Re: Classroom tools
At Tue, 15 Jan 2008 14:11:40 -0800, Edward Cherlin wrote: At the schoolroom level, the difference is between knowing rules for manipulating variables, and understanding what a variable is. (Basically, a variable name is a pronoun that can refer to a different number each time it is used.) Caleb Gattegno was particularly good at inducing understanding of arithmetic and elementary algebra using Cuisenaire rods. Everybody involved in XO software and content should read his work. In fact, a Cuisenaire rod activity would be brilliant. Yes. In fact, the idea of making the numbers viewable as rods and making them addable in Etoys has been popping on and off quite while. Scott Wallace even has an experimental implementation. -- Yoshiki ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
2008/1/16 Jameson Chema Quinn [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Let's keep our feet on the ground here. Just because teaching is a field where mediocrity (or worse) often goes unpunished, does not mean that expertise is irrelevant. It is possible for a bunch of non-teachers on a mailing list to have good ideas, or to discuss good ideas they've heard elsewhere. But some of the worst disasters in education come from good ideas that turn into trendy dogma. Success comes from thoughtful, flexible application and evaluation by experienced teachers who believe, and then divulgation that respects the ideas and inclinations of those who do not at first believe. There is a strong tendency for experienced teachers to reject anything new, just as in every other human endeavor. And we need far more than divulgation, we need entrainment. Teachers need to discover discovery themselves before we can divulgate the rest to them. They need to Get It [TM]. Most of us on this list are probably similar in our learning styles - naturally oriented towards understanding and discovery, resistant to repetition. I remember hating many of the most traditional aspects of schooling, most particularly the emphasis on formulaic recipes. Yes, I nearly failed third grade because I could spell, and wouldn't do spelling homework. But when I became a teacher and tried socratically to get my students to construct their own recipes, refusing to tell them 'step 1 step 2' for anything, I had some spectacular failures. One or two students would love it and figure out what I was trying to teach in 5 minutes - then get even more bored than they would have been from the formula, as I spent the rest of the period getting frustrated with students who were frustrated with me because they didn't get it and I wouldn't just tell them how. It is a hard balance to strike. Socratic teaching was devised for a one-on-one situation by a master. It was never meant for the classroom. I recommend looking at Caleb Gattegno's work on discovery using Cuisenaire rods. But you can't improvise this stuff in the clasroom until you have mastered what others have discovered how to do. I've made constructivism work in the classroom a few times, too, and it is great. But let me tell you: the less fired up and prepared I am, the more likely I am to choose something more traditional. Because when things don't go well, constructivism is much worse. I believe that the actual idea is to get children so interested in discovery that they will carry it forward, even on your off days. But yes, you still have to know your material, the children's capabilities, the likely paths of discovery, and the likely impediments to discovery backwards and forwards. However, as Maria Montessori amply demonstrated (and her followers have almost entirely forgotten) we know very little about what children are really capable of. We need a serious set of research programs, and a means of sharing the resulting knowledge. That means that we need to get a lot of teachers to catch the discovery bug, so that they will join in collaborative discovery of collaborative discovery itself. Luckily, we here do not actually have control of any schools. If we ossify into dogmatic constructivists, we will just hurt our own project, not students. If we do not make the tools teachers need, as well as the ones kids need, nobody will pay any attention to us, and OLPC will just dry up and blow away. I do not want that. Yes, indeed, control is not what we need, and certainly not what I want. I want teachers and parents, as well as children, to have the advantages of discovery. And there's another constituency besides teachers and students: researchers/administrators/bureaucrats. Them, too. It's easy to paint these guys as the enemy. For instance, in the US, standardized testing companies, with their seductive call of 'cheap, clean data', have seduced these guys into imposing the nightmare of No Child Left Behind, where the test is king. But if, as I said above, there are right ways and wrong ways to teach, who is going to sort it out if not the researchers? Researchers have done excellent work that is utterly dismissed by administrators, teachers, and governments in disasters such as New Math and the continuing war between the linguistics profession and the language teaching profession (local and foreign language, both). Even the controversy between Whole Word and Phonics, which is utter nonsense. It is impossible to read English without using both methods, and in addition referring to a dictionary from time to time. I defy anybody to figure out, unaided, the pronunciation of the astronomical term aphelion. (I have already given you a major clue, so you can't count yourselves. But I do congratulate you if you get it from just that clue.) Phonics can't handle once, the 'ough' words, and a multitude of others, and Whole Word can't hope to handle words like
Re: Classroom tools
