Talk:Educational activity guidelines

Teacher interaction with student work

There needs to be some documentation of the model(s) for teacher-student interaction. Let me pose various scenarios, and do my best to answer them from my understanding. Anybody who can help improve my answers is welcome to. Homunq 13:12, 29 July 2007 (EDT)

• A lecture-type scenario where there is material available to the students in a more-or-less guided fashion but some effort is being made to keep the class "on the same page"

Here, there would be some sort of browser / powerpoint activity running on the teacher's machine, with all the students "participating" in the activity. The teacher could be in the app itself, or they could use the neighborhood view or the right-sidebar (with the icons of the participating students) to check that students were "on task". (Thoughts: should there be a way to keep the right sidebar from hiding? I can imagine other high-collaboration situations where this would be nice.)

(I realize that this scenario assumes some level of teacher authority that may not be desirable from a radical constructivist point of view. But you can't force constructivism down the teacher's throats any more than you can force the kids - either side could doom you.)

• A classroom-type situation where the students are working, individually or in groups.

The teacher wanders the classroom and "participates" with each student in turn. This is where the design of Sugar is focused, so the mechanisms are obvious and intuitive.

(Note that the above two scenarios are at least theoretically possible without the class being physically together)

• Teacher evaluating student work without real-time interaction.

Students use some process to "hand in" process. Reading the interface design docs, I can't quite figure out how that should work. If they kept an activity open, the teacher could participate, but there are obvious problems with guaranteeing connectivity. A "hand in" activity would fundamentally conflict with the Bitfrost paradigm - it would need both "browse" and "network" permissions.

In fact, file sharing (as opposed to activity sharing in real time) in general is not obviously covered, or at least I didn't catch it. It would make sense for users to be able to grant read-only or read-write access to their files to others, even if the author doesn't have the file open. The logical place from which to do this would be the journal. Another obvious need is the "save a local copy"/"fork" command, so that you can get and markup your own copy of someone's document.

• Teacher evaluating/supporting student PROCESS without real-time interaction

Is there some simple yet secure way for the students to give the teacher limited access to their journals, to enable the teacher to give them evaluation / support not just on products but on process? This is especially useful for the younger kids, who may not be up to reliably doing some extra, complicated "turn in" process.