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@gmail.com Subject: Re: [squeakland] Artifacts in ObjectCatalog To: squeakland@squeakland.org Cc: kharness@illinois.edu, "Hilaire Fernandes" hilaire.fernandes@edu.ge.ch
On Saturday, May 29, 2010 09:15:54 pm kharness@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
On Monday, May 31, 2010 11:42:49 pm kharness@illinois.edu wrote:
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?
They start with painting simple figures while practising their WIMP skills. Simple figures are then composed leading to beautiful patterns exploring symmetry and colors. We still don't have support for native language (Kannada) so titles and labels are typeset using LaTeX. After about a year of work, interest turns to animations involving revolving objects like moon and earth, eclipses, spinning wheels etc. Others use linear movements like football, driving car etc.
Back home, where English is not a barrier, I have seen my daughter create projects like a MS-paint like program, basketball games, pac-man type games, animated greeting cards etc. An interesting innovation was the use of whistle tones to control variables. I wished my mobile used whistles instead of voice recognition for activation ;-). No worries about ambient noise or accents.
I have not posted the projects because the aim of our intervention is different from regular deployments. We introduced Etoys in schools to stimulate the lower quintile performers to think and express freely and to aspire for higher goals. Etoys is not used for teaching lessons and projects are not assessed. Learning happens while "doing" and we use projects only as an evidence of such efforts. Students become more inquisitive, expand their reading habits and open up to a wider world. Once they get energised and become receptive to learning, the task of engaging their attention towards meeting curricular demands becomes easier for the teacher.
Subbu
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