OLPCorps Jamii OLPC Tanzania/Curriculum Talk
Jamii OLPC Curriculum Talk Page
This page is primarily for the use of Jamii OLPC's Pedagogical Advisory Unit.
Prior to the Jamii OLPC deployment, the Pedagogical Advisory Unit will work with the International and Matemwe Pedagogical Leads to develop an Educator’s Package of flexible curricula and introductory projects to be utilized by Matemwe School.
As an international, multi-disciplinary team, members of this unit are not physically in the same place. So, this Talk Page is will be the primary method of sharing information and resources, as well as discussing and developing curriculum/project ideas to be included in the Educator's Package.
Please feel free to take a look around but, if you are not a member of the Advisory Unit, we ask that you please post any comments to this section's Open Discussion Page.
OLPC Learning Vision
OLPC is predicated upon three basic premises:
- Learning and high-quality education for all is essential to provide a fair, equitable, economically and socially viable society;
- Access to mobile laptops on a sufficient scale provide real benefits for learning and dramatic improvement of education on a national scale;
- So long as computers remain unnecessarily expensive such potential gains remain a privilege for a select few.
By providing our most powerful tool for knowledge creation, development, and discovery to children and their teachers with sufficient time and support to enable fluency, and development, and by providing high-bandwidth connectivity to enable the development of knowledge communities, we now have the means to address seemingly intractable and critically important educational issues. more
OLPC Learning Resources
- OLPC's Learning Vision
- Constructionism: the philosophy of education OLPC is based on
- Educational Activity Guidelines: an extensive review of the XO features that pertain directly to educators
- Learning Activities Database: a collection of a variety of learning activities, both previously implemented and in progress; a good place to get inspired!
For additional resources, also see: Educators wiki page; Education Portal; XO Teachers Page; OLPCorps Learning Page
Also, OLPCorps is planning to conduct a Online Seminar on Learning sometime in late March/early April for everyone involved in OLPCorps Africa. I (Sam) will keep you guys posted :)
Things to Consider
- existing Tanzanian curriculum
let's first focus on the core subjects least impacted by language/cultural challenges (ie. math, science)? - creative uses for XO activities
- target age groups (7-12 yrs) please specify target age for each project
Zanzibar Government School Curriculum
Matemwe is a government school, and as such Jamii OLPC will be working with the government curriculum. This section will contain relevant notes regarding aspects of the existing curriculum that could affect, may add to or benefit from, and should be considered when developing XO-related projects.
English
Swahili is the main language used in Matemwe School. The school begins at Standard 1 (7yrs) and students start studying English in Standard 2 (8 yrs). Freddie Boswell (Local Unit; International Communications) says, "I find that their mode of studying focuses on reading and writing more than speaking, so many students are very shy to speak English at all."
There are around 8 English teachers at Matemwe School.
Curriculum Ideas
English
Maybe incorporate the Speak activity (which is basically a speech synthesizer) in early English classes (ie. 8-9yrs), to get the kids talking more? What kind of activities could we use this for?
Project Ideas
SongChild
Two of the members of our Pedagogical Advisory Unit, Jason Nolan and Danny Bakan, are the Project Leaders of SongChild.
The concept of SongChild is "to develop and maintain an on-line community of users, who will work together to write and share kids songs. The mandate of the site is to foster an Open License Music Project, in which users will work together to build upon and create public domain material. This musical repertoire of public domain kid's songs will be available to share and with children everywhere."
Can we incorporate this into Jamii OLPC somehow?
Ninakaa Hapa
"Ninakaa hapa" ("I live here" in Swahili) is just the very beginnings of an idea for an introductory project geared toward older students (~10-12). Using the Record activity, students would make a short audiovisual collage/story about where they live. It would be great to eventually expand a project like this into an exploration of social issues that impact their lives, and ultimately the development of potential ways of addressing these issues.
