posted Aug 30, 2010 2:39 PM by Jose I. Icaza
posted May 12, 2010 4:59 AM by Jose I. Icaza
... is sometimes applied to children that grow up. But in technology and other endeavors we have many kinds of children -most notably computer programs that start life with many limitations (call them bugs if you wish...) and end up ready to confront the wide world by themselves; or to certain kinds of projects close to our hearts.
TecnoTzotzil has been one of those projects. For the children, the community instructors and ourselves the researchers (listed in order of importance...), it has been so far an incredible experience, and we want to make sure that the project keeps growing and is able to sustain itself when we go...
To this end we have been careful to train not only the instructors but also the instructors' tutors and one assistant to the academic director of the schools' zone at San Cristobal and even that boss herself.
But here we must come to terms with CONAFE's policies, that apparently encourage a lot of personnel rotation. Instructors stay with their kids one or two years only, in exchange of a two year or four year College scholarship respectively. The computers will stay at the school, but they may later be managed by an instructor that has not been trained in pedagogy with thechnology -it'll be the kid's task to train their teacher... Tutors may also get assigned to a different school. Raymundo, the academic assistant, ends his CONAFE term also. And Carlos, our star instructor, has decided to stay just one school year, so he goes also. Only the academic director remains with knowledge of the technology, and she didn't stay for the full training course :(
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On our next-to-last visit, we met some ugly technology problems. Readers of this blog with technology experience may be surprised that we have not mentioned any problems with the technology... Actually both the Classmate machines and the Sugar Leanring Platform have turned out to be very reliable. But we have had a nasty problem with the SD cards where Sugar resides. On each visit, typically one or two cards in each school wouldn't boot, and on this visit there were 5 cards wrong at Naxoch and another 5 at Tilil. So we spent most of those visits subsituting or repairing cards. Recently the problem has been solved, and it turned out to be not the cards' fault but a nasty software bug regarding the encoding of Sugar within the 2GB cards.
At Naxoch, instructor Carlos was making his first steps with the Logo Turtle, by having the little screen critter do same... As usual, his very directive style just made the kids repeat what he was doing; we hope later on he will give greater degrees of freedom to the children. We left him a tutorial video on Turlte Art.
At Tilil the kids were learning to do tables with the Sugar equivalent of Word. They were preparing their weekly schedule. We notticed that, unlike Carlos, the instructors at Tilil speak to their kids only in Tzotzil language. So when we showed the instructors the Turtle Art tutorial in Spanish, they mentioned that the children would not be able to understand it, but that it will be useful to the instructors themselves.
Comming back to letting go... at Tilil fortunately both Marcela and Maria plan to stay for another year. At least for these 15 kids, they will have another school year with trained instructors and computers. Then when they finish primary school, their poor parents will be unable to buy one. At least it'll be a two year experience that they will not forget; for some of the brightest kids, it may perhaps provide a window for a better future. |
posted Feb 15, 2010 2:55 PM by Jose I. Icaza
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updated Feb 24, 2010 4:12 PM
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That certailnly applies to us, as we always arrive to the community classrooms with eyes wide open, and have refrained taking the role of experts specifying what to do. Therefore instructors and kids always have some nice surprise about their achievements.
And it should also be something to be engraved in every teacher's desk: " plan to be surprised by the creativity of your kids" -(otherwise if your class or exams are so rigid that everything the children do is as expected, you may end up with perfect clones, not diverse human beings ready to improve their world... and also discourage those kids that think like Einstein...)
That is a personal reflection brought about by comparing two very different classrooms and teaching styles: both effective, both using technology to improve learning, yet one of the two more... alive?
At Naxoch instructor Carlos uses his Classmate netbook to develop very detailed class plans, every day, down to what he will explain at each of 5 time periods, what questions to ask, what answers are expected... Three times per week after the mid-day break, kids bring out their computers and Carlos uses the machines to reinforce in some way whatever was learned before.
