Talk:Educational toolkit

Deepank,

This is a very interesting concept, except why are you focused on tests, when those work at cross-purposes to the collaborative-constructive nature of the XO and the OLPC? When children create and share using the XO, they should be assessed on what they DO - not what they memorize or remember for a multiple choice test.

So maybe the better way to take this is to talk about assessment, not testing - how can we create tools to help teachers assess student learning when they use the XO in their classes.

Respectfully,

Douglas M. Harvey Associate Professor - Richard Stockton College harveyd@stockton.edu

I have been thinking about this idea myself

Actually, I am shocked by how similar this is to the idea I had. Since my main work is on Develop right now, I can't really say I was anywhere near actually doing anything about it, though.

Some differences between your ideas (as I understand them) and mine:

• It is important for the app to keep data for teachers, administrators, and researchers to do formative and summative evaluation. This means, at first, keeping all kinds of data - what is asked and what is responded, when, by whom. Later, tools for browsing and/or anonymizing this data - tools which have defaults that are useful for actual teachers, even at the cost of not being elegantly "turing-complete", that is, beautiful to a programmer - would be useful.

• Worthwhile to be able to "keep problems for later", ie, a teacher can pose a question in class, get quick/short responses at the time, and then say "give me a deeper answer as homework".

• Along with your "demo mode", which is really a totally unrelated tool that is simply also useful in a classroom context, goes the "spy mode" where the teacher pulls a screenshot from a student who appears to be off-task. I know that this will rub the more committed constructivists the wrong way, but as an actual classroom teacher I can attest that the mere existence of this kind of possibilities makes them mostly unnecessary. I would also support this function being visible and preventable by the student (as a teacher, you just have a policy on when "privacy mode" is/is not appropriate).

More comments later.

Homunq 22:46, 24 March 2008 (EDT)