[squeakland] Artifacts in ObjectCatalog

kharness at illinois.edu kharness at illinois.edu
Mon May 31 14:12:49 EDT 2010


Subbu,
That sounds great that it is being used in so many schools. I wish I could say the same! What kinds of projects are students making? 

The Birmingham, Alabama schools bought 14,000 OLPCs but I have not heard much about what they are doing with them. Birmingham is about 500 miles south of here so it is too far to just go visit for a day or two. Maybe this coming year I will make a longer trip. There is a group from University of Alabama Birmingham working with the Scratch-ed team. It will be interesting to see what comes with one-to-one computing. 

My local district has computer labs in most building and additional pcs in each classroom but there is not a cs curriculum so what is done at one school may or may not be done at another but nothing in Illinois is on the scale of what is being done in Uruguay, Brazil and Peru.I hope Marta will share the experience they will be gaining soon in Rio Grande do Sul. They are using Intels.

I think teachers might be more flexible and innovative if given a chance but the system level math curriculum is rigid and those standardized tests loom large.
Regards,
Kathleen

---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 31 May 2010 01:13:37 +0530
>From: "K. K. Subramaniam" <kksubbu.ml at gmail.com>  
>Subject: Re: [squeakland] Artifacts in ObjectCatalog  
>To: squeakland at squeakland.org
>Cc: kharness at illinois.edu, "Hilaire Fernandes" <hilaire.fernandes at edu.ge.ch>
>
>On Saturday, May 29, 2010 09:15:54 pm kharness at illinois.edu wrote:
>> The teachers are more concerned with following a rigid curriculum that
>> pre-tests, introduces concepts, post-tests, bench-marks, and quarterly
>> assesses. And all of that instruction/assessment is, of course, focused
>> toward the standardized tests given in March. Their curriculum is too
>> large, time is too short, and each concept and skill is given too little
>> time to mature. But, that is a problem for the math establishment and one
>> of the reasons I like Etoys is that it is so much more open ended and so
>> much less prescriptive and so much outside of the whole assessment
>> environment that is consuming education in the US today. 
>These beliefs are widely prevalent in my locality too but I have met a few 
>teachers who refuse to subscribe to these beliefs. They are quite clear that 
>most students can be taught to qualify in sixty days provided they are 
>motivated. So they spend the initial weeks in motivating them and then bring 
>in the curriculum. Board officials don't dare :-) take a performing teacher to 
>task. Questions arise only when students don't make the grade.
>
>In around 110 village public schools in my locality, Etoys is used as a 
>motivator but not integrated into the curriculum (yet!). There are no canned 
>projects illustrating lessons. Teachers reported that kids who used Etoys are 
>easier to teach than other kids. In one cluster, they even had their own mini-
>conference on Etoys [1] where teachers watched student present their projects. 
>Appropriation has been slow but steady.
>
>[1] http://sikshana.blogspot.com/2009/12/students-conference-in-halasuru-
>school.html
>
>Subbu


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