User talk:Gregorio

My list of places where student and educator input results in new software being developed for the XO or XS.

Places where developers collect and analyze incoming requests

Roadmap: http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap

Its based on a bug tracking system. All items appear to be related to deploying the XO and addressing critical bugs which interfer with core functionality. Mostly Wireless and booting issues. One note on activities and library is listed. Need to find links to that software/ideas.

User experience, input, ideas and blogs

OLPC Report on XO Roll Out in Arahuay

Talk Main Page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Main_Page This page is for discussion of the Main OLPC Page. Its achrived every month and it appears that all input so far is coming people commenting on rather than using the XO.

Ask OLPC a Question: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question Long list of incoming questions. Lots of sub links to questions asked and some answered. I'll extract and categroize relevant links soon. Mostly questions from people wanting to help the project or get a laptop.

Blogs and user pages outside OLPC Wiki

Chile Un Computador Por Nino page

Ceibal Blog

New eToys software from Nepal!

Places which document the praxis of software development on the XO

The overall Interface Guidelines page covers some of this:

OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines

An In Depth Look at School System Goals in Uruguay

First major XO roll out in Uruguay Ceibal Blog

Report on Education in Uruguay by Government Ministry Report on Education In Uruguay In General

First questions from kids in Uruguay El más solicitado, la pregunta más oída fue: “Señor, señor, ¿cómo hago para poner música?” My rough translation: The most asked questions was "Mr. Mr, how do I play music?"

La segunda: “Señor, señor ¿me enseñás a sacar las fotos?” My rough translation: Second, Mr. Mr. teach me hlow to take pictures?"

La tercera: “¿dónde están los juegos?” Y la cuarta: “¿cómo hago para escribir?” My rough translation: The third, where are the games and the fourth: how do I use it to write?

From Ceibal blog at: Entregando laptops del Plan Ceibal

Ethiopia Roll Out Plan

http://wiki.laptop.org/images/2/23/Ethiopia_ecbp_Pilot_Project_CONCEPT_v0.5.pdf http://wiki.laptop.org/images/9/97/Ethiopia_ecbp_Pilot_Project_IMPLEMENTATION_v0.5.pdf

Comments and Suggestions on How To Teach Caring For Your Senses

Some ideas on education with the XO liberally construed from a single image taken in Peru.

I originally wrote this as a follow up to my post on OLPC News: http://www.olpcnews.com/software/applications/xo_application_development_process.html

My time has since been taken up by interacting with Uruguay team (see below) and helping Nepal get an XS Server up and running.

My challenge, add your input and ideas below....

Its time to revisit my idea of how to make early XO deployments successful with an interactive development model. I am still on step 1, gathering input and creating a dialog between users and developers. The dialog part has been especially challenging. That's probably a good thing as we don't want the XO users to be deluged with questions and distractions from the vast world of XO commentators. That said, its amazing how many forums, blogs, wikis and web sites have sprung up with G1G1 users posting at a torrid pace. In comparison, the similar number of XOs distributed in the developing world have left nary a ripple of requests on the web..

What do people think about why we don't see requirements or feature requests from XO users in the developing world? One possibility could be time and experience as suggested in the essay, "Models of Growth" http://www.laptop.org/Models_of_Growth.pdf: It refers to one project where "there was a limited use of the online environment ... Primarily it was not in the school culture to spend time on-line. teachers' time is more than full accounted for already. They have virtually no extra time for seeking answers to their questions, for edification, for curiosity, for improvement."

We need to deal with that by ensuring we only engage in meaningful and constructive dialog which leads to real results. Protecting the privacy and time/bandwidth of teachers and students is paramount. Nonetheless, we should look for a safe intermediary or process that allows kids and teachers to talk about what they want to do with their XOs. Then hopefully we can mobilize large groups of resources to respond. We may need an asynchonous and uneven process. For example, a teacher in Peru only has 5 minutes to comment on what software they need. In return their collaborators need to spend 5 days researching options and proposals. Then the suggestions need to be presented back in way that only takes 5 minutes to evaluate. That's my guess but we need to engage that dialog to see how it works on real projects.

In order to start a dialog it helps to show that you have something useful to offer. That is a reason for others to want to engage you.

So I have come up with a project that I think would be valuable and which we can start on without needing any further input.

Carla Gomez Monroy posted a super report on the roll out of XOs in Arahuay, Peru: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Peru/Arahuay In it there is a picture of a beautiful learning tool created by one of the teachers for her students: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:024_Arahuay.JPG

My rough translation is: Care that we must take for our senses
- Go to the eye doctor
- Don't sit too close to the television
- Don't put anything in your eye
- wash your hands
- don't touch hot things
- don't put wet hands in a power socket
and one I can't read

This teaches students about the senses of touch and sight and it teaches kids how to protect those senses.

This brings to light three challenges:
1 - How would you teach this with the XO and could you design software that teaches it as well or better?
2 - How would a teacher use the XO to create this kind of learning material for other lessons? Could they do it a more quickly and with better results than drawing it by hand?
3 - Is there an activity available that would preserve or even enhance this teachers superb sense of creativity and design?

That's taking a lot from one simple picture. Still, if we can address those challenges we can create a set of tools that implements a broad range of educational goals. The good thing is that its a real lesson that a real teacher wants to teach her kids. I don't know if its what the kids want to learn but it does seem like important life knowledge. This is targeted at first and second graders, ages 6 - 8. Its almost a trivial example but it may be harder to teach ths with the XO than it looks...

I envision four stages of this development:
1 - A tool and template that let's teachers pull down images from a collection (google?) and place them on a background. Then let's them add lines and text to create essentially the same thing you see on the page.

2 - A way to share that creation with the kids (web page?)

3 - A concept of interactivity which allows construction and agency on the part of the kids. Something that the kids can create themselves and that allows them to go beyond the primary message to explore the ideas further. e.g. what if the kids wanted to learn why wet hands are more dangerous with electricity than dry hands or why sitting too close the TV is bad for your eyes? What if the kids learned something more and wanted to add it back to extend the lesson or wanted to add more safety lesson? What if they want to virutally see what happens when they violate one of these rules? What would it take to make this lesson interesting to the kids (e.g. make it a game or let them make it their own)?

4 - How would you make it faster to create this on the XO than to draw it by hand? Could you do it without diluting the chance for creativity?

I think we can knock off the first two pretty quickly. The second two look much harder. I'm not an educator though I pretend to be one at home with my kids :-)

The high level goals of this software development in priority order are:
- Make an XO tool that is useful for teachers and saves them time in creating lessons.
- Make an XO tool that creates lessons which are more interesting and creates more effective learning for 6 - 8 year olds.
- Empower teachers and students to create their own lessons and learning tools using the XO