There's nothing preventing Johnny from doing this without a laptop. It's just easier with the laptop, but then again, so are legitimate tasks. I don't think OLPC should be getting into the business of creating anti-cheat provisions. I do think that tagging objects with the people who have worked on them might be a good idea, though, for this and for other purposes. --Thomas Tuttle On Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:46:14 -0500, Mikus Grinbergs [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: When I showed my G1G1 to a teacher friend, just about his first thought was: this is an opportunity for surreptitious assistance. Suppose Tommy needs to do something for school, but is stumped. He contacts Johnny on the mesh, who (for a suitable future pay-off) feeds Tommy the answer. How is the teacher to know that Tommy did not do the task himself ? mikus ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
I wrote a piece about this for OLPC News, on how the Collaborative Discovery that the laptop promotes is defined in many classrooms as cheating. For a contrary view, you could talk to the faculty of Presidio School of Management, where team projects are the essence of the curriculum, and teams are diligent in calling delinquent members to account. On Jan 18, 2008 7:46 AM, Mikus Grinbergs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: When I showed my G1G1 to a teacher friend, just about his first thought was: this is an opportunity for surreptitious assistance. Suppose Tommy needs to do something for school, but is stumped. He contacts Johnny on the mesh, who (for a suitable future pay-off) feeds Tommy the answer. How is the teacher to know that Tommy did not do the task himself ? Monitoring wireless traffic in the XO environment is not at all difficult. Get a student to put something together for you. You don't even need to read the packet contents. Just the addresses are sufficient. mikus ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
On Tuesday 15 January 2008 9:23:55 am Y.Sonoda wrote: According to Construntionism theory OLPC relies on, any children have their own model of understanding the world (that is shema and those are all different each other. As the children interact with the real world, they learn by themselves using their shema, assimilating this model to the phenomena first, and accommodating it to adjust for better understanding next. This causes new shema, or knowledge, and these new shema will be also assimilated and accommodated repeatedly. Along with these series of interaction with the real world, children learn. On the other hand, the opposite idea is Instructionism in which teacher poses question and children answer. The way Instructionism is practiced, the child is forced to assimilate and accommodate the teacher's model of the world. Where the schema from real world conflicts with those of the teacher, it is the latter that is rewarded :-(. I have seen Instructionism work well a) when it is the student who seeks out a teacher b) when such contacts are spaced out. The former reduces frustrations and the latter limits domination by the adult. I believe a teacher (or more correctly, a guide) is essential in the learning process. Unguided constructionism doesn't work. Children left alone (see www.feralchildren.com for extreme examples) never managed to learn higher level concepts. BTW, I am confused by this discussion thread. I thought OLPC was about bringing learning environments into the reach of the neglected children - those who don't have access to well-equipped school rooms or educated guides. Does XO really make sense in environments that already have well-equipped classrooms and teachers? Subbu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
BTW, I am confused by this discussion thread. I thought OLPC was about bringing learning environments into the reach of the neglected children - those who don't have access to well-equipped school rooms or educated guides. Does XO really make sense in environments that already have well-equipped classrooms and teachers? Any country in the world has dedicated, caring teachers. And in any country in the world, teachers - whether dedicated or not - are an important constituency in education decisions. If OLPC aims solely at where-there-is-no-teacher, it's aiming at precisely nowhere. (I live and teach in Guatemala, roughly middle-of-the-pack for the third world, if that's worth anything.) Jameson ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
On Wednesday 16 January 2008 11:09:49 pm Jameson Chema Quinn wrote: BTW, I am confused by this discussion thread. I thought OLPC was about bringing learning environments into the reach of the neglected children - those who don't have access to well-equipped school rooms or educated guides. Does XO really make sense in environments that already have well-equipped classrooms and teachers? Any country in the world has dedicated, caring teachers. And in any country in the world, teachers - whether dedicated or not - are an important constituency in education decisions. If OLPC aims solely at where-there-is-no-teacher, it's aiming at precisely nowhere. (I live and teach in Guatemala, roughly middle-of-the-pack for the third world, if that's worth anything.) It is not about teachers or economic classifications. XO is described as a potent learning tool created expressly for children in developing countries, living in some of the most remote environments. Even in developed countries, I can see how XO will be welcomed by home-schoolers or schools in remote rural communities. But the classrooms being discussed here already have access to electric grids and computers with larger screens and hard disks. Would XO hit a sweet spot in such environments? I am not so sure. Subbu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Fwd: Classroom tools
