Re: [IAEP] Introduction: teacher interested in SOAS
Kevin Pato, Thanks so much for the heads-up around this issue. These are definitely issues I was thinking about. I've spoken to our after-school coordinator about getting together a small group to trial this with, and she is pretty excited about the idea. 1. What size of USB will you use? Last year we had a usb donation drive for our older students who use them in the standard way. It was an overwhelming success, yielding far more than we need for the older students, and drives in all shapes and sizes. I've been using 2 gig drives in my testing, but I can see how that would fill up fast with the video recording activity. We took videos of our traditional rhymes. I love these! More importantly I think the more traditional teachers at my school would love it too! Too bad my spanish is so poor! 2. Will your computers boot from USB? I've already confirmed that I can configure the BIOS to boot from USB if present! No problem here. 3. Sticks will fail at a high rate. As I mentioned in my first post, we have about a 20% failure rate on our sticks every sessions. Yesterday, one student had to try 3 sticks before we got one that would work. This is pretty distressing to me, as a reliable persistant save space is really the biggest reason for doing this in my book. Hopefully with the benefit of your experience we can improve on that 20% figure. This means we always take a lot of back-ups. Can I infer from this that the XS server does some sort of automated backup? I've been trying to figure out how essential the server is, and whether it is worth the effort to set up, but that's probably a discussion better suited to the SOAS tech list. We were able to figure out that one computer was the problem, not the sticks, so be prepared to be methodical in tracking the sticks and computers. Did you figure out what the issue was with the PC? Do I need to bother with tracking if all PCs are hardware identical? The problem diminished some when we teach these students the meaning of the flashing LED on the usb. If you had blinked, you had to wait. My notion is that I will train the students to watch the PC's power light rather than the read/write light on the USB stick. Possible rhyme for remembering to do so: Don't take it BACK until the light goes BLACK! Thanks so much for the advice. I will keep in touch as the project progresses, with blog entries to come! -John ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Introduction: teacher interested in SOAS
Thanks so much for the warm welcome. Particularly to Patricio, Harriet, and Kevin for sharing such fascinating links. If it's okay, I'm going to use this list as a sounding board for my thoughts as I explore Sugar. Again, if there's a better place for this type of thing, please let me know! So far, I'm getting the impression that Sugar on A Stick is more or less limited to experimental university-school partnerships, and hasn't yet reached a phase of wide deployment in the hands of schools. Is this an accurate assessment? The reason I'm interested in SOAS is that I work in the traditional computer lab setting that is so familiar in K12 schools in the US. This setting has a lot of restrictions and drawbacks. A big one is that, even though the students are surrounded by computers in my lab, and to varying degrees at home, they have no opportunity to take ownership of these devices. They can't monkey about with the precious computers that we adults see as far to precious to fully hand over to children. A very basic symptom of this is that the students simply can't save their work. A save dialog box on most computers is very difficult to learn for the uninitiated. Add to this that all files which don't make it onto a shared network or USB drive are basically instantly lost given the shared nature of school computers. If the kids can't do something as simple as save a piece of writing, the computer is far less useful than a notebook. In this light, SOAS looks very appealing. The promise of handing a student their own _persistant_ computer where they are free to explore is exactly what I've been looking for. (to say nothing of sugar's Journal which I think is a brilliant answer to the above problem). I'm curious, how do my motivations match up with how you guys think about sugar? -John ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Introduction: teacher interested in SOAS
Hi there, Not sure if this email list is the proper place to post, but I wanted to introduce myself to the community. I work in Philadelphia, teaching technology and media literacy at a K-6 (ages about 4-12) charter school. I'm interested in using Sugar on a Stick with my 5-7 year old students. I need a bit of guidance as I explore this new territory, both on the technical and the pedagogical side of things. So, first question: have I got the right community or should I be posting elsewhere? -John Landis ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