We arrive before the break and find Carlos explaining something about Spanish grammar. Later the children go out to practice marching with the Mexican Flag, as there will be a competition about that among CONAFE schools. Carlos uses his computer to record the kids in video, then shows the video to the children and back to marching again to correct mistakes. At the break we obserce that many kids go into the classroom by their own initiative rather than remaining outside. They take out their netbooks and start using some of the Sugar learning activities. We are surprissed by the facility kids now have with the computers; they all use the touchpad with perfect precission and have improved considerably in typing speed. Class starts again and Carlos uses the computers to reinforce Spanish grammar; he writes something on the blackboard, kids type it and then must underline or put in different colors the different parts of the paragraphs or phrases. Everything, just a expected... We must stress, however, that Carlos has also done some very creativity activities other times, such as having the kids write a poem collaboratively.
After class in the afternoon, we take Carlos to the other school at Tilil, so that he can interchange experiences with instructors Marcela and Maria there. We find the girls much more outspoken that the last time we did this experience interchange. They speak first, and describe a learning activity that they have been doing recently: they divide the kids into teams, and then have the kids decide about characters and plot in a short story of their own. Then they record their story orally into one of their computers, with each child taking the role of one of the characters. Finally they present their story to the rest of the class. This is great: these girls are giving the children much room for creativity. Carlos pays close attention. Then he shares with the girls what he has been doing with the Turtle Art activity. He says he has found this activity difficult for the children. This is unfortunate because the Turtle is a very important Constructionist activity. We ask some questions about the difficulties and make some suggestions.
The following day part of our group including Carlos returns to Tilil to observe class, and the other part goes to Paytajil with Raymundo, the CONAFE guy taking care of this later community. At Tilil Marcela and Maria describe a physics experiment to the children (static electricity) then have the teams repeat the experiment, photograph it with their netbooks, then write out a report that includes the photo and a written description of the experiment. The kids again are free to describe what they did in any way they want. Carlos has not attempted much team work, other than collaborative writing of a report or poem by all his 11 children sharing the same screen -something the ladies have not attempted yet. So we think instructors of both schools are learning from each other.
At the third school, Paytajil, we find that there is unfortunately yet another new instructor; the children have had four so far!. Further there are some disgreements between the parents committee and CONAFE authorities and they want to speak with CONAFE people before this program can continue. We hope it does.
Our student programming team has been working on Sugar Manuals in Spanish, new or adapted software activities, and system software. Lately they have finished programming a very useful Sugar Journal Analysis System that will help the three master's in education students to analyze anonymized versions of the kids' electronic portfolios that are backed up every day to the classroom server using software also developed by the programming team. The system allows to list and compare one or more journals from one or more communities, filter by learning activities and make graphs. This system has been shared with the Sugar Labs worldwide community. One of the graduate students (Alejandra) will write her disertation about impact of tecnology in the development of cognitive abilities; another (Ramiro) about the role and development of the community instructors; and the third one (Ramon) about hardware and software description, issues and solutions. Besides the portfolio analysis, they will also have access to viedotaped interviews and class observation records.
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posted Dec 20, 2009 10:39 AM by Jose I. Icaza
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updated Dec 26, 2009 6:26 AM
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Hi - this reports on our fourth visit to the Chiapas communities, 2nd trough 4th of December.
The weather was nice at San Cristobal this time, and actually we learn that back in November the very cold weather we experienced was an exception. The beautiful colonial city is full of tourists wandering through the narrow streets. At the Plaza women and little girls -never boys- carry embroidered textiles on their hands and backs to sell to tourists. A marimba is playing in the kiosk...
At Naxoch we find instructor Carlos teaching the kids about Poems as part of the Spanish lesson. He asks the children to produce pairs of rhyming words and to write them down on their computers. They take time getting the idea but after some prompting start to generate some pairs, which come out mixed up in Spanish and Tzotzil... Later on we ask Carlos what he intends to do for the next Spanish lesson, due the following day. We are glad to hear that he plans to ask Children to develop a Poem by themselves, all of them writing on the same shared screen, one line at a time.
A Sugar software activity that has not been tried on yet here is Turtle Art. This is a very important Constructionist activity - a sort of graphical Logo where the programs are built assembling together blocks on the screen. So after class we spend one hour and a half having Carlos learn Turtle language. He grasps it quite quickly and is soon making the turtle produce geometric figures and a number line. He promises to try it on with the kids the following week.
