The KAPPA pilot is now two months old, and we’re taking inventory on what was accomplished, what works and what doesn’t. I’ll break this all out into two areas (1) Teaching and Learning (2) Hardware / Software.
Teaching and Learning
There was a lot of excitement when the devices were first introduced. It took approximately a week for the class to acclimate to using the devices in everyday work. However, after two months, the students are still very excited about the devices.
On the instruction end, the class participated in Writing Matters: Response to Literature – a technology infused writing unit that has online resources, Moodle activities, blogging and animations. We found that because this was a new unit of instruction for the teacher (Mr. Almazar) that Mr. Almazar wanted to keep consistency with his other classrooms (that did not have XO’s). As a result, most of the Moodle activities were not used. Because of the infusion of hardware and the change in curriculum (to one that takes advantage of technology), there was a definite learning curve for Mr. Almanzar acclimating to changing his instruction and becoming comfortable using the 1:1 environment in an effective way. The next unit of instruction is poetry (a unit he is familiar with) – and he is confident that they will take full advantage of Moodle and the online unit.
Hardware / Software
In the two months we have seen 3 out of 28 (~11%) devices “break” to the point where outside support is needed to repair them:
- A cracked screen (mostly likely the student dropped the XO on a corner)
- A broken keyboard (might be software, might be user-related)
- A OS boot “not found” (most likely software related and fixable)
Students do take the XO’s home regularly – and are excited when they can, and we have found it to be a very effective classroom management (threat) tool. No power adapters have been lost / broken. Students charge their devices using power strip “squids” under their tables. Initially there was a learning curve for students – they complained that the OS booted slowly, and were “thrown off” by the lack of icons on the write activity. Since then, they all feel the write activity is much easier to use than MS Word and prefer the journal method of storage over the saving dialogs on Windows and Mac.
In terms of internet access, the workaround for the DOE internet we implemented gets them online, but is annoying to have to restart every time they want to “share.” Also, students do not have internet access at home for the most part and will not go to cafes or libraries. Mr. Almazar relied on print handouts largely for this reason. The 800 x 600 resolution was a problem – they weren’t aware that you can “shrink” the page to fit. Flash wasn’t properly installed on a couple devices initially in the first week. And pop-ups were an issue that needed a work-around. Also, the students could not all watch learning animations in class because the sound of 30 devices at once was a problem. Inserting and managing images in the write activity is still a problem – it is not clear how to insert images from the web.
All in all, everyone agrees it has been a huge success so far, and is a very effective and easy to use tool. The above issues are all relatively small compared to the improvement in teaching and learning that is happening. We have found though, that real-classroom-situations do not change just because of technology immersion. There has to be buy in from the teacher, and the school should be prepared to offer teachers a high level of support. Otherwise, the technology does not make it’s way into the curriculum and instruction.
As a foot-note, all this information is coming from the Teaching Matters professional developer who has been (and is) working in-class with the students and teacher.
Up next – a formal assessment!
You can take a screenshot. It’s an ugly hack (no way to crop) but might be a help for adding photos from websites:
Press Alt+1 to take a screenshot.
Sounds like you are doing a great job of integrating technology into our students’ every day lives. Our school was lucky enough to receive a huge grant for tech and our students’ education has forever been changed. Blogging, podcasting, moodle, IWB’s, doc cameras, all lead to increased motivation and increased tech ability.
Thanks for your rundown. You’re doing great!
Darren B.
I’m surprised students were given paper handouts instead of PDF versions of them. As a test, I printed the parent blog page, converted it to PDF, copied it to a USB drive and then loaded it up on the XO. It read just fine.
I’m a noob on this so I’ll have to see how one copies a doc like this to the system for offline or off-usb usage. I think one of the most important design elements for the XO was to provide a document reader and that includes offline as well as online.
It will be tough getting a good handle on value with a mixed( have-XO and don’t-have-XO ) curriculum. And even doubly tough when the don’t-have-XO students also don’t have web access. The only way this could work would be if each student had his/her own USB drive which is where the electronic versions and tools resided. What would be nice is a bootable CDROM for students to use on their own computers and which acted like the XO.
Keep up the good work. As more and more curriculum gets published, the easier others can pick it up and use it AND improve on it. Everyone wins in the sharing of knowledge.
Inserting images using the Browser:
You can use the clipboard to do that. Click on the image in the browse activity. Keep the button pressed and move it over the clipboard. When the image can be inserted the arrow will change to have a little ‘+’ icon (this cursor change is subtle but we are working to make this interaction clearer). Release the button and the image will be added to the clipboard.
To reveal the frame you can either use the ‘hot-corners’ or using the frame key (i find the latter to be easier).
Now go to the write activity. Click on the image in the clipboard, keep the button pressed and move it over the canvas of the write activity. Release the button and the image will be inserted into the write activity.
Hopes this helps
Simon
PS: Some interactions of the browse activity (like download and installing of activities) are described here: wiki.laptop.org/go/Browse
(simon, I tried that with a link and it also worked! thanks for the hint–I will try to tell other xo users) (note: the clipboard is the left edge of the frame) anyway…
Thanks for the update on the project status. It is great to see the issue, resolutions and progress that this project has made in only 2 months! I hope it survives to the end and the OLPC project get more opportunity to prove its open-source HW/SW and local teams are up to the task and can make a difference. Every report from the deployments touts its success amid the grumblng of critics which seems to include, as of late, Mr. Negroponte. Please continue to disprove the critics and show the world those energetic students learning with their mit-created kid-friendly tools.
You can crop images with Paint (although it’s not straight-forward).
Open an Image with Paint. Use the selection tool to select the area of the image, and copy it. The selection will be placed in the clipboard as a image clipping. Just add it to the Journal (via its menu) to keep it.