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

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Douglas,

Thanks for your feedback. I accept your view point about the need for the collaborative and constructive nature of the XO. This is one of the main reasons for having a demo mode in the toolkit. This will help in facilitating classroom discussion. Please do not misinterpret the toolkit as just being a tool for handing out monotonous objective type questions to the children. Rather, the toolkit is aimed at helping classroom discussion, helping children learn and apply their concepts with flash cards and create and test knowledge using interactive and digital question papers.

I am eager to hear more ideas regarding the assessment tools mentioned in your response.

Thanks,

Deepank

This is well put. How can this become a tru educational toolkit, and not simply a quiz generator? More detailed use cases are needed. --Sj talk 16:11, 7 April 2008 (EDT)

I will be putting up the use-cases document on the wiki shortly. Deepank

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)

This is great and I will invite you to collaborate on this project when you get time off from "Develop". The ResultViewer Module will be helpful in achieving the first feature. The second feature will be implemented later with a global web-service for teachers all around the world. I do not believe the Demo mode is a totally unrelated tool, since, it helps in classroom discussion and is very similar to implement as the other mode. Currently I do not have any plans to implement a spy mode but will be very happy to discuss the idea further with you. Thanks and looking forward to hear from you,

Deepank