Things have improved also at Tilil. We find instructors Maria and Marcela with much greater control of the classroom. Control is a difficult issue to handle in classrooms -too little may lead to anarchy, and too much might mean that kids do not have enough leg room to take their own paths or express their creativity.
Here the instructors are teaching kids all the menus and tools of the Paint program. Some children race ahead of the explanations and proceed to learn the tools on their own by trial and error. Later Maria asks them to reproduce a paysage that she has painted the night before. There is not enough time left to finish it but we notice that some children have decided to make the sky darker and have put some stars on it. For the next lesson, the instructors plan to ask the children to paint something related to what they are learning without specifying exactly what. That's perhaps a good balance between control and freedom; Carlos on the other hand might be using too much control, as he always has his children carefully aligned to the fixed sequence he has planed.
The bad news come from Paytajil. This is the community that will be attended by Raymundo of CONAFE, as a test of our "train the trainers" approach. So Raymundo went there alone this time, and later on reports that Hector -one bright instructor he trained last time with our supervision- has had to renounce his post recently due to some family situation. The other instructor of the same classroom did not come that day, so Ray found the children without a teacher. He proceeded to take out the computers and have the children try them on, with great engagement and joy on the part of the kids. That second instructor will also be replaced, so next semester it will be back to square zero for Paytajil.
But some other good news include that we have started to share our materials with the large Spanish community of 770,000 Sugar users. They use Sugar mostly as part of MIT's One Laptop Per Child program. Our Sugar Manual in Spanish for kids has been downloaded about 1200 times, and we just added to our site a page with links to 18 lesson plans and some software that we have developed, all under Creative Commons or GNU licences.
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It's end of the year and perhaps a good time to take stock. Things have advanced more slowly that we anticipated, both on the use of the technology and of the Constructionist and participative learning pedagogies; nevertheless, by now instructors are using the technology frequently to support learning, are well motivated to keep improving, and they report in interviews that the children are highly enthusiastic as well. We will keep visiting the communities next term and try to gather and analyze as much data as possible for our final report. |
posted Nov 19, 2009 5:21 PM by Jose I. Icaza
Education involves interpersonal relationships, and in every such situation problems and solutions are unique to particular circumstances. We are re-learning that no single pedagogical model can fit all kinds of schools, or of teachers, or of kids. Every group is unique.
This entry reports on our third visit during school time to the Tilil and Naxoch (pronounced nashosh) communities, and our first visit to Paytajil, the community in which CONAFE will implement the technology with our supervision. It was difficult to arrange for these visits because fhe first two communities take vacations during the whole week of November 2-6 for the "All Saints" festivities; and before that the instructors went to the city for a development course, and then they had exams.
At the Tilil school, it was very cold (about 8 degrees C) and a tiny and persistent mist made it feel like 4C. Only six grade 3-4 kids came to school, and four from grades 5-6 out of 15 total. Children have to walk 15 to 20 minutes among mountain valleys to get to their school and parents are afraid they might catch influenza, so they keep them at home. The ones that came were not dressed up enough for this kind of weather --there were even a couple of girls with no shoes. At midday, they invited us to a cup of coffee and then turned on central heating on the classroom - a brasero with flaming coal.
After we fixed up a couple of laptops that had presented a technical glitch and installed a journal backup system, instructors Marcela and Maria started their class with the machines. They asked the kids to write a letter using the Write activity of Sugar. The title and format of the letter was written down on the blackboard - from: Child's name to: mom date: and so on –a sort of memo... The younger pupils still do not read Spanish well enough so they merely hunted down for each letter one by one on their keyboard. A little girl kept keys presssssssssssed =) Then she hit backbackback...space and it was all gone... We forget how difficult it is to learn to type for people that have never seen a keyboard before. The instructors went around helping the kids, and then put the children in small groups so that the older ones could help the youngest. Then one of the older kids springed up all enthusiastic from his seat and came to me:
-Can I send the letter to him? (he had taken the initiative of writing a letter to his friend across the room and noticed the “send to” function on his Journal entry)-You mean to his computer? -Yes! -Sure!
