Maria,
The real experts to reply to your question are the teachers and children already using the laptops. SPC has a current programme with currently over 1000 6-8 year olds and 100 primary school teachers mostly with absolutely no prior computing experience using the OLPC laptops and finding them excellent for teaching and learning in remote community schools. Several thousand more shortly to be deployed under the SPC trials programme. It's designed for young ages, 6 years upwards, and for teachers to introduce more child-centres approaches such as more active, discovery learning and "learning by doing". The focus of the teacher training is on the curriculum integration, i.e. teaching ideas. Teachers with no experience normally start creating lesson resources, worksheets, local language readers, etc within 2-3 days of starting. Children become experts by themselves, as we discovered in PNG after 5 months. It does not need technology experts to use or introduce! In PNG there are several educational institutions (i.e. DWU - St Benedicts and Don Bosco Tech Institute) already having introduced OLPC into their teacher training programmes. Some other comments: I believe the way it was introduced in the workshop was in good faith, and I am perhaps guilty of not providing some guidance on how the exercise should be done. I am a teacher myself - I worked as a VSO volunteer in two very remote Solomons schools for 3 years in the 90s. One of them had no resources, no books, no equipment. I taught science using empty tin cans and stones from the beach. The laptop would have transformed how I could teach and the early lives of those children. One example alone - the laptop comes with content already installed, including a slice of the wikipedia providing an entire reference encyclopaedia on Chemistry - a marvellous resource for any science teacher and mark my words, the children too!. Add the school server and you could pack it with the entire Wikipedia, the entire school curriculum resources, community continuing education materials, information on any subject. The scale of the program would mean that all those excellent highly motivated teachers that I have known, in those remote schools, could become empowered to collaborate in content development - of relevant, Pacific-centred resources. Think of the OLPC as wide approach to transforming basic education, not just a laptop. If you want a browser with tabs, it's all open for you to start a project and develop one, and furthermore, you can even localise it to your local language . It's all possible with an open development approach. Firefox 3 can be installed if you need that, etc, etc. By the way, the software is not a fixed set - there are hundreds of "activities" that can be downloaded and installed. The OS version is also more advanced now with version 8.2 - not what you found on the Tuvalu batch which are yet to be updated. The principles of OLPC are about one-to-one computing (child ownership - but interpreted from Pacific view point), and connectivity - everything you do on the laptop can be shared. These are not lab computers where children won't get a look in and if they do, only teach them office skills - which can certainly come later. They do have browsers and can access the wiki certainly, and as the whole development approach is open I would expect to see teachers using them creatively for producing local content, not only on the wiki but with other open source tools - eXeLearning for instance, is a simple-to-use offline HTML content authoring tool that will run on the XO. The main thing is that this is designed to scale - and that is where the transformational aspects will be seen. David Leeming OLPC Coordinator, SPC and Technical Advisor, People First Network Honiara, Solomon Islands From: Maria Droujkova [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, 4 December 2008 7:24 a.m. To: [email protected] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [WikiEducator] Re: One Laptop Per Child OLPC I have two questions for David Leeming, based on this conversation. Thank you for offering to answer, David. 1. From Leigh's experience, it looks like OLPC laptops take an onsite specialist (or specific detailed instructions) to "get", even (or especially?) for people with computer background. One can't just start using them, given previous computer experiences. Is it so? 2. In your opinion, are these laptops appropriate tools for wiki work, as exemplified by that 40-person workshop, in the light of the fact "they aren't really computers"? -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. naturalmath.com: a sketch of a social math site groups.google.com/group/naturalmath: a mailing list about math maker activities groups.google.com/group/multiplicationstudy the family multiplication study --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