Let's keep our feet on the ground here. Just because teaching is a field where mediocrity (or worse) often goes unpunished, does not mean that expertise is irrelevant. It is possible for a bunch of non-teachers on a mailing list to have good ideas, or to discuss good ideas they've heard elsewhere. But some of the worst disasters in education come from good ideas that turn into trendy dogma. Success comes from thoughtful, flexible application and evaluation by experienced teachers who believe, and then divulgation that respects the ideas and inclinations of those who do not at first believe. Most of us on this list are probably similar in our learning styles - naturally oriented towards understanding and discovery, resistant to repetition. I remember hating many of the most traditional aspects of schooling, most particularly the emphasis on formulaic recipes. But when I became a teacher and tried socratically to get my students to construct their own recipes, refusing to tell them 'step 1 step 2' for anything, I had some spectacular failures. One or two students would love it and figure out what I was trying to teach in 5 minutes - then get even more bored than they would have been from the formula, as I spent the rest of the period getting frustrated with students who were frustrated with me because they didn't get it and I wouldn't just tell them how. It is a hard balance to strike. I've made constructivism work in the classroom a few times, too, and it is great. But let me tell you: the less fired up and prepared I am, the more likely I am to choose something more traditional. Because when things don't go well, constructivism is much worse. Luckily, we here do not actually have control of any schools. If we ossify into dogmatic constructivists, we will just hurt our own project, not students. If we do not make the tools teachers need, as well as the ones kids need, nobody will pay any attention to us, and OLPC will just dry up and blow away. I do not want that. And there's another constituency besides teachers and students: researchers/administrators/bureaucrats. It's easy to paint these guys as the enemy. For instance, in the US, standardized testing companies, with their seductive call of 'cheap, clean data', have seduced these guys into imposing the nightmare of No Child Left Behind, where the test is king. But if, as I said above, there are right ways and wrong ways to teach, who is going to sort it out if not the researchers? Who is going to help the good mdels spread faster than the bad ones, if not the administrators? So we need to focus some attention on having the programs we write help to generate the research data that they need, if we want to break the grip of standardized testing. To bring this all back to earth, here's another teacher-centrically-inspired idea that I didn't include in the original message: a word processor that saves the whole undo stack with the file. It's technically possible: it's not actually so much more data, and text is lightweight. It would integrate well (from a user perspective; as a programmer, this is no easy job) with the Journal file paradigm. And it would help teachers focus on teaching writing process instead of just results, and, by the way, provide a natural barrier against computer-aided-plagiarism. I sent the above message off-list by mistake. Edward Cherlin already responded to paragraph 2: From: Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... Of course. I am well aware of the New Math disaster and several others. That's why *I* am talking about helping teachers discover discovery, and complaining that Nicholas dismisses teachers as irrelevant. I also know that we have to ask teachers and children what will work in their schools under the conditions they have to deal with. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
One way or another is what I wrote, and letting them cut papers and weigh is a great idea, I think. As you wrote, it is important to have teachers understand, or able to help, impotant ideas. And assembling a repository of what are impotant ideas and techiniques to teach them would be essential addition to the current OLPC effort. -- Yoshiki At Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:13:58 -0800, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Jan 14, 2008 10:06 PM, Yoshiki Ohshima [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But let me say one more thing. Making use of constructionism theory doesn't means the unnecessity of the teachers, but the role of the teachers changes. Yes, I think tools for supporting teacher who want to do the traditional style of teaching is eventually necessary. And, even in Learning learning, many subjects that are invented are not discoverable by kids' own. (Alan Kay said Children are not going to invent calculus.) a kid should be helped by teacher(s) in one way or another to learn powerful ideas. Alan Kay has examples of children discovering parts of calculus with some assistance. It is important that teachers know about the really important ideas, and about how to introduce children to them without thinking that they can simply teach it in language. I started working on a Kindergarten Calculus idea a while ago. Show the children that you can put a straightedge against any shape to get the direction of that shape at that point. Ask why the straightedge is level at the top or bottom. Assist them to find the third case in which the tangent can be level. That's the essence of differential calculus. The rest is deriving formulas and doing calculations. Similarly for integral calculus. Draw a figure on paper, cut it out and weigh it. Now, how can you help children to discover that these two operations are inverses? That's the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. (I have a solution, but I am sure that there are others.) Given that we can teach understanding of the fundamental ideas in Kindergarten, we have the opportunity to rethink at what ages the rest can be brought in. Traditional thinking is that you can't start until the students are capable of understanding all of the subject. This is very close to complete nonsense. Weapons-grade bolonium, in fact. -- Yoshiki ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