So I showed him how to send documents over the mesh network, a very simple operation on Sugar, something that they had not done before. His friend was delighted. Soon other children noticed and also sent their letters around and the instructors learned how to do it...
Talking with some of the kids later, we learned that they have mainly used so far the Write and Calculate activities, and that they enjoy working with the computers. Instructors confirm this. We notice that they have better control of the classroom. Maria tells us about a learning activity that she invented using the StoryBuilding activity of Sugar. In this activity children can choose a background image and then select and move characters around as they write a story using the characters. They had learned about some animals in class so the kids had to pick the jungle background and then choose and identify animals, and mention in their story which can be eaten and how. Maria tells us that they have to advance very slowly with reading and writing as small kids are still learning Spanish.
One of the surprises that we have had while working with CONAFE is that, at least in the communities that we have, parents have a very strong interest in school happenings. The parents’ committee is very often around when we visit and they ask how things are going on. The committee also influences some school policies; in particular, they can declare that on some day or days kids will not have classes because of some festivity taking place in the community or any other reason. At Tilil on Wednesday, the parents cancelled classes for the following day because it was to be too cold for the kids. We can imagine that in these conditions, classes will be very infrequent as the winter season progresses.
Taking that vacation day as an opportunity, the following day we invited Marcela and Maria to Naxoch, so that they could watch instructor Carlos giving classes with the computers and then could later share experiences with him.
Carlos was teaching fractions when we arrived; then he asked the students to get a blank page of screen and write down what they had just learned. He prompted them with some questions. We noticed that kids still type slowly but faster than the last time we were here, and that they already know how to format their document nicely.
The most interesting part of the day came when we asked the instructors to share experiences. Carlos has been using several of the Sugar activities in creative ways. He has asked students to go out and take photos of animals and plants, insert the photos in documents and share documents around; use the Record activity to record stories aloud and share them with their classmates; use the Speak activity to write down any number, first attempt to read the number aloud, and then ask the funny face at the screen to read it to see if they got it OK; and of course use the Calculate and Write activities and several others. We were surprised about Carlos’ creativity and advances. He still has a very commanding way of teaching and still helps kids one by one –he has only 10 students- instead of asking the students to help each other.
The following day we were in for another surprise. The Paytajil community is as far from San Cristobal as Naxoch; however, it is besides the road between the city and the Palenque archeological ruins, a highly traveled road with many towns in between. The 13 primary students (two boys and eleven girls) no longer dress using native clothing; they use school uniforms. The girls are much more active, unlike say Naxoch girls who are more timid. We were treated to an official ceremony (national hymn, marching with the Mexican flag and so on), including words of thanks from a CONAFE official and the leader of the parents’ committee. This later oration was most moving; he said the parents were very grateful of CONAFE and Tecnológico because we were bringing laptops to the children, so that they can have a better education than the one the parents had. He mentioned that he had gone to the States as an undocumented worker and tears fell from his eyes when he remembered some hard experiences and said he hoped the children with better education will not have to do the same and suffer the same. Later on I told him that he should also be grateful of McArthur foundation and HASTAC – he did not know and was surprised.
For this community we decided not to train the instructors ourselves, but rather have Raymundo, CONAFE’s academic director assistant, to do the training while we just observed and minimally intervened. A second decision was to train the instructors alone and not simultaneously with the kids, to give the instructors a head start and more authority as experts of the computer experience… That only kind of worked, as these very active children soon came in to the room and were opening the laptops, finding out how to turn them on and asking questions… It is likely that they had seen computers before, unlike the other more rural children of Naxoch and Tilil. Training was limited to a few hours only, but Raymundo would be coming back do further prepare the instructors Hector and Julio.
Our time at Paytajil was very limited as the parents invited us to have lunch with them around a long table. I was fortunate to sit besides the parents’ leader. He had seen computers with internet at the U.S. and asked whether and when the children will have internet so that they can learn “about other countries and places of the world” and whether we would install a printer to see what the children were doing. Our answer was “sure, later on…”
This community will have less time to use the computer as the other two; for the research it will be interesting to compare results of rural children with Paytajil more city-like kids.
