*Pre-post note: we do not want the computers to "become distractions in classrooms." As such, our OLPCorps team is conducting a three-week xo summer camp with both the teachers and students of Ecole Notre Dame. Goals: Teachers will be more comfortable teaching the xo when we leave. Also, the students will know xo basics by time school starts. Bonus: we get to do amazing learning activities with 200 awesome children.
Today, we broke the students into two groups to help manage crazy kid behavior and found the age segregation to be fairly helpful. James and I were paired with a teacher who has largely struggled in class. James came with me due to his fantastic French skills and we crossed our fingers. To my pleasant surprise, the teacher was extremely comfortable teaching "Memorize" to 26 7-9 year olds. To James' disappointment, she did so in a very rigid / instructionist manner. The truth of the matter probably lies someplace in between our two reactions.
Things I didn't expect:
1. A classroom of 26 yelling kids to behave like angels once the teacher, two Americans, and a bunch of green laptops showed up. Students wouldn't even vocalize a question to me - he/she would only whisper it.
2. Memorize is like a flashcard game. You can create matching pairs, such as cat to kitten and dog to puppy (or) Senegal to Dakar and USA to Washington D.C. In teacher training we encouraged each teacher to think up new and inventive ways to use memorize. These ranged from the periodic table, to history dates and places, to synonyms. Teacher X today told the kids specifically which types of pairs she wanted them to create: masculine/feminine words in French. It ended with every single student looking over his/her partner's computer screen to remind them of other masculine/feminine word pairs. The creativity was cut out, as was the critical thinking.
Things I expected:
1. The students to be dynamic learners and (because they're Senegalese) good at sharing. Both have been true so far. Students sit three or four to a desk and rapidly share their treasure chest of how-to-open-memorize knowledge with their neighbors.
2. Mousing skills to be the steepest learning curve. Between the touch-pad being hyper sensitive and kids' hand being fairly dirty, using the mouse has proven difficult. Although they all love using the pre-made hearts and stars in "Paint," using the pencil or paintbrush function will take some time.
Things I would suggest:
1. Week three have the teachers actually teach students how to use the xo. While teacher X today struggles to remember where the border key is or how to save a document, throwing her in front of a classroom was the best thing we could have done to assist in her learning. She's a teacher, so of course she was competent. She lesson-planned-ahead; made sure she knew her subject (Memorize), and taught it in the only way she was comfortable doing (extremely directed). But, my hunch is that she will begin to participate in teacher sessions more actively and will slowly begin to remember where the border key is, or how to save a document.
* For now we are preparing week 4 of teacher training after strict orders from our local Catholic supervisor. (We were only going to train for 3 weeks). We're pumped! The teachers, whose vacations will be cut short by one week, may not be as thrilled. But, they need the practice. Our local Catholic supervisor is also creating an xo test to be administered on Wednesday or Thursday of week 4. If we're as good of instructors as I hope we are, the teachers will have no problem passing her/our jointly written exam.
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