ideas arising from student blogs

I'm behind on my marking of student blogs but managed read, think about and comment on their first impressions blogs today. This enables me to spell out student requirements in more detail and also clarified for me where the students are at. Hence, through reading and thinking about their blogs I put together a list of questions for further discussion.

I am also formalizing a request to show initiative. What is initiative? Well, I can't tell you can I because if I told you it would be my initiative and not yours. Ha ha. But I can tell you that some students have already surprised me with their initiative:

control-tech-sama for writing up blog links on the weekend - something that I was intending everyone to do but he did it without asking
darkdragonzz for asking three great questions of the Timor Leste guest speakers
air sok for attracting the attention of a blogger in rwanda!!!



STUDENT REQUIREMENTS (nuts and bolts, nitty gritty)

• include paragraphs in your writing
• it is best to centre your screenshots and pictures
• setup the time zone on your blogs correctly
• go into detail in your writing, generalisations on their own are not very helpful
• setup a blog roll and leave comments on the blogs of other students
• make sure your comments option is switched on so others can leave comments

MARKS

At this stage marks are redeemable if you want to improve your mark but write me a separate blog post about it if you update an old blog

IDEAS FOR FUTURE LESSONS

1) Identify which activities you would like to explore more - give reasons - get into groups to organise this one - it's ok for one person to write for the group but make sure you identify the other group members by pseudonym

2) Get into groups and have a competition as to who can make the best game using physics
assessment: One of the students in the group posts a screenshot of the best game and writes a description of the rules, who developed it etc.

Lesson plan: Monday 3rd August

These are clarification and discussion questions that arose out of reading and thinking about student blogs:

NOT SO HARD

1. some people are saying sugar is slow and others are saying it is fast, which is true? (on our PCs, it would be a different story on the xo machine which has less RAM)
2. ability of the xo screen to turn 180 degrees - this is for book reader mode, need to demonstrate
3. what is the target audience for the xo?
4. what are the core principles of the xo project?
5. what is pippy?
6. sugar os has 4 screens: neighbourhood, groups, home, current activity (F1-F4) - we don't have the first two working yet but they should work once we setup a jabber server
7. what is the best name for the green machine? olpc, xo or $100 laptop?
8. what is the xo-2? find a picture and description of it

HARDER QUESTIONS

1. What are the different variants of linux? Is linux a serious threat to windows? why? why not?
2. what is an operating system (os)? examples? characteristics? is sugar an os? what is the purpose of an os? is sugar simple or simplistic?
3. what type of games should there be on educational software?
4. who is joel stanley, look him up on the internet, he will be our next guest