At our initial two days training in August, we had assumed that our young instructors would catch on early about the technology and “constructionist, project-based and problem-oriented participative learning”; and that they would use our initial lesson plans and then invent new ones. This was clearly very ambitious and will eventually happen but much more slowly, and in a different way in each community. Technology use has been more intensive and creative at Naxoch than at Tilil, even considering that Naxoch instructor Carlos could not attend our training. At Tilil the kids are teaching their instructors about the computer rather than the other way around. Both communities need to improve regarding the four steps in which we have simplified Constructionism – have kids build something, share it, improve it with feedback and reflect on learning. Once they do that consistently we can move on to problem-based and project orientation.
On another note, researcher Yolanda Heredia presented the TecnoTzotzil project at the Virtual Educa conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This is an important conference supported by OEA, the Organization of American States. The presentation raised much interest among attendants, as 1 to 1 laptop projects have not yet been implemented in Argentina.
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posted Oct 16, 2009 9:19 AM by Jose I. Icaza
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updated Oct 17, 2009 8:59 AM
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Second visit to the Nashoox and Tilil communities, October 8 and 9, 2009. Fifth week of classes.
In the community of Nashoox we found that the electricity had already been installed on the half of a classroom corresponding to the third through sixth grades.
The arrangement of children in the room consistsd of two school desks occupied by boys, five girls around a small table and another three boys in another small table, reflecting a gender separation. This kind of furniture and the lack of enogh space made it difficult for the kids to move the mouse freely.
The community instructor had prepared a lesson plan that included the resolution of three arithmetic word problems that required addition, subtraction and multiplication of three digit numbers. All three problems featured male characters only...
The learning strategy followed by the instructor followed a good methodology in general terms: assign a task (in this case mathematical problem solving) which meant copying the problem from the blackboard to a blank sheet on the computer. The children were able to do this, although slowly. Then the instructor gave sufficient time for resolution and also asked the children to use their notebook; then he sent the solution to the kids through the computer network. He was very emphatic in clarifying the reasoning to be followed to solve the problem.
We were glad to see that the instructor had prepared these problems in advance and brought them to class written up in his own laptop. In addition he had learned on his own how to send documents through the network to the student computers; however the children did not know quite well how to receive these communications, so part of the time was devoted to teaching the kids how to open the documents sent by the instructor. With all this, the first problem took about 45 minutes.
The instructor did not encourage more collaboration among the children. He was trying to solve all the problems, rather than relying on the more advanced kids to support other children. He had not used much yet the participative-learning lesson plans that we had left him last time.
This group of children is very quiet but there were noticeable differences between boys and girls; the latter more quiet, seemingly less secure in themselves, taking time to answer questions from the teacher. The instructor speaks about 80% of the time in Spanish, and when children do not understand he translates to Tzotzil.
In our interviews, the children told us they liked using the computer in the school and that they mainly use it to write, take pictures, play memorama, draw. They would like to use it more time during the day. They also told us that the machine helps them learn better.
The instructor told us that they are trying to use the laptops every day, and that he also used his laptop to plan classes, something that was very evident in the class we observed. His attitude is quite positive towards incorporating technology in the classroom. An example of this attitude is that he had already learned by himself how to share a document with the students through the network.
Intel kindly donated to this classroom a wirless router with EDGE cellular Internet. Unfortunately we noticed an internet connection of very variable quality at this remote rural location. We opened an gmail account for the instructor, allowing us to communicate with him more frequently. Right now only the instructor has access to the internet; later on we will open mediated access to the children, mainly so they can share experiences with children in the other community, Tilil or elsewhere...
With permission from the children and their parents, we gathered anonymized copies of the academic activities journal that the Sugar software automatically keeps.
We believe that in this school the project has been achieving its objectives.
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The situation at Tilil is quite different...
Here there is a small classrroom with the children packed next to each other in their school desks. They are using the touch pad instead of the mouse, and they seem to handle the cursor better than the Nashoox children. Remember there are about 8 third grade children and 7 4th to 6th graders, half girls and half boys, here distributed randomly in the classroom.
