Walter Bender wrote: > The week culminated with an open-house where each teacher > presented a project they developed that integrated national curriculum > goals into an XO activity.
I think, this illustrated another, probably less fundamental but practically important point -- if a country has national curriculum, the whole educational system treats it as the foundation of their work, and whatever tools or methods are introduced are judged by their suitability to fit in it, or at least by being compatible with it. No one would dare to remove a chunk of curriculum to replace it with some other content -- it will break all kinds of dependencies, so both teachers and education officials will be seriously unimpressed. What, BTW, gives you the greatest argument against Windows that can be ever made when introducing any new tools to educators. Unless the country is slated to become the next giant outsourced tech support farm, Windows user training is a microscopic part of the curriculum, and existing computer classes with desktops cover it completely. No one would buy a laptop per child just to enhance a small, unimportant piece of a large curriculum that as a whole has nearly nothing to do with computers in general and Windows in particular. However presenting a laptop as a tool that supports better methods for studying things that are already in the curriculum, a tool that is easy to adapt, that is not tied to some predefined commercial "educational" software made for a foreign school system, you can score major points on suitability when faced with education officials in countries that strongly support national curriculum. -- Alex _______________________________________________ Olpc-open mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open
