On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 4:36 AM, Nicholas H.Tollervey <nt...@ntoll.org> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Hi, > > I'm a former teacher currently working as a Python developer and I've > stepped up to help organise the "Education" track at this year's > PyconUK (happening in September - see http://pyconuk.org). >
That all sounds like excellent thinking and planning Nicholas. My experience is a minority will seize on the new toys / tools and share their delight with peers. Many will only be swayed if they see student enthusiasm tick up as well, but that requires getting that far (so where's the door to get in again? -- not math class they say). The idea of a classroom especially outfitted for computer-based learning is still new and undeveloped. The idea of "passing a terminal around" or better, having students enabled to share their screens in real time, front projected, or to join the teacher at the command line (two keyboards feed the same console), or to split the console among screens... we don't try enough such experiments. I always thought HP would get into that, but then "selling classrooms" is not quite like "selling cath labs" (more GE's line of business) -- could be though, if schools were built more like hospitals. PythonAnyhwere: https://www.pythonanywhere.com/ http://python-in-the-lab.blogspot.de/ (Lantz is looking interesting) More open sorcery needed. The economic bottleneck in my state of Oregon is that CS is an elective meaning it doesn't count towards requirements. The idea that getting serious at the command line, learning all that open source jazz, could count towards the math requirement was what we floated, as three years of math is required, by order of the state. The lawyers who write such standards *may* know computers exist but this should not be taken for granted. Remember, Oregon is home to places like Boring, Fossil and Remote. And Dufur: >>> "Ask not what Dufur can dufur you, but what you can dufur >>> Dufur".replace("dufur", "do for") # Heh. So say you've done your algebra / geometry and need one more year of math, and maybe calculus isn't quite your cup of tea. We've got this other thing for you then. Piece of cake. Didn't fly yet though, except informally it's what half the kids are doing anyway. Like my daughter (18) got help rooting her phone to upgrade the OS, but don't expect any classes in your high school to help with that. You're lucky if there's one dusty room with Ubuntu somewhere. If you wanna learn fast, make up excuses to stay home, where the bandwidth is better. Sad but true. But with teachers coming up to speed more.... could be a whole new ballgame. School could become relevant again, maybe! Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
