide deployment in the hands of schools. > Is this an accurate assessment?
No, it's not. It's been used in a number of school environments that I'm aware of quite successfully in a number of different countries. > The reason I'm interested in SOAS is that I work in the traditional > "computer lab" setting that is so familiar in K12 schools in the US. > This setting has a lot of restrictions and drawbacks. A big one is > that, even though the students are surrounded by computers in my lab, > and to varying degrees at home, they have no opportunity to take > ownership of these devices. They can't monkey about with the precious > computers that we adults see as far to precious to fully hand over to > children. A very basic symptom of this is that the students simply > can't save their work. A save dialog box on most computers is very > difficult to learn for the uninitiated. Add to this that all files > which don't make it onto a shared network or USB drive are basically > instantly lost given the shared nature of school computers. If the > kids can't do something as simple as save a piece of writing, the > computer is far less useful than a notebook. > > In this light, SOAS looks very appealing. The promise of handing a > student their own _persistant_ computer where they are free to explore > is exactly what I've been looking for. (to say nothing of sugar's > "Journal" which I think is a brilliant answer to the above problem). That's basically it, it certainly isn't without it's quirks but it generally works pretty well. I'm the lead developer for SoaS. Peter _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
