Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

July 7, 2008

On any given day, school teachers can literally make or break any attempt at educational reform and OLPC (The One Laptop Per Child project) certainly won't be any exception.

For the OLPC project and the XO computer to be truly successful, they will need more help, and more money as well. There are many learning activities on the XO such as E-Toys, Scratch, Measure, etc. But out of the box none of them - with the exception of the MaMedia activities - comes with built-in lesson plans and correlations to country XYZ's national curriculum.

MaMedia has done a great job of integrating lesson plans into their activities, but it's only a beginning. More is needed and soon.

Observers that look at the XO computer can see activity icons but no logical path or a "Next Step" button that you would expect on well-designed software. This is great for discovery but problematic for a teacher trying to include the XO into regular classroom curriculum.

OLE Nepal's development team tried to make this easier by grouping the E-Path activities by subject and by grade. They also added a help icon to each E-Path activity that clearly explains the purpose of the activity and which objectives it satisfies in all national classrooms.

However, all of this still isn't enough and a lot more is needed. Teachers are usually excited when they first see E-Path but then most are daunted by the staggering amount of work of integrating it into the classroom.

Some have looked at building lesson plans and other supplementary materials into various school activities but this has turned out to be more technically challenging than many had initially expected.

Some chose E-Toys as their preferred development platform, because:

It features a graphical development environment

It's fully extensible in Squeak-Smalltalk

It can access the XO's hardware and Sugar's presence service

Some even put in a large amount of work to make Sugar integrate well. Unfortunately, E-Toys aren't the best tools for linking and embedding different types of content such as PDFs, flash animations and even python activities.

On average, lesson plans and supplementary reading materials quickly grow into something much bigger.

For the foreseeable future, creating courses for the XO means stringing together activities written in Python and Flash.

Some just don't see E-Toys or any other programming tool emerging as the standard programming platform for activities on the XO. Since the beginning of Sugar, many have championed Python but it simply lacks a graphical editing environment which makes it far less productive than E-Toys or Flash for designing graphics heavy utilities.

Flash is neither open-source nor can it access the XO hardware but a lot of people know it and a large number of open-source educational software packages use it such as eShiksha.

Source: L.N.S.

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

ADVERTISERS:
Linux News Today.org is read by over 450,000 people involved in the field of Linux application development, professional Web hosting services, Linux security, Linux Web development, etc. Inquire about our reasonable advertising rates on our news website. One of our advertising representatives will be in touch with you. Simply email us to learn about our ad rates and how we can help drive relevant traffic to your website. Advertising space is limited.