On Jan 15, 2008 12:42 AM, Yoshiki Ohshima [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: One way or another is what I wrote, and letting them cut papers and weigh is a great idea, I think. Thank you. Of course, not every school can afford construction paper. :-( But there are numerous alternatives, and I have no doubt that the children will think of more. (One example: Make a shape from clay on a flat surface, fill it with water to a measured depth, pour the water into a cup and measure the volume of the water. Or weigh it.) As you wrote, it is important to have teachers understand, or able to help, important ideas. Discovery being the most important idea. We can't just tell teachers that. We have to enable them to discover it. This is the most critical and neglected part of the Laptop program. If we don't do it, and if Nicholas keeps saying that teachers are irrelevant, we will get a ferocious backlash, comparable to the New Math disaster. I have started the outline of a book under the working title Discovering Discovery, but I won't be able to write it alone. Second on my list of important ideas is the difference between know-how and understanding. This is well illustrated by the difference between the ferocious rivals Thomas Edison, who simply tried everything (most famously, over a thousand materials for light-bulb filaments), and Nikola Tesla, who could visualize three-dimensional magnetic fields, and believed in calculating likely possibilities before starting experimentation. At the schoolroom level, the difference is between knowing rules for manipulating variables, and understanding what a variable is. (Basically, a variable name is a pronoun that can refer to a different number each time it is used.) Caleb Gattegno was particularly good at inducing understanding of arithmetic and elementary algebra using Cuisenaire rods. Everybody involved in XO software and content should read his work. In fact, a Cuisenaire rod activity would be brilliant. Another example that bit me in grade school: English does not have vowel quantity, that is, longer and shorter vowels, in the manner of, say, Latin, Hindi, or Japanese. But in schools we use the terminology of long and short vowels taken from Latin. In fact, so-called long vowels in English are not the same vowels spoken longer, but entirely different vowels (actually diphthongs) that happen to be written with the same letter (though not always), and marked by a following silent e (but by no means always). This is due to the great lack of vowel letters in alphabets descended from Greek (Latin and Cyrillic mainly). The Greek alphabet was adapted from a Semitic alphabet that had no vowel letters at all. Some other alphabets such as Korean Hangeul and the Shavian alphabet for English have many more vowel letters, and use unique combinations for writing diphthongs. As though we wrote Ai keim to yur haus, and didn't pretend that 'ai' was a version of 'i', and 'ei' a version of 'a'. a ei cap cape e How would you write this clearly in Latin alphabet? We would have to just make something up. met meet mete i ai sit site o ou for fore four, but not cop cope u ?? tun (ton) tune, tun (ton) tune, cup coop, but not cut cute /kyut/ but note that book uses 'oo' for a different vowel than in coop. It took me days to work out that the long and short distinction was nonsense, and that I could and should ignore the plain meaning of the words, and just memorize the list. And assembling a repository of what are important ideas and techiniques to teach them would be essential addition to the current OLPC effort. Yes. Let's think about where and how to do that. There are too many important ideas for just a Wiki page, but I'll start one and see where it takes us. No, I won't. There is an Ideas page on the Wiki. See you there. -- Yoshiki At Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:13:58 -0800, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Jan 14, 2008 10:06 PM, Yoshiki Ohshima [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But let me say one more thing. Making use of constructionism theory doesn't means the unnecessity of the teachers, but the role of the teachers changes. Yes, I think tools for supporting teacher who want to do the traditional style of teaching is eventually necessary. And, even in Learning learning, many subjects that are invented are not discoverable by kids' own. (Alan Kay said Children are not going to invent calculus.) a kid should be helped by teacher(s) in one way or another to learn powerful ideas. Alan Kay has examples of children discovering parts of calculus with some assistance. It is important that teachers know about the really important ideas, and about how to introduce children to them without thinking that they can simply teach it in language. I started working on a Kindergarten Calculus idea a while ago. Show the children that you can put a straightedge against any shape to get the direction of that shape at that point. Ask why the
Classroom tools
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) [edithttp://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=Software_ideasaction=editsection=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. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
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. 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) [edithttp://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=Software_ideasaction=editsection=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
Re: Classroom tools
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) [edithttp://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=Software_ideasaction=editsection=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
Re: Classroom tools
