MoBloged
David Cavallo, with MIT and a major leader in the $100 laptop program, maded it to Chicago from Brazil just minutes before the keynote. He’s talking now about education in Brazil. He describes a process that is common in San Paolo, where community grow in poverty, but improve, and grow more affluent, the building materials improve. Interestingly, no one is documenting this process. So one of the first projects that will be engaged in by students with laptops will be to record and reflect on this construct. The laptops all have a digital video camera.
It seems, however, that we are exploring our neurosis over high-stakes testing. So computer labs and libraries are being closed, budgest are being cut, and any materials used by the students are being purchased by the teacher. This is outrageous. Teachers, who are buying the learning materials for their students. What kind of country would devote so little money for the education of their children, that teacher would feel a need to buy materials themselves.
Pause!
I met a teacher yesterday in Seattle, who purchased, out of her own pocket, a computer and LCD projector for her classroom.
He’s now talking about some of the robotic projects that MIT’s Future of Learning project has been engaged in. Some of the projects are absolutely intriguing. They find that when students can plug into something that they care about (basketball playing robots, dancing robots, and much more) then they take off. They learn like crazy. I’ve found myself using Doc Searls’ analogy of the snow ball a lot lately. It happense when children connect. They start rolling, and growing their own knowledge.
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“I met a teacher yesterday in Seattle, who purchased, out of her own pocket, a computer and LCD projector for her classroom.”
I’m starting to think that some problems involving lack of resources in the classroom are universal. I teach Project Management and Information Architecture at an undergrad course in São Paulo, Brazil. We don’t have computers nor projectors to help us in our activities, so the results are poor and the satisfaction/motivation level of the students goes down progressively.
A month ago we had a discussion on the pros and cons of renting a projector for our weekly meetings. Some students are in charge of checking the investment. Any price divided by 25 (myself included) can be very affordable.
We also thought on the possibility of acquiring a projector, that could be given to a student in the end of the semester. In this case the investment would represent a 5% increase on the tuition paid (monthly).