In Tilil children showed very high enthusiasm when working with their computers. The instructors asked the children in third and fourth grades to confirm with the Sugar Calculator the restults obtained in some arithmetic operations carried out in their notebooks the previous day. Children in fifth and sixth grades were asked to solve other operations in their notebooks and also confirm the results with the calculator.
This group of children was much more restless and active, so after some children finished the assigned task, they started to open by themselves many other Sugar software activities. We recommended that the instructors complete all the steps to close the learning cycle - invite collaboration for solving tasks, assign children to become learning resources for other children and engage kids in reflecting on what was learned. This we hope will begin to happen little by litle.
To model for the instructors part of the methodology of participatory learning, we enabled the collaborative tools in order to send to the children a word problem -this time involving mothers and girls... Kids were grouped into small teams of three, balancing the number of boys and girls on each team and encouraged them to collaborate in the solution of the problem.
The instructors at Tilil have not mastered the computer and the software. Recall that one of the instructors was not present during training, and we noted her lack of security. We found no evidence that the instructors had spent a little time to learn the software on their own. The children were spontaneously opening various softwaqre activities one after another at high speed leaving the instructors and the lesson plan behind. When a child finds a new software activity, almost immediately the word spreads around the room. Instructrors say they use the computer about three times a week, but easily lose control of the calssroom.
Next time, we will spend special time to train the new instructor. We left the instructors some specific recommendations to develop in class.
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At the CONAFE offices we received the very good news that they would like to start a third rural school in the community of Pajatik!. Further, they are willing to set up the hardware installation and train the instructors by themselves - remember we also trained the academic director and his assistant when we trained the current instructors. Fortunately the Sugar software is very easy to learn both for instructors and for kids. They already have extra classmates because in the two communities that we have now we are not using all of the ones we bought. We will purchase the rest of the equipment (SD cards, timers, power strips and the furniture to keep classmates safe) and just serve as consultants for this new part of the project, as we won't be able to visit this third school as often as the other two. It will also be a test of whether our "train the trainers" approach works well. |
posted Sep 29, 2009 5:43 PM by Jose I. Icaza
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updated Oct 1, 2009 7:32 AM
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Due to some political and religious issues that developed at Nectaktik, CONAFE authorities decided to change one of the two communities where the project will take place. The community chosen was Naxoch'II, located in the municipality of Larraizar. This is unfortunate because the instructor of this community did not receive the training we gave before, making it necessary to train him at the same time as the kids.
So the 9th of September (Thursday of first week of classes), a group composed of the two researchers, one graduate student (Jose Ramiro Espinoza) and Raymundo, the assistant academic coordinator of CONAFE went to Naxoch. The parents' committee was waiting for us.
The community school is composed of two rooms and the toilet. The classroom in which children take third through sixth grades is small and rustic; it is shared with preschool kids that take half of the room with another instructor, lacks enough furniture and has no electricity because there was no wiring from the public lines. We provided financial resources so that the parents can do this electrical installation later. The second classroom, for junior high students, is in better condition and has electricity, so the initial training of the children was held in the second room. There, we met Carlos Hernandez-Diaz, who is the community instructor for primary school students. Carlos has finished high school where he took an informatics class. He has worked with Windows, is very bright and did not find difficult to adapt to the environment and activities of Sugar. The third through sixth grades group consists of four girls and six boys. The laptops were distributed and we conducted several exercises using the following software activities of Sugar:
- Introduction to the Sugar environment
- Record - to take pictures and record video or sound
- Gcompris followline - to learn the movement of the mouse. Using the mouse, kids have to push water through a crooked pipe in order to bring water to flowers
- Paint - to make drawings
- Memory - the memory game, using virtual cards representing additions; and others that relate to the identification of uppercase and lowercase letters
- Speak - Spanish Language Comprehension. The child writes something that is repeated by an animated talking face. In another option they can ask questions of the face and listen for the response.
- Turtle Art - The popular Logo Turtle. In this version, the turtle can be programmed in an easy way using graphical programming blocks.
The instructor quickly took the initiative to assign tasks to children and even began to read the Sugar manual in Spanish by himself.
The children enjoyed these activities enormously. They had some problems at first to learn to move the mouse, and they type very slowly. We left them an activity that helps to learn typing. We also left the instructor Sugar manuals for the kids and for himself, and a set of constructionist class plans that use the computer and match CONAFE’s curriculum.