Yeah, I was thinking along these lines with the Pop Quiz activity. The teacher (the activity initiator) gets a screen showing a box for a question, a box for the answer, and a box for every student that is sharing the activity. She types in a question, it is posed to the children, they type in their answers. When done, she types in her answer, which is delivered to the students, and their boxes are marked correct or incorrect on her screen. At this point she can manually adjust correct/incorrect/partially correct answers for individual students. Then she clicks the Next button, and the interface is reset for the next question. The students see a vertically scrolling list of question/answer pairs with a current correct and incorrect count at the bottom. When the teacher's question is posed, they will see the question followed by an input box to enter their answer. This would be a massive improvement over the standard write test, photocopy test, pass out test, receive test, grade test system as the questions could be adjusted in realtime based on how well the class is doing. This should be implementable using the current activity interface, right? It just means that the initiator of the activity receives a different interface than the participants, which is easy to do. Regards, Wade 2008/1/14 [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 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
Re: Classroom tools
Teacher screen grab: that would be good. A view of which people use what applications is also useful, because it can fit the whole class on screen - and it's pretty close to what you already get in the friends view. So, is it possible under Bitfrost for a background activity to grab the screen AND see the net? I would be surprised and upset if it were, so it probably needs a special permission - and one that can't be set for an unsigned activity. (note that this also protects against student hackers who would like to write a version that always shows the teacher the screen the student wants...) Pop quiz: yes, this could be done as its own activity. The idea is maximum flexibility - teacher can open or close questions in any order, can 'grade' in real-time or offline, can reveal grades to students in real time, offline, or never, has tools for choosing a random student to call on, can let students see all or some of each others' answers. It would make sense for these two activities to be rolled into one. Otherwise you'd have to tell your students 'all right, now log into my shared Big Brother activity, or else...'. Also it should be integrated with some kind of gradebook/attendance sheet/etc. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
--- Original message --- From: Jameson \Chema\ Quinn [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note that this also protects against student hackers who would like to write a version that always shows the teacher the screen the student wants...) It most pointedly doesn't. Bitfrost activity signing is not a 'trusted computing' enforcement mechanism; it's there to aid the user when the user so desires. The user retains full control of the machine, including the abilities to make his activities lie, cheat and steal. This is a Feature. -- Ivan Krstic (via mobile) | http://radian.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
2008/1/14 Wade Brainerd [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Yeah, I was thinking along these lines with the Pop Quiz activity. The teacher (the activity initiator) gets a screen showing a box for a question, a box for the answer, and a box for every student that is sharing the activity. She types in a question, it is posed to the children, they type in their answers. When done, she types in her answer, which is delivered to the students, and their boxes are marked correct or incorrect on her screen. You are making important assumptions here. The first is that the teacher is only asking questions that have right answers. The second is that the right answer is actually correct. This is frequently not the case, particularly outside the realms of math and physics. But even in math, teachers and textbooks frequently give incorrect information. The notion that you can't add apples and oranges, for example. This is what algebra is *for*. It is true that when you add apples and oranges, you don't get a total that is all one or the other, but to claim that you just can't do it is simply insane. According to Richard Feynman, the books used in the Los Angeles Unified School District in his day were appalling, and I don't know of any reason to suppose that any others are any better, except the few written by serious mathematicians like Ken Iverson. I am interested in the case where the teacher asks an open-ended question for the children to explore in some manner. I am also interested in other cases, such as the original out of the box puzzle, which asks for the minimum number of connected straight lines that can be drawn to cover nine dots in a 3 x 3 square. Five is trivial; four is the classic outside the box solution; children have discovered solutions in three lines and one line. It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry.--Albert Einstein The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them.--Albert Einstein At this point she can manually adjust correct/incorrect/partially correct answers for individual students. Then she clicks the Next button, and the interface is reset for the next question. The students see a vertically scrolling list of question/answer pairs with a current correct and incorrect count at the bottom. When the teacher's question is posed, they will see the question followed by an input box to enter their answer. This would be a massive improvement over the standard write test, photocopy test, pass out test, receive test, grade test system as the questions could be adjusted in realtime based on how well the class is doing. This should be implementable using the current activity interface, right? It just means that the initiator of the activity receives a different interface than the participants, which is easy to do. Regards, Wade 2008/1/14 [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 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
