[IAEP] Lesson plans needed (was Re: Release 8.2.0 -- pls add critical features (Greg Smith))

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 6:35 AM, Bryan Berry <bryan.berry at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greg wrote:
>>Thanks for keeping us apprised of your needs!
>
> My pleasure.
...
>
> We had two evaluators spend a week at both of our pilot schools and the
> consistent feedback they came back w/ was
> 1) The teachers want lesson plans integrated w/ the activities

Writing lesson plans needs to be a whole program in itself, integrated
with rethinking textbooks to make use of the available software and to
implement Constructionism, or possibly just creating textbooks within
available software. This is Alan Kay's domain, among others. I haven't
heard of anybody seriously taking up this vital part of the program,
and I haven't even gotten answers to my queries about previous work in
this vein. We need to involve the entire education establishment
(those that are willing, anyway) including Schools of Education, the
Free Software community, teachers' organizations, Ministries of
Education, and SMEs (Subject Matter Experts). A research consortium. I
don't see any reason why we couldn't get it funded at a fairly high
level as soon as we can demonstrate what we are talking about.

Just as one example, the Measure activity can play a central role in
teaching sciences, health, and music (frequency analysis). I can give
hundreds of similar examples covering every school subject on fairly
short notice. (Yes, _every_ subject including History and PE.)

> 2) The parents don't see the learning activities as anything more than
> games.

Has anybody taught any of the programming language tutorials to the children?

> This was constructive feedback they gave us. I am happy to report that
> the kids, teachers, and parents were overwhelmingly positive about this
> project.
>
> We need a way to seamlessly integrate supporting materials such as
> readings, lesson plans, together with activities. HTML is the way to do
> this and the browser is what we use to display html. URI's are what we
> use to link to different resources.
>
> We may end up hacking Browse esp. to allow this because of the immense
> demand.
>
> We need to make it dead simple for teachers to use activities like
> EToys, E-Paath, Measure in the classroom. The easiest way to do this is
> to make the transition from lesson plan to activity as easy as possible.
...
> Bryan
> Kathmandu
>
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-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay