[Sugar-devel] Karma's Chakra - 2 views on lessons

[David Farning]

2009/8/6 Christoph Derndorfer <christoph.derndorfer at gmail.com>:
> Thanks a lot for the information.
> And I'm not a teacher myself so all my comments above are based on
> second-hand experience.
> However my understanding is that the learning goals for each grade are very
> well defined and due to the small variety of different school books in-use
> in schools (this seems to be a global problem;-) there's hardly any
> difference between schools in terms of what material is taught at a given
> time.

I am answering as a non-teacher.  This varies widely across the world,
some nations have very specific federal guidelines other nations allow
for a great deal of autonomy even between classroom within a school.
Nepal, for instance, has very strict national guidelines.

My local elementary school is very flexible.  The school has
historically been very strong.  So it is assumed that everyone will
meet the 'No Student Left Behind' tests.  It seems the students have a
week of direct test preparation just before the test, nation standards
are forgotten about until the the next round of testing.  Throughout
the rest of the year teacher, even with the same grade, pick and chose
what teaching materials they want to use.

As a disclaimer: This is probably not a normal school.  Every night
the students bring home a 'take home folders' with yesterdays graded
papers and tomorrows home work.  The parent must sign that they have
reviewed yesterday homework and their child has completed tomorrows
home work and send the folder back to school in the morning.

david

> Regardless of these details there's no doubt in my mind that a
> time-component, whether it's a weekly or a monthly basis, is an important
> axis of navigation in interactive learning materials. Plus, this is a core
> use-case for Nepal anyway so even if I wanted I couldn't really avoid it:-)
> BTW, I'd be interested in hearing how the process of getting from national
> curricula to lesson plans work in other countries around the globe. Anyone
> have more information on this?
> Cheers,
> Christoph
> 2009/8/6 NoiseEHC <NoiseEHC at freemail.hu>
>>
>> Now that is strange...
>> In Hungary there is a document called NATIONAL CORE CURRICULUM (NCC). In
>> contains only the goals what the schools must meet at the end of the year
>> (in fact it only defines those goals in periods of 2 years), and it only has
>> an advised number of hours per week per subject. It is up to the school to
>> define a Local Curriculum (LC) which contains the lesson structure. Of
>> course the teacher defining this Local Curriculum is constrained not only by
>> the NCC but also by the fact that there are only approximately 3 books for
>> every subject in a given grade (the school decides which books must be
>> bought by parents at the beginning of every grade) and the kids have
>> nationwide tests to take. So in the end the LCs do not differ too much but
>> giving a date for a lesson is practically impossible.
>>
>> I do not know what other school systems are you aware of but probably
>> getting info from around the world would be wise. (Of course if you need
>> this feature in Nepal then obviously you will code it so it should not
>> withhold nor delay you.)
>>
>> NCC abridged version in English:
>>
>> http://www.okm.gov.hu/main.php?folderID=137&articleID=6994&ctag=articlelist&iid=1
>>
>> ps:
>> I am not a teacher but my ex-girlfriend who graduated as a teacher (just
>> works something else) told me just this and reading the NCC I had the same
>> understanding. In the end I am only 98% sure that this is the situation in
>> Hungary so I will ask somebody about it.
>>
>>
>>
>> Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
>>
>> Andras,
>> in basically every school system I'm aware of it's not the teacher that
>> decides what material is taught and when it's taught but rather a
>> well-defined national curriculum.
>> Hence what OLE Nepal currently does with their E-Paath learning activities
>> is to create specific interactive lesson content that aligns very closely
>> with the Nepali curriculum, the associated school books and weeks when the
>> material is to be taught. This is definitely a major use-case for something
>> such as a library of Karma lessons, hence I want to support it in Karma's
>> Chakra.
>>
>> However national curricula obviously differ from country to country hence available lessons will be re-mixed in
>> different ways to support these specific requirements. That's where the idea
>> to put that meta-data into the locale/ directories comes from.
>>
>> At the same time I also think it makes sense to support a more generic view where all lessons for a specific Grade and Subject (or, as already mentioned above, only per Subject) are presented in a simple list.
>> I hope that answers your questions.
>> Cheers,
>> Christoph
>>
>> 2009/8/5 NoiseEHC <NoiseEHC at freemail.hu>
>>>
>>> Exactly what is the problem that this solution wants to solve? I mean
>>> that is not the teacher who selects from the lessons depending on her
>>> personal lesson plan? (Of course we could provide a default lesson plan but
>>> in the end it is up to the teacher what she wants to teach and in what
>>> order.)
>>> So is it important at all to select from a predetermined date or country
>>> specific grade?
>>> Can it be that I do not understand at all how those lessons would be used
>>> in the classroom? Or is this mega bundle (what bundles a lot of lessons from
>>> different subjects) solves the deployability problem and creates a selection
>>> problem?
>>>
>>> Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>> I spent some time toying around with Chakra in the past 24 hours. As a
>>> preliminary result I have concluded that we should initially support two
>>> different "views" of the available lessons.
>>> (1) What I call "E-Paath" style (see the attached chakra_epaath_s.jpg) as
>>> it follows E-Paath's current flow in terms of choosing Grade - Subject -
>>> Week before being presented with an overview of the available lessons.
>>> (2) "List" style (see the attached chakra_list_s.jpg) which is a simple
>>> list of lessons available for that Grade and Subject (of course one could
>>> make it even simpler by listing all lessons for a given Subject, regardless
>>> of Grade)
>>> (Please ignore the lack of reasonable design and color choices in these
>>> screenshots;-)
>>> Now the question is how to generate these Chakras for a given set of
>>> lessons (which are stored in sub-folders)...
>>> In general the issue is that with the currently proposed Karma bundle
>>> layout (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Karma/Bundle_layout) the only
>>> information we have about a lesson is it's name. This is of course too
>>> little data to create a nice Chakra with Grade and Subject choices.
>>> Subsequently I believe that we should find a way to include some additional
>>> information with lessons.
>>> The way that OLE Nepal currently handles it during E-Paath development is
>>> that lessons are stored in sub-folders named <Grade>_<Subject>_<Lesson
>>> Name>_<Week> (e.g. 6_English_RajuAndTheWolf_1). Based on that information a
>>> support scripts then builds the Flash menu structure.
>>> Now I was thinking that one approach could be to include some sort of
>>> .info file in each lesson that contains the information. While Subject
>>> probably will be fairly consistent between various countries the Grade
>>> information is highly country-specific and could be put into the respective
>>> .po files for each locale.
>>> What do you think, does that approach make sense? What are other possible
>>> solutions to deal with this?
>>> As always, all comments, feedback and suggestions are much appreciated.
>>> Thanks,
>>> Christoph
>>> --
>>> Christoph Derndorfer
>>> co-editor, olpcnews
>>> url: www.olpcnews.com
>>> e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Christoph Derndorfer
>> co-editor, olpcnews
>> url: www.olpcnews.com
>> e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Christoph Derndorfer
> co-editor, olpcnews
> url: www.olpcnews.com
> e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com
>
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