Re: Classroom tools
2008/1/14 Wade Brainerd [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 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. Is your mother-in-law interested in discussing this program with us? Would she be willing for us to talk with her students? For OLPC students around the world to talk to her students? Please extend these invitations not only to her, but to anybody else you know who is in any way involved in this program, and ask them to pass them on. -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
Actually I think you're assuming (incorrectly) that the text matching feature is the only way questions are graded in my (hypothetical) activity :) In the description, the teacher has the ability to override whether or not the answer is correct or partially correct before it is reported to the student. The text matching is simply a convenience to reduce the tedium on the part of the teacher. I agree that it doesn't cover more exotic paradigms like self grading on the part of the student. Further, it doesn't allow the student to submit a drawing with their answer. But it was just a 3 paragraph idea... Best, Wade On Jan 14, 2008 3:24 PM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2008/1/14 Wade Brainerd [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Yeah, I was thinking along these lines with the Pop Quiz activity. The teacher (the activity initiator) gets a screen showing a box for a question, a box for the answer, and a box for every student that is sharing the activity. She types in a question, it is posed to the children, they type in their answers. When done, she types in her answer, which is delivered to the students, and their boxes are marked correct or incorrect on her screen. You are making important assumptions here. The first is that the teacher is only asking questions that have right answers. The second is that the right answer is actually correct. This is frequently not the case, particularly outside the realms of math and physics. But even in math, teachers and textbooks frequently give incorrect information. The notion that you can't add apples and oranges, for example. This is what algebra is *for*. It is true that when you add apples and oranges, you don't get a total that is all one or the other, but to claim that you just can't do it is simply insane. According to Richard Feynman, the books used in the Los Angeles Unified School District in his day were appalling, and I don't know of any reason to suppose that any others are any better, except the few written by serious mathematicians like Ken Iverson. I am interested in the case where the teacher asks an open-ended question for the children to explore in some manner. I am also interested in other cases, such as the original out of the box puzzle, which asks for the minimum number of connected straight lines that can be drawn to cover nine dots in a 3 x 3 square. Five is trivial; four is the classic outside the box solution; children have discovered solutions in three lines and one line. It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry.--Albert Einstein The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them.--Albert Einstein At this point she can manually adjust correct/incorrect/partially correct answers for individual students. Then she clicks the Next button, and the interface is reset for the next question. The students see a vertically scrolling list of question/answer pairs with a current correct and incorrect count at the bottom. When the teacher's question is posed, they will see the question followed by an input box to enter their answer. This would be a massive improvement over the standard write test, photocopy test, pass out test, receive test, grade test system as the questions could be adjusted in realtime based on how well the class is doing. This should be implementable using the current activity interface, right? It just means that the initiator of the activity receives a different interface than the participants, which is easy to do. Regards, Wade 2008/1/14 [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 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
Re: Classroom tools
There was a nice project done in Chile using Ipacks: the teacher would pose a problem and the children would formulate an answer. Then they'd gather in groups of four and pool their answers. Each group of four would then reach consensus on an answer they thought was correct. All of the group answers would be shared with the entire class. Then a class discussion would ensue: why did Group A come up with that answer? The role of the computer and the teacher was to facilitate the discussion among the students and to focus discussion around problem areas that revealed themselves in discussion. A nice use of collaboration that has nothing to do with taking control or all eyes forward. -walter 2008/1/14 Wade Brainerd [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Actually I think you're assuming (incorrectly) that the text matching feature is the only way questions are graded in my (hypothetical) activity :) In the description, the teacher has the ability to override whether or not the answer is correct or partially correct before it is reported to the student. The text matching is simply a convenience to reduce the tedium on the part of the teacher. I agree that it doesn't cover more exotic paradigms like self grading on the part of the student. Further, it doesn't allow the student to submit a drawing with their answer. But it was just a 3 paragraph idea... Best, Wade On Jan 14, 2008 3:24 PM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2008/1/14 Wade Brainerd [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Yeah, I was thinking along these lines with the Pop Quiz activity. The teacher (the activity initiator) gets a screen showing a box for a