During recess, we took some demographic data of the children and instructors. We found that only 30% of the children understand and speak Spanish well; the others required an interpreter. The instructor speaks Spanish and Tzotzil well. The parents were kind enough to invite us to eat a delicious chicken broth =). This is costly for them and we were most grateful.
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The following day we went to the other community, Tilil. Our group this time included one of the researchers: Jose I. Icaza, and three graduate students: Alejandra Fontanes, Ramón Morales and Ramiro Espinoza.
The Tilil community school has three rooms in good conditions, one for fourth to sixth grade, another for preschool and third grade, and another for junior high. In this school there are eight third grade children; other six kids are in fourth to sixth grade. There are an equal number of boys and girls. Again we had to adapt our plans on the fly: there was a change in the instructor we had trained before. The current instructor for fourth to sixth grade is now Marcela; however, Maria and Claudia, the girls we had trained before, are also at the school and agreed to support Marcela in the use of the laptops. Another problem was that the third grade children take classes in a different classroom, with instructor Maria. For the training we brought all the kids together to the same room. The third problem was that the third grade classroom has no electricity – again we left financial resources for the installation of the electrical wiring. And finally we were given only two and a half hours because the kids had to practice for a special event that was to take place on 16th of September, the day of Mexico’s independence from Spain.
We run through the same software activities as in the other school –only faster. This time the children used the track pad instead of the mouse, and we found out that the kids find it easier to guide mice with the pad.
There were significant differences between the abilities of different kids; from a very shy little girl that initially almost didn’t dare to touch the computer, to one of the boys who was ahead of everybody else in learning an activity and trying others on his own. The main dynamic at the classroom was some kid discovering something or doing something exciting and shouting “hey, see what I found out !”. Suddenly other kids began to do the same and in no time most of the kids were trying out the same thing. The demographic data shows that almost all of the third grade kids and some of the others have trouble with the Spanish language. Her instructor speaks both Spanish and Tzotzil and we hope will be able to help the children with translation of some of the menus and graphical blocks of the Sugar activities.
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posted Sep 4, 2009 8:18 AM by Jose I. Icaza
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updated Sep 4, 2009 9:12 AM
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On 13th and 14th of August at the CONAFE offices in the city of San Cristobal de las Casas, we conducted an intensive development course with the community instructors of the two chosen schools: Claudia Hernandez-Ruiz and María Diaz-Perez form Tilil and Alfonso Gomez-Santis from Nectaktik; other educational actors from the region participated also. The course included: - A brief explanation of the TecnoTzotzil project
- Training in the use of the Classmate laptops and the Sugar operating system and activities
- How to develop lesson plans that integrate CONAFE curriculum with Sugar activities following the constructionist methodology -mainly a) Have the kids plan, design and build physical or virtual artifacts that represent some aspect of their learning b) Share result with other children or the instructor c) Gather feedback and improve design d) Reflect on learning and register reflection. Instructors are encouraged to let kids explore the design space rather than impose a fixed design in order to spark creativity; and to allow for playing time.
- The researchers shared some lesson plans already developed by us. Each of these plans follow some thematic content of the curriculum and can be used by children of several ages, as the CONAFE classrooms are multi-level. So they typically start with some simple activity related to the plan Theme that can be extended in several directions for older children.
- The community instructors then had the opportunity to develop a couple of their own plans, receiving feedback from the researchers.
- We finally presented our research questions and the research instruments that will be used during the project
The two girl instructors for the Tilil school will be in their first of two years with the children and they were quite excited to be able to use the laptops in class. The instructor for Nectaktik will be in his second year and showed slightly less command of the computer. He will likely require special support later on.
Also taking the course were two master's in education students from Tecnologico's Graduate School in Education that will do their thesis on aspects of this project: Ramiro Espinoza-Guajardo and Alejandra Fontanes-Miceli. Other participants included Enriqueta Perez-Ortiz, academic coordinator of the Los Altos Chiapas zone, Raymundo López, assistant at the CONAFE office; Silvano Hernández, educational assistant for the Chiapas Region corresponding to Los Altos; and Maria Magdalena Hernández, in charge of instructor training for the three instructors.
