[IAEP] RFC: Supporting olpc-ish Deployments - Draft 1

[Tony Anderson]

Hi,

Actually the model for the website/wiki already exists. It is DART at 
the Bering Straits School District. They have married mediawiki with 
their own software to provide a killer tool. The standards, lesson 
plans, etc. are in a wiki. DART maintains a data base which allows 
teachers to see/record the status of each of their students in each area 
of each subject/strand.

Having the curriculum standards in a wiki makes it trivial for each 
deployment to set that up for their own requirements cross linked to 
anything relevant.

Tony

Berry wrote:

 >From Michael's questions:

 > > * Is there anything we could spend our time on which would yield a
 > > greater
 > > return on investment?

The most helpful thing I can think of right now would be a
special-purpose website/wiki only for curricula. Each curriculum should
map to a course in moodle.sugarlabs.org. We need to start the process of
mapping standard curricula to the open-source resources (quizzes,
readings, activities) that are available in some sort of intelligible
order. Then an interested developer or educator could start plugging in
the holes.

Really, all is needed is some kind of special-purpose wiki mapped to
moodle. No special software. The hard and incredibly *unsexy* work is
uploading the n curricula from X states/countries and mapping it to
sequenced materials. We can talk about quality, pedagogy ad infinitum
but the vast majority of teachers don't have a starting point to even
provide mediocre education beyond what they are currently provided by
their own governments.