Create Collaborate Learn
The Create. Collaborate. Learn Concept was a brain child of my insomnia. It all started about a week or so after I attended barcampsaskatoon2007 where I attended a session on active learning. Active learning is a basic ideology that learning can be placed in the hands of the student, to use his or her own imagination to create an idea on a subject or topic. Mixed with the guidance of a teacher this can be a powerful learning experience. Most educational institutes often do not follow this educational practice. Often they will use lectures and other teaching methods. This often can be affective but also leaves huge educational holes in a students creative development. My idea was to take the ideals of the active learning model and apply them to a mass scale where active learning lesson plans could be taken to the masses, where students and teachers could implement them in their very own class rooms. At this point I realized this would have a huge impact on education all over the world. This then made me think of the OLPC project. I have been thinking about getting involved in this project for awhile but did not know where I would be useful. So I figured I would throw my concept out there and see if I got any feedback or support. I wanted to come up with a way for teachers to communicate on a global scale, so they could share lesson plans and teaching methods and other useful information that would be of benefit to the global community and the minds of our children. This is what i came up with.
Create:
Create a community driven website based around the creation of content (lesson plans, tests). This website would be ran by teachers across the world. The web page would give the teacher the ability to create a lesson plan and then post it to the site. This lesson plan could contain text, images, flash or java based games and quiz's. Etc. Once a lesson plan was posted it could then be downloaded by a teacher and then hosted on the schools website. Each teacher would be given access to install modules on their schools server. When a teacher decided to download a lesson plan the site would generate a .rpm package and then forward it to the schools server, this would unpack and then the teacher would have the ability to let her student access it. All of these modules will have rss feeds that communicate to each other.
Collaborate:
All participating parties will have the ability to communicate. Each teacher will have the ability to see the effectiveness of each lesson plan on the community site. This will be accomplished threw student polling. At the end of each lesson plan on the site the student will have the ability to submit feedback on why or why not they didn't like the lesson plan. This feedback along with what the student marked to their answers for lesson plans would then be submitted to the teacher. When projects are due the teacher would press "grab" and the students answers and feedback would be synced from the students computers to the school servers. Once on the servers the teacher could then grade written answers, see what the student got wrong on multiple choice questions and what feedback they had about what they had just learned. The teacher could then submit a virtual report card and archive the final grades for reporting on later dates. Nightly the school server would submit their student activity to the community. Not all information would be sent but general stats on the lessons would be collected. How well the students did, how hard they found it and what they though of the class would be the focus of doing this. Once this information was collected the community could look at the data collected and give them the ability to change and modify their plans. Changes could be shown as revisions and sub revisions. This would give the community the chance to grow and thrive off each other daily. Within each module on the community site teachers could talk about the lessons and work together on them, changing questions and answers, etc.
Learn:
This would give people the ability to see what teaching methods worked, what methods did not and give the community as a whole the ability to change for the better. Students would greatly benefit from this too.
How to do this:
Someone will neat to create a Content Management System that gives its users the ability to create lessons. The Management System must have the ability to add multiple choice questions and or a space where written question could be answered by the student. The written question then must have the ability to be graded. 1 to 10 and/or so on. When a lesson plan is created it's code will be assigned to that teacher on the community site. When the lesson plan is made another teacher then can download it to the school servers. The teachers at that point can change or modify questions and assign grade values to questions. These servers would be running a pre-configured web server that could easily be updated at teachers request. Probably Fedora. Lessons could be downloaded as rpm's and installed using the server software. Teachers could download the selected rpm to their desktop and then enter the schools back end which teachers only have log-ins for. They could click install lesson plan then pick the rpm they would like to install. Once installed the teacher could mark the assignment as hidden until she would like to share it with the class. When she is ready she can click send to chalkboard. Once that has been done students can approach a virtual chalkboard within the X0 Environment or threw a web browser. At that point the lesson plan could be downloaded to the students XO or assigned to a student log-in on the school web server. Each student would have its own rss feed assigned to it so a teacher could see a child's progression on an assignment and be able to see it as soon as it is completed. Once it was done the information would be saved to the schools server for the teacher to grade, and read feedback. Nightly or weekly the school servers would submit feedback and information on lesson plans back to the site. The community could then see its effectiveness and modify it to make it better for the students. Then save revisions under their own user profiles.
Making it happen:
Once the coding aspect of it was done (creation of the site and creation of API's which give other sites the ability to embed content into lessons. [Flash, java, etc] ) there would need to be a large campaign where flyer's, posters and pamphlets were sent out to every school and educational committee in North America and in other Developed nations. These pamphlets would discuss what the project is about and how it would benefit them. and how it would benefit the OLPC mission. It's would also contain a quick crash course on how the use the site. Getting the message out will help greatly. Say if 1 teacher from every school submits a lesson. and you contact 10,000 schools that's 10,000 Lessons created Which is more then enough to get the ball rolling for education. Even if promoting costs 1 dollar a package this is still a very small price to pay for content.
Who:
My name is Nathan Koch and this was just a rough draft of an idea I have been having for awhile now. Please feel free to contact me by email at bleedapathy@gmail.com . I would love any feedback on this idea.