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.

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 utilized during the Jamii OLPC deployment with Matemwe School.

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:

1. Learning and high-quality education for all is essential to provide a fair, equitable, economically and socially viable society;
2. Access to mobile laptops on a sufficient scale provide real benefits for learning and dramatic improvement of education on a national scale;
3. 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

1. existing Tanzanian curriculum
2. creative uses for XO activities
3. target age groups (7-12 yrs) please specify target age for each project

Tanzania/Zanzibar Government 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 the 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.