Educators

Welcome

This is the main organizational page for the OLPC educator community. It is a work in progress.

The purpose of this community is to support teachers who are using XOs in their classrooms, and to involve educators of various backgrounds who are interested in contributing to the OLPC project.

Where to Start

Haven't been here before?

• Create an account on the OLPCWiki!
• Add yourself to the educator Roll Call page.
• New to wiki editing? Here's a good tutorial to help you get started.

What should I do first?

• Read about the OLPC Learning Vision, to learn more about why we think children in developing countries need laptops and what we think laptops will enable them to do.
• Learn about our pilot programs-- read our reports from Nigeria and Thailand, visit the OLPC Ceibal blog, and explore the wiki pages created by OLPC Brazil.
• Familiarize yourself with the various Creative Commons licenses, since we want all of the educational material produced for and connected with the project to be free and open source.

And then what?

Join the community

• Add an educator user box to your user page.
• Create an educational organization page for your organization, group, or school.
• Start to Participate.

Contribute content

• Read about the content repository that will reside on the school servers.
• Add to the list of ideas for content that should be included in the repository.
• Contribute your content directly to OLPC by following these instructions.

Create activities

• Read the educational activity guidelines to learn about the features of the XO that pertain directly to educators.
• Contribute to our collection of story-based learning activities.
• Create a new activity, either with an activity template or entirely from scratch.

Projects

Jump right in!

A list of all open education-related tasks is here: Category:Education_Tasks

Open Projects

• Synthesizing info from pilot programs

Expand presence of educators on wiki

• Begin w/ template for educational org user page.
  • Educational organization template.
  • Educator template.
• Ask specific orgs to seed:
  • WikiJunior
  • OERCommons
  • MaMaMedia
  • E3F
  • WikiEducator
  • CK12? (see also cnx, curriki, &c)

To Do

• Draft letter (in progress)
• Send letter

Educational bundle as part of each release

Emphasis on mixed/multi-media format, composed of:

• Activity
• Sample lesson plan(s) for activity
• Example of activity in use, possibly including...
  • Kid's final product (if generative activity) or
  • Page that documents activity in classroom (anecdotes, pix, etc).
• Explanation of theory behind activity.

First one for a July release? (Or practice w/ eToys for late June).

To Do

• Define vision/spec
• Ask educational orgs to contribute

Reactivate educators mailing list

Self explanatory

To Do

• Compile list of open projects
• Draft/send message

Educational activity guidelines

See Educational activity guidelines.

Ideas to incorporate/inspire:

It's important to realize and emphasize that we are looking at inspiring and supporting two types of constructionist learning-- learning

• ... specifically connected to digital learning with activities with XO laptops in user-communities within developing countries around the world.
• ... in these same communities, that is going on in and out of school, with or without the laptop.

Need to find ways to integrate the laptop as much as possible to as many activities as possible, if it makes sense; but also, we are using the fact that we can talk to these teachers about education reform in general in this context.

Become a constructionist educator - an agent of change to think with about new ways of learning and teaching.

To Do

• Expand "Key Design Principles." See: Educational_activity_guidelines#Key_Design_Principles
• Expand feature walk-throughs ("The Laptop Experience") and "Additional Features." See: Educational_activity_guidelines#The_Laptop_Experience and Educational_activity_guidelines#Additional_Features.
• Add links to example activities.

Educator Jam

Cf. Game Jam, but for educators w/ aim of designing activities for Activites.

Discussion begins 6/18.

To Do

• Complete "How to hold a Jam" doc.
• Decide on:
  • Dates?
  • Locations?
  • Agenda?

Meta-indexing for library

How to be able to search existing content repositories?

• XML spec/namespace?
• thing to embed?

To Do

• Write up 6/13 meeting notes

Towards Collaborative Constructionism

Guidelines for establishing collaboration between classes.

See:

• Collaboration guidelines
• Collaboration example
• Collaboration template

To Do

• Integrate into wiki

Project Ideas

Activating educators is a brainstorming space for project ideas and organizational principles.

Guidelines and Tutorials

• Educational activity guidelines
• Collaboration guidelines

Comments and Discussion

Please leave comments on the Educators talk page.