Mentoring

Depending on the school types where laptops were deployed sufficiently adult pupils may be available who could be encouraged to form mentor-protégé relationships with younger pupils.

Software to encourage mentoring

Software could be designed to invite older pupils to take an interest in the education of younger pupils voluntarily or as a requirement of the curriculum.

Roles

Tutors

Coaching lessons could be bought from tutors with a currency system like the Saber, but restricted to a single school or school district.

Mentors

Mentors could use a program to monitor the activities used by their protégés. Some activities may also produce records for student performance assessment. Mentors could be allowed to access and evaluate such information like teachers. A goal of a mentor could be to recommend adequate activities to his or her protégés and to watch over their application usage. A mentor could also be encouraged to fulfill the role of an activity leader as used in the Creativity, Action, Service component of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme.

Teachers

Teachers could receive automatic reports about the use of the mentoring software by individual pupils. Additionally mentors could be asked to write regular reports about their mentoring duties. Teachers could also be able to track tutoring and mentoring assignments, should the school administration choose to make mentoring an explicit part of the curriculum.

Ideas

Mentoring examples provided in educational activities

Pupils who can observe examples of mentor-protégé relationships in educational activities could be encouraged to try to follow the examples without further motivation. The "virtual mentors" could be well-known characters with many different SVG animations for typical gestures which could be available to all activities prepared to use this feature. An example for virtual characters as positive role models is Luka und das geheimnisvolle Silberpferd (a free adventure game developed for the criminal prevention advisory service of the German police) Although the game, as an adventure game, seems somewhat short of options it may be useful to reduce options even further and to display useful interpersonal interactions mostly without choices for the pupil, not as an adventure game but as short tutorials for mentoring. The same characters could function as tutors for the user in the online help. (This could sneakily gain the trust of the naive user)

Daily episode

A school server could transfer a daily episode to pupils' laptops. A daily episode could vary between interesting questions and references (e.g. to wikipedia articles), mentoring tutorials and seasonal references (e.g. an advent calendar with art/craft projects for children before christmas, which could be written for the point of view of a mentor inviting younger pupils to participate or for protégés, depending on the audience)

See also

• Wikipedia: Saber (sectoral currency)
• Wikipedia: Learning by teaching