question, a box for the answer, and a box for every student that is sharing the activity. She types in a question, it is posed to the children, they type in their answers. When done, she types in her answer, which is delivered to the students, and their boxes are marked correct or incorrect on her screen. You are making important assumptions here. The first is that the teacher is only asking questions that have right answers. The second is that the right answer is actually correct. This is frequently not the case, particularly outside the realms of math and physics. But even in math, teachers and textbooks frequently give incorrect information. The notion that you can't add apples and oranges, for example. This is what algebra is *for*. It is true that when you add apples and oranges, you don't get a total that is all one or the other, but to claim that you just can't do it is simply insane. According to Richard Feynman, the books used in the Los Angeles Unified School District in his day were appalling, and I don't know of any reason to suppose that any others are any better, except the few written by serious mathematicians like Ken Iverson. I am interested in the case where the teacher asks an open-ended question for the children to explore in some manner. I am also interested in other cases, such as the original out of the box puzzle, which asks for the minimum number of connected straight lines that can be drawn to cover nine dots in a 3 x 3 square. Five is trivial; four is the classic outside the box solution; children have discovered solutions in three lines and one line. It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry.--Albert Einstein The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them.--Albert Einstein At this point she can manually adjust correct/incorrect/partially correct answers for individual students. Then she clicks the Next button, and the interface is reset for the next question. The students see a vertically scrolling list of question/answer pairs with a current correct and incorrect count at the bottom. When the teacher's question is posed, they will see the question followed by an input box to enter their answer. This would be a massive improvement over the standard write test, photocopy test, pass out test, receive test, grade test system as the questions could be adjusted in realtime based on how well the class is doing. This should be implementable using the current activity interface, right? It just means that the initiator of the activity receives a different interface than the participants, which is easy to do. Regards, Wade 2008/1/14 [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 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
Re: Classroom tools
2008/1/15, 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 (Sorry for my duplicate mail, I unwittingly sent my post to your personal email address. ;-P) I think the topic you are posing here is very important and draw my deep interest. Partially I agree with the some lacks of powerful tools for teachers to support the children's learning outside of the XO. And I also think it is natural that the teachers who are making tremendous effort to educate care about some kind of system or mechanism to perform their ways of teaching in OLPC scheme. I also think the collaboration tools between teachers and children you proposed here can be one of the support tools (or assist mechanisms) for many teachers who would like to commit OLPC activities with the will. But I guess the starting point of the discussion seems turn aside from the main track which OLPC is aiming for. According to Construntionism theory OLPC relies on, any children have their own model of understanding the world (that is shema and those are all different each other. As the children interact with the real world, they learn by themselves using their shema, assimilating this model to the phenomena first, and accommodating it to adjust for better understanding next. This causes new shema, or knowledge, and these new shema will be also assimilated and accommodated repeatedly. Along with these series of interaction with the real world, children learn. On the other hand, the opposite idea is Instructionism in which teacher poses question and children answer. So, the beginning of your discussion makes me feel some kind of contradiction. If we respect OLPC Learning learning policy, what we are aiming for as support tools for the teachers ( or children supporters, generally ) is not the tools to implement the current teaching schemes into OLPC framework, but those develops and accelerate the collaborations among childrens including supporters. But let me say one more thing. Making use of constructionism theory doesn't means the unnecessity of the teachers, but the role of the teachers changes. In the Learning learning world, children questions to themselves or pose them among other children, some of them are alone and others may get together the groups in which all of them have same questions. What questions will be posed, in which each children have interest, and their timing are all unsynchronized, so that it is almost impossible to synchronize children to obey some kind of curriculum to progress class one by one. Forcing something regardless of their interest will rather lose their obsession. But generally speaking, as you anxious about, it seems there are lacks of supporting tools for supporters, though XO as the standalone personal learning tool is well done. So I think it is OK to prepare the tools you proposed as an one of varieties of supporting tools if OLPC has enough resources ( or enough and skillful volunteers). One thing we should care about is that the main track is to respect Learning learning policy if we make some effort under OLPC, and we need more powerful tools or systems for supporters to help children's learning whose classroom is under the tree. Spiky ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
