<html> <head> <style></style> </head> <body class='hmmessage'> Juj>>Just wanted to mention my admiration for the Tutorious team: they have >>pushed forward a big feature that affects shell and activities, have >>set up their instance of AMO for tutorials, have pinged periodically >>the community for feedback, have made a spin of SoaS so others can >>more easily test their work, have contacted the testing team at NZ for >>feedback, etc. And not because that's a lot of work, but because it's >>the _right_ work to do. >>Kudos to them and whoever is mentoring! >>Regards, >>Tomeu   Hello All,   Myself and Gerald Ardito had a Skype meeting with Erick Lavoie and Michael Montclam from the Tutorius Project last Thursday Nov. 19th, the notes from that session are below. Since the comments/suggestions from Gerald and I are U.S. based, I am in the process of trying to set up a second meeting between Tutorious and Enhanced Learning Strategy-Ron Canuel had a Team that went down to Uruguay recently and visited 18 schools. This will give the Tutorius Team an additional view to incorporate into the project and allow for the internationalization of Tutorious, which is one of their objectives.   They are due to finalize the Project and give a Final Presentation in early December to complete this class project. They have indicated an interest to merge Tutorius ability into Sugar when it is at a stable state. I indicated to them I would reach out to the Sugar Developer community-Tomeu,Walter, and others to see if there can be some joint planning or conversations that would lead to this possibilty. Please let me know how we can proceed on this front.   I look forward to trying to facilitate these initiatives, which I believe will be very valuable for students, teachers, and activity developers alike.   Best!   John Tierney <HR id=stopSpelling> Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:17:23 +0000 Subject: Meeting minute - 2009/11/19 From: michael.jmontcalm@gmail.com To: jtis4stx@hotmail.com; gerald.ardito@gmail.com Hi guys! Here are the notes for today's meeting. Feel free to add precisions and comments if anything was missed. You can access the document right here : https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AVT_nzmWT2B2ZGN3dDd2MzRfNTF0dzMyNGdnag&hl=en Thank you for your time and the great ideas! Michael <DIV style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 10px"> <H1>Meeting minute </H1>2009/11//19 <H2>Attendees : </H2>John Gerald Érick Michael <H2>Minute : </H2> <OL> <LI>Introduction </LI> <LI>Gerald's tests </LI> <OL> <LI>5 XO classrooms since January in middle school </LI> <LI>Doctoral thesis on Sugar </LI> <LI>Focus on curricular needs with teachers </LI> <OL> <LI>Ex : Using etoys to do an interactive story book </LI></OL> <LI>Pre-testing with Test Team students in class, then attempting with the whole class </LI> <OL> <LI>Works really well and adds much more depth to the teaching </LI></OL> <LI>Gerald's view of Tutorius </LI> <OL> <LI>Offer assistance on learning the platform (journal, using write activity, etc...) </LI> <LI>Using the platform is one of the hurdles to getting the most out of activities </LI> <LI>To have Tutorius to walk them through those skills would be incredibly useful </LI></OL> <LI>Gerald's perception </LI> <OL> <LI>Tutorius would be immediately useful in teaching the basic Sugar skills </LI> <LI>But not so much for the specifics of the activity </LI></OL> <LI>John's suggestion </LI> <OL> <LI>It would be great to have tutorials on how to do tutorials </LI></OL></OL> <LI>Technical details </LI> <OL> <LI>How can we deploy Tutorius on the XOs? </LI> <OL> <LI>Is it an activity? Can it be easily installed? </LI> <OL> <LI>No, it's a direct integration with the Sugar OS </LI></OL></OL> <LI>Questions from John </LI> <OL> <LI>What are the details for the merging? </LI> <OL> <LI>Tutorius would need to stabilize its code base </LI> <LI>The activities are not all consistent (e.g. save_state function) </LI></OL></OL> <LI>A screencast utility for Sugar </LI> <OL> <LI>Make a tutorial inside a screencast </LI> <LI>Dump the screencast on the web </LI> <LI>Point the students to the web </LI> <LI>Gerald is concerned on application on the XO </LI> <OL> <LI>Re-flashing