Hi Sora,
There needs to be a database of XO users (both students and staff). The
staff can then have 'teacher' priviliges. The system will also know what
grade the student is in and so what course material is relevant.
My plan is that where XO's are shared, that each user should go to the
'About Me' and change the nick to their username. The advantage is that
no extra programming is required and the system will be restarted
(terminating activities started by a previous user as well as
registering the new nick).
Naturally, where there is a single user, the username and the user nick
would be the same.
Essentially what is happening is that the activity stores a session
record showing when an activity was started, stopped, and what outcome
was recorded (simplest, it was run). The session records are captured on
the school server and displayed to the teacher. The model for this is
the coach report in Khan Academy Lite.
A credible representation of what is available on the school server is
now available at http:www.projectbernie.org.
I would recommend the English Children's Literature collection from OLE
Nepal's Pustakalaya and the
'stories' in the English Learning for Kids from the British Council
(example of audio with text). The school server also has a collection of
40 more stories not on the web site.
Synchronizing the audio with text is difficult. There is a capability
called SMIL (smile) which has this capability but I have not had time
enough to get it working. My thought was to have reading work similar to
Karaoke.
Incidentally, the Talk English component on the school server also
provides a wide range of simple English text associated with audio clips.
Tony
On 02/23/2015 01:19 PM, Sora Edwards-Thro wrote:
Thanks, Tony and James. Replies to both your messages below:
On Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 8:42 PM, James Simmons <nices...@gmail.com
<mailto:nices...@gmail.com>> wrote
The goodreads website https://www.goodreads.com
<https://www.goodreads.com/> might be useful.
Yes, and features like getting recommendations about what to read
based on what you've already liked and being able to add books to a
"want to read" list would be great. I especially like the "want to
read" list because it implies it gives you a way to identify something
as interesting and then move on instead of feeling obligated to dive
right into it. Of course, the experience of downloading a text to your
computer's journal to read later might replicate that.
I wrote a free book the might be of some use to you:
https://archive.org/details/EBookEnlightenment
Thanks for passing this on! I ended up reading through the whole
thing because everything inside is relevant to this project (even the
parts on scanning in paper books).
A few questions:
You mention that the text-to-speech works for plain text and ePubs;
does that mean it doesn't work for PDFs? I would test this on my
personal XO, but I'm waiting for my charger to arrive in the mail...
On another note, at one point you mention that in the Read Etexts
activity "highlighting may lag behind the words being spoken." Does
this activity actually highlight the words as the computer is reading
them? Using the text-to-speech function built into the Frame of later
versions of Sugar, I haven't seen it do that.
On Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 9:03 PM, Tony Anderson <tony_ander...@usa.net
<mailto:tony_ander...@usa.net>> wrote:
Hi, Sora
The idea would be that a comments on a book (accession) would be
linked from the accession record.
There is also a Django app (kls), which provides a record for each
XO user (student or staff) and a record for each XO (inventory).
The comments made by a user would be linked also to the user. In
this way it would be easy to look at all comments and rankings by
a user or to look at all comments and rankings for a given item in
the library.
Sounds great. It's good to hear that accessions can be linked to one
another; that also got me thinking about how we can accommodate books
accompanied with audio on the server. Currently, when students want to
listen to audio for a book, they have to start the audio in a separate
window and then flip back to the book to read along. It isn't too much
of a hassle, but it would be nice if it was easier.
Would you provide a log-on for each user? With our particular course
we'll be enrolling only 20 students in each class, so everyone will
have access to their own XO and will use the same computer each day.
We figured that means we can skip a log-in step and just identify
teachers and students by the computer they're using to access the
server. I know other deployments are using the same set of XOs for the
whole school, so they might need a log-in; we're just hoping to have
one less page for students / teachers to click through before class
can start.
Like most of my projects, this one is 90% complete. The comment
link is needed. I plan the comments/rankings to look like those in
Pustakalaya (www.pustakalaya.org <http://www.pustakalaya.org>).
Unfortunately, that app currently only works in the internet
version. I also have not added the 'url' links capability to add
other items. Look at Rachel as an example of how the Gutenberg
collection could be organized into collections for greater
accessibility (by the way, this sort of direct link is far less
demanding on the server than the current search method).
I'm glad someone's thinking of how to structure large amounts of
resources in the future. That's not exactly our situation, since we're
only dealing with 300 - 500 books in an extracurricular program that
doesn't have to tie things to curriculum. Sorting of some sort will be
important, but I guess my own priority at the moment is giving
teachers and students the tools to share great reading materials with
each other. Thanks for giving some advantages of the direct-link
system so that even a non-techie like me can understand why it might
be useful ( ;
Tony
On 02/22/2015 09:42 AM, James Simmons wrote:
Sora,
The goodreads website https://www.goodreads.com might be useful.
You can do rankings of books, reviews, have threaded discussions,
post favorite quotes, interact with G+ and Facebook, and other
things that the words "reading socially" would suggest.
I wrote a free book the might be of some use to you:
https://archive.org/details/EBookEnlightenment
It is also available on the web. Here is the chapter on the
Pathagar book server, which might be of interest:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/e-book-enlightenment/the-pathagar-book-server/
James Simmons
On Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 4:45 PM, Sora Edwards-Thro
<s...@unleashkids.org <mailto:s...@unleashkids.org>> wrote:
Thanks for the additional input, everyone. James, Gonzalo,
Tony, some responses below:
On Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 4:14 PM, James Simmons
<nices...@gmail.com <mailto:nices...@gmail.com>> wrote:
The catch is it only works with plain text files.
Yes, my original thought was we could convert PDF to
plain-text files and just use the Write activity to do
highlights and such. But, some of the content we're working
with is not OER (that's what happens when you need
high-quality books in a specific language), and I'm not sure
if they'll be okay with us manipulating the files like that.
We've got to choose how many battles to fight with them.
Thanks for passing this tool on - looks like it's better
suited than the Write activity for reading.
On Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 2:51 PM, Gonzalo Odiard
<godi...@sugarlabs.org <mailto:godi...@sugarlabs.org>> wrote:
I am available to work (on contract) in these
features if you are interested.
Thank you for the offer, Gonzalo. Fortunately, we do have
some money raised to pay programmers. Right now I'm just
trying to identify which tasks to ask people to tackle. Bear
in mind that this is my first experience with software
development; thanks for being patient,everyone, as we try to
figure out what is and isn't doable, and what is and isn't
worth doing.
On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 7:52 PM, Tony Anderson
<tony_ander...@usa.net <mailto:tony_ander...@usa.net>> wrote:
Also on the list is a 'comments' capability so that
learners can make comments and give rankings for the
books they read from the school server library and which
would be linked to the book entry on the school server.
Do you currently have a system in place for organizing books
on the schoolserver? I know on the Haiti IIAB release we have
a searchable copy of Project Gutenberg; I don't know how easy
it is to add entries to that. In the past, we just added
books by creating another link that goes to a page with a
list of the PDF files available. But since we're looking at
adding at least 300 more books, plus whatever the texts the
students are able to write, so searching by title would be
nice / necessary. We're also looking for sorting by level and
topic. Finally, the ability to comment and give rankings is
essential if you want students to start reading socially. If
you've made / plan to make any headway on the above, I'd love
to hear more about it. Thanks.
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