Re: [school-discuss] OLPC Review Update

[dhhoward@xxxxxxxxxxx]

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Joel Kahn <jj2kk4@xxxxxxxxx>
> For those who are not regularly following
> Ed Felten's blog. . . . Here is that
> precocious twelve-year-old geek again,
> with thoughts on a newer version of
> the world-famous laptop:
> 
> http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1206
 
Thanks for forwarding Joel, looks like they fixed a lot of the issues originally seen.  After reading the review, I noted the part about SG using the IM application to send notes back and forth to another family member on the second XO.   I recently polled my 5th grade teachers for whom we set up K12LTSP thin clients for a 1:1 in their classroom (we velcro'ed the LCD monitors to their desks at the top edge and cable-tied the thin clients to the sides of their desks), to ask them pros and cons of it since they've had it for almost a year now.  Pros overwhelming were reported over cons, but one con they consistently reported was that last year they found the students often played on the PCs when they were supposed to be working, and it was a distraction having the screen in front of them all the time and they had difficulty doing collaborative projects with the screens in the way between two abutted desks.  We addressed this by moving the desks around and putting tables back in the r
oom so that during instruction the students all turned to the side to see the teacher (that way she could tell if they were paying attention or looking at the screen, showing the teachers how to log all the students off using TeacherTool to guarantee attention was not distracted by the PCs, and the teachers used the tables for collaborative work so students could lean across to partners, etc.

This tells me one thing missing in the OLPC is this ability for the teacher to shut the systems down for instruction.  She could insist that all students close them, but they're so small I wonder if students could still open them up and play underneath the desks, and further if they were in a class with severe discipline problems it would be difficult to stop them from IM'ing, playing games, etc.  We turned off the IM application in our case, BTW, and the teachers asked us to remove certain games they felt were just not conducive to learning in the classroom.   The TeacherTool capability to log all students off is a must have, IMHO, and I wonder if it also needs the ability for teachers to select/deselect any applications that are functional on them when in class.  These capabilities make K12LTSP a real winner for our teachers.

Best, Daniel