the XOs is not hard but would wipe all data </LI></OL> <LI>Could we have an automatic upload to YouTube? </LI></OL> <LI>The XO is a great computer for kids because of its form factor </LI> <OL> <LI>It is slower, but the kids relate to the device differently </LI> <LI>Akin to the way they use their iPhones and MP3 players </LI> <LI>Re-flashing would be ok, providing a way to save data and restore it </LI> <LI>A screencast would be a backup plan </LI></OL> <LI>Erick's question </LI> <OL> <LI>What does a tutorial adds to a screencast? </LI> <LI>Gerald : Having a label is for actions is great information </LI></OL> <LI>John </LI> <OL> <LI>The important first step is to get a screencast tool out there with Tutorius </LI></OL> <LI>First steps </LI> <OL> <LI>John : Short term is more important than long term </LI> <LI>Erick's question : </LI> <OL> <LI>Is internationalization important? We could offer it in an easy way or a complete support. </LI> <OL> <LI>John : Support for this would be awesome, but sounds a bit more on the long term approach. </LI> <LI>Walter and Tomeu could point us better </LI></OL> <LI>Error case support : if students click on the wrong button, how do we address this? </LI> <OL> <LI>Gerald : We could inspire ourselves from an Adobe product that does interactive screencast? Adobe Captivé </LI></OL> <LI>Sharing : we have a basic, non-secure prototype. We do not have a full-fledged sharing platform. </LI></OL> <LI>Gerald : </LI> <OL> <LI>There are no really good way to share things in Sugar yet. </LI> <LI>You can collaborate, but you cannot share products easily. </LI> <LI>Let's loop in with the Sugar devs. </LI></OL></OL></OL> <LI>Major hurdles when training people? </LI> <OL> <LI>Some teachers do not possess the basic tutorial skills </LI> <OL> <LI>People are very good at what they do regularly (email, downloading music, etc...) </LI> <LI>Not everyone was taught to think in general principles, or extrapolate skills </LI> <LI>The major hurdle is that most people use Windows and find themselves lost inside Sugar, because it's not the most consistent UI. </LI></OL> <LI>The focus for the first version </LI> <OL> <LI>would be on </LI> <OL> <LI>How to open an activity </LI> <LI>How to close an activity </LI> <LI>How to use the clipboard </LI> <LI>etc... </LI></OL> <LI>Gerald would suggest </LI> <OL> <LI>Walk through the 4 views (neighborhood, friend, home, activity) </LI> <LI>Explain Browse </LI> <LI>Explain Write </LI> <LI>Explain the journal </LI></OL> <LI>This scenario would really empower the user </LI> <LI>Érick mentions that our initial focus was to let the users interact with the buttons, but we could provide a non-interactive tour of the system </LI> <LI>John says that we could show a screencast of the tour on a day, then 3 days later have them execute the interactive version on their machines </LI> <LI>John suggests that we could also show TurtleArt </LI> <OL> <LI>Gerald mentions that there already exists YouTube videos of turtleArt usage, as opposed to the other activities </LI> <LI>It would be in the list of the next </LI></OL></OL></OL> <LI>View of Tutorius </LI> <OL> <LI>Érick explains that our teachers warned us that explaining the validity of Sugar as a learning tool would be really hard </LI> <LI>Gerald mentions that the goal </LI> <LI>Gerald says that it would require to take two classes, have one with Tutorius and another without, and prove that the former learns faster </LI></OL> <LI>Gerald's thesis </LI> <OL> <LI>How do students interact with each other when students are involved with technologies like Sugar? </LI> <LI>Traditionnal method does not work well; viral methods are extremely efficient </LI> <LI>What happens when the students don't know to do something? </LI> <OL> <LI>Students should become more persistent in solving problems </LI> <LI>At the very least, they become more social and have more initiative when learning </LI></OL></OL> <LI>John's intervention </LI> <OL> <LI>Tutorius could do testing locally with Ron Canuel in Magog, Québec </LI> <LI>It would be important for Tutorius to keep in touch with other developers and actors in the Sugar project to keep the international perspective </LI></OL></OL> <DIV>   </DIV> </DIV> </body> </html>