[squeakland] An nice, simple example of Etoys use in primary school

[K. K. Subramaniam]

On Thursday 28 Jul 2011 1:20:12 PM Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
> We have many examples of Etoys use cases in primary schools. However I
> am looking for your advice for what you think the most interesting and
> easy to understand use cases of Etoys in primary schools.  I am looking
> for 1, 2 or 3 examples. The example should be short as well.
Etoys was introduced into 120+ rural primary schools in Kanakapura, a rural 
town 50kms south of Bangalore, in 2007 as an experiment in motivating children 
towards learning. Each school got a desktop, and a laptop that could be 
borrowed by students like a book and even taken home for working on evenings 
and weekends. Students in upper primary (grades 5-7) got a USB "pen drive" 
with Etoys-To-Go for their personal projects. Teachers were told that if the 
two computers were fully utilized (as shown by usage logs), then additional 
computers would be given. Surprisingly, no school has crossed this threshold.

Inspite of the cultural (first exposure to computers) and language barriers ( 
English is hardly used in these villages), this intervention was picked as the 
third most effective one by teachers. Personal uninterrupted 15-20min sessions 
(not groups) on personally chosen topics (vs. curricular topics) gave the best 
results. See http://sikshana.blogspot.com under notebook computing tag for 
details.

About 30% of the children hardly created projects even after one year. This is 
when I learnt that Etoys is not really "accessible" to learners who are not 
yet literate. They may play with it like a toy but get frustrated when it 
comes to authoring projects. Literacy may not be an issue in monolingual 
locales. It is a big issue in these parts. Because the numbers were high, I 
had to push Etoys to back burner while focussing on interventions to narrow 
this gap. 

BTW, the best intervention was a competitive general knowledge quiz with the 
winners going on week long trip, along with a few teachers, to New Delhi 
(India's capital, ~1700kms) by train. The second best intervention was giving 
students as many writing sheets they wanted to practice paragraph writing at 
home from any source (textbook, story books, newspaper) as they liked. Most 
students attain fluency in about three to four months of frenetic practice.

HTH .. Subbu