Cambridge Friends School: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 17:40, 15 March 2008
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NOTE: The contents of this page are not set in stone, and are subject to change! This page is a draft in active flux ... |
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Status
This proposal is a rough draft right now, intended as a strawman for discussion and revision so we can get a real proposal (and then a program) rolling as fast as possible.
It's not a terribly formal doc. The reason for this is that formal documents are rather dull to write (and read) and we want people to read this, comment, and contribute. We care about the content and how much it makes sense to other people more than we care about presenting this in accordance with some hypothetical protocol. Irreverence may ensue. You have been warned.
Introduction
Disclaimer: Please bear with us. We haven't done this before. Comments, criticisms, feedback, and suggestions for improvement are always tremendously welcome - leave a note on the talk page.
This document is a proposal for an One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) pilot to be run in grades K, 3, 7, and 8 for the 2008-2009 school year at Cambridge Friends School (CFS), a private K-8 school in Massachusetts. The main points of the program (aside from giving each child, teacher, and relevant administrator a low-cost, rugged laptop running open-source educational software, to be owned by them and used as a personal learning tool and information access point, gateway to exploration, and all that) are that it will be:
- Financially and infrastructurally independence - housed and funded from within the school itself (with help from local volunteers and sponsors). See #Budget.
- Cultivating and supporting a local grassroots community around the school that will contribute technology, content, and mentorship to both CFS and the OLPC program at large. See #Local outreach and community involvement.
- Involving parents, especially through their children doing outreach work. See #The parents.
- Having older children serve as technical support and project mentors for other students within the school as well as those outside it. See #Students teaching students.
- Having people of different ages and disciplines from both within the school and around the world together on self-defined, self-designed, self-led projects that have an impact on the world outside the walls of CFS. See #The activities.
How do we plan to do this? Read on.
Contact information
The obligatory blurb about the current draft's author: Mel Chua is an electrical and computer engineer currently working in open-source software development, studying engineering education, and writing in the third person. She has been heavily involved in volunteering for OLPC since Feb. 2007, organizing the first Jam in Boston, running the Summer of Content program, and interning at the OLPC Boston office as part of the Content team despite her hypothetically technical background. Aside from building prosthetic hands, evolutionary robotics simulators, and doing embedded programming for USB peripherals and wireless motion control platforms, Mel has been teaching and developing curriculum for 8 years and has taught and TA'd everything from a math camp on fractals with middle-school students to intro electronics with undergraduate engineering majors. For more details and contact information, read her user page.
Mel is also hoping that some blurbs from other contributors (and other contributions from said contributors) turn up in this section very soon.
About OLPC
Warning: What you are about to see is boilerplate copy-paste designed for formal things like press releases. A far more interesting and up-to-date way of finding out what's going on is reading the OLPC wiki.
One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization created to design, manufacture, and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. The rugged, Linux-based, mesh-networking-enabled, and power-efficient laptops have begun to be deployed to children by schools across the world on the basis of one laptop per child. OLPC is based on constructionist theories of learning pioneered by Seymour Papert and later Alan Kay, as well as the principles expressed in Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital.
About CFS
Warning: What you are about to see has simply been yoinked from CFS's front page. It's probably a good idea for someone to tweak it and point to where more recent updates can be had.
(Paste boilerplate here.)
Proposal
- Give students laptops and get them to explore, for credit, topics they are interested in (and give them time and resources to do this).
- Give teachers laptops and work with them to facilitate and guide, rather than strictly direct, the projects students choose to work on - and a way for them to communicate the experiments they're doing to students, parents, and administrators (it's always a risk to try something new).
- Give parents ways to more directly see what their children are doing inside the classrom, and opportunities to get involved within their field of expertise.
- Give students teaching opportunities to mentor younger students as well as (possibly older!) people outside the CFS community.
- Plan and integrate learning activities into the existing CFS curriculum and into the existing efforts of our partners (work smarter, not harder - leverage existing projects to be more fruitful).
- Reach out to the community around us and beyond us.
- See where things go from there...
The students
The teachers
The parents
Students teaching students
The activities
Local outreach and community involvement
Looking forward: beyond the first year
Schedule
Spring 2008: Community development
Summer 2008: Setup and training
Fall 2008: Launch and initial activities
Spring 2009: Outreach and giving back
Equipment needed
XO laptops
Note: I'm making up these numbers - folks from CFS, do you have more accurate counts on how many of these you'll need?
- 1 laptop per child in participating classrooms (~15 students x 4 classrooms = 60 laptops)
- 1 laptop per teacher in participating classrooms (4 laptops)
- 1 laptop each for supporting teachers and administrators... (5 laptops)
- music teacher
- science teacher
- math teacher
- art teacher
- technology coordinator
- 5 extra laptops for emergency repairs, community events, and short-term loans to external volunteers
Total: 74 laptops
Power adapters
Power adapters use the normal 120VAC from wall outlets, which are readily available throughout the CFS campus. We'll need to get some power strips and extension cords for children to all be able to plug in at once, but these are easily obtained from local hardware stores at affordable prices.
Wifi network
The CFS campus already has wireless internet access. Whether the coverage and bandwidth are sufficient for an XO pilot needs more investigation. This may necessitate the purchase of an extra wireless router or two, but they are easily obtained from local computer stores at not unreasonably exorbitant prices.
School server
The XS school server will not be an initial vital component of the CFS pilot in terms of having a standalone desktop/server in every participating classroom running the official XS software release. (It's possible that this could be a local grassroots group project; a team of volunteer Boston-area developers are already implementing an XS server in their spare time.)
However, there will be a storage repository of some sort specifically dedicated to backing up the CFS XOs (this could easily be done with a single desktop on campus with several large hard drives in a RAID array, or with off-site hosting) as well as an "external portfolio" website where students and teachers can upload and host their work. When possible, students and their collaborators will host their work in existing knowledge communities such as Curriki, WikiEducator, Wikipedia, Launchpad, and so on in order to make their contributions immediately part of a global collaboration and a larger body of knowledge.