We left laptops for the instructors and one for the CONAFE office so that they keep exploring the hardware and the software. The laps for the children will arrive September 10 on the fourth day of classes.
All content and software developed for this project will be uploaded to the project site with a Creative Commons licence. As part of the project, we have also been collaborating with the Sugar Labs open-source project that develops the Sugar software in order to have it ready and fully translated into Spanish for TecnoTzotzil. Some translations to the tzotzil language will be done later on. |
posted Jul 3, 2009 3:44 PM by Jose I. Icaza
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updated Jul 3, 2009 4:26 PM
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On 1st and 2nd July we visited San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas to present the project to CONAFE authorities and decide which particular schools will take part in this project. We also visited the two communities, the one called Tilin and Nectactic, localized in the Chamula municipality of Chiapas state. We had the opportunity to talk about the project with the members of the Parents Committee of the schools. They were very interested and assure us ample support for the project. Some of the little ones at both schools also showed great interest when they had the small Classmate laptops in their hands. We agreed with CONAFE authorities the dates for instructors training - that will be on August before classes start.
CONAFE structure is very hierarchycal. Form the National CONAFE program, depend several State Delegations and then Zone Coordinations. We had already presented the project to National CONAFE at Mexico CIty. Tilin and Nectactic correspond to the Los Altos Zone. At the offices of the Zone Coordination, there is the Academic Department and the Administrative Department. From the Academic Department depend Academic Advisors who supervise the Training Tutors and these in turn coordinate Community Instructors.
Usually, instructors are young indigenous persons that have finished basic education and agree with CONAFE to teach the kids during two years in exchange for a scholarship to continue their higher education. From this perspective, they do not have a formal teacher training; however they receive constant training from their tutors.
Each community is rather small; each includes about 10-20 families, so each school classroom serves about 15 to 20 kids of different ages. This allows an active learning methodology; however it is necessary to remember that these indigenous communities do not always have full command of the Spanish Language, so instructors are generally bilingual. In this bilingual environment, with children of several ages, we believe that Constructionism and Participative Learning and the use of the small laptops can result in a very engaging and successful experience. |
posted Jun 22, 2009 3:03 PM by Jose I. Icaza
We have been quite busy with project planning and some software and learning activities development. We have gone to CONAFE's office in Mexico City to present the project and get their approval, and will be going to CONAFE Chiapas by the end of the month.
We have not been successful trying to get XO laptops from OLPC for this project - they only make these machines available in large quantities, not for small pilot projects. However, Intel's Classmate 3 is now able to run the same Sugar software and also has a camera and can communicate via mesh network, so the two machines are now functionally equivalent.; the only disadvantage is that the Classmate consumes about three times more electric power, so we'll likely have to get CONAFE one-room schools with electricity as other more sustainable power means would get quite expensive.
We now have three programmers working on the open source project at Sugar Labs to get the software sufficiently free of bugs on the Classmate (The Sugar Labs version of Sugar is still in Beta). We have been studying CONAFE's curriculum and Tzotzil culture and will start developing lesson plans and software activities that meet three requirements: compatibility with the curriculum so that community instructors can understand what this is about; compatibility with tzotzil culture so that the children find the activities familiar; and compatibility with as much Constructionism as possible.
Constructionism and standardized curriculums and tests are not good friends. Under the first kids are free to Constuct something they feel so proud of that they want to share it and improve it with comments from their peers - or that they build collaboratively with other kids. Under the second the children are supposed to learn "precisely THIS" and are tested on whether they achieved predefined objectives that may not be their own...
I also feel uneasy about going down on the community with a solution conceived from Up and searching for what that solution can be useful for, rather than the other way around. If this were a full community development project, one is supposed to first find out the communities' problems and needs and then lead the community members to find solutions themselves, perhaps with the aid of technology. We'll have to be very very sensible about what instructors, kids and their parents think about 20 laptops intruding in their peaceful lifestyle from day one... be ready to observe any surprises or problems and be willing to adapt and re-try on the fly whatever is not working.
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