On 07/03/2011 08:35 AM, Binand Sethumadhavan wrote:
2011/7/2 Rony gnulinuxist@gmail.com:
That is precisely what you dont want to do - buying someone else's idea of an idea. Content creation must be part of the students work, whereby they can directly feel the original idea. Amit Dhakulkar's use of a gps to teach physics, maths and geography is one such. Kids in Khalapur recording tales told by their grandparents is another. Many such absolutely interesting stuff in Khalapur.
[Apologies for the attribution error. I did not receive the email with this original text]
The teachers have to tread a middle path here. Significant deviations from the syllabi prescribed by the powers to be leads to the wrath of the parents/guardians who dream of their wards acing the class XII exam and getting into a good professional college. Thus they, in the current Indian milieu, cannot allow the students unrestricted content creation access.
True. There has to be some syllabus affiliated to some Board for formal certification and further acceptance of the certification in other institutions. For very interactive communication, the number of students per class has to be drastically reduced too.
So, what happens (again, I am recalling from the market research I did for Next back in November 2009) is that the schools get the hardware and software aligned to the syllabi from the company, and then encourage the students to explore while staying aligned with the pedagogical requirements.
This is not happening in all the Mumbai schools that have these IWBs. Hardware is being sold with limited or no software and teachers are being asked to make power point shows for their daily teaching. Plus, in case any contract is over, _some_ multimedia content will not open. I am repeating my earlier point that showing a video or a slide show or a web site can be done using a simple computer and projector too. The students can also interact as they do with the IWB, by using the mouse and keyboard.
If a subject / topic is to be understood for the first time by a student, how will the discovering method work unless he has some clue of what he needs to discover.
This is a very naive view of the world. How did stalwarts like Newton, Darwin or anyone else ever discover anything? Nobody pointed Einstein that there is something called the General Theory of Relativity that is waiting to be discovered.
Newton, Darwin, Einsten were not school children. They had experience and learning behind them. For adults, learning new things is easier as they already have some knowledge foundation over the years. For school children learning everything for the first time, this is not possible.