(photo by What Makes a Great Teacher)

The Atlantic published an article discussing the 20 years and 7,300 teachers worth of data collected by Teach for America.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching

 Its a great article and for this blog post I want to focus on what it says about assessment.  When we've discussed assessment on Sugar's Its an Education Project mailing list there was a tendancy to think of it in terms of the high stakes, once a year or less frequent, standardized tests. The results of these tests take months return and they are not all that useful for teachers to use to modify their teaching.

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(photo by Image from CSLUG)

Last week I went up to Durham and visited the friendly folk of NHs Linux User Group. I had a wonderful time and here is a write up from one of the attendees.

http://www.tedroche.com/blog/2010/02/09/seacoast-lug-caroline-meeks-sugar-on-a-stick Here is the presentation:

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(photo by Jacob Rus)

We, at Solution Grove, are advocates of Open Source software.  A good use of Open Source is to teach kids how to program.  One such example of Open Source is the Etoys activity from the Squeakland Foundation.  

Etoys, is an educational tool that teaches kids some powerful ideas.  It is a free software program that runs on almost all personal computers.  Using Etoys, children make their own models, stories, and games.  They learn math, science, and language arts the fun and effective way.

Read the full posts here and here about how children as well as adults at the Squeakfest '09 learned Etoys to explore and acquire more knowledge.

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(photo by Sugar FOSS Manual)

I'm going to try to post more about our progress as we get Sugar on a Stick ready for prime time. I'm going to try a sweet and sour formula

Record - http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4081

I played with Record on my iMac today.

The Sweet:

• Video worked on my iMac

The Sour:

• Audio doesn't work yet
• Video quality isn't great - but alsroot thinks he knows how to fix that!

Why should we care?

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(photo by CuriousLee)

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 22 /PRNewswire/ --

Sugar Labs(TM) announces the availability for testing of Sugar on a Stick Beta-1. This version of the free open-source Sugar Learning Platform, available at http://www.sugarlabs.org for loading on any 1 Gb or greater USB stick, is designed to facilitate exploration of the award-winning Sugar interface beyond its original platform, the One Laptop per Child XO-1, to such varied hardware as aging PCs and recent Macs to the latest netbooks.

Teachers and parents interested in trying Sugar with children can download the Sugar on a Stick beta-1 file from the Sugar Labs website and load it onto a USB stick by following the instructions at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick.

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On Friday, Walter Bender, Pablo Flores from Uruguay, and I went to FOSSVT - Vermont's Open Source and Education Conference.  We handed out Sugar on a Stick and it worked!

It worked on the eeePCs, it worked on the Dells big and small, it worked on the think pads, it worked on the classmate.  It worked on the HP tablet, including the touchscreen! It didn't work on one of the little HP netbooks but that was our only complete fail.  We had problems with accessing wireless on a few models.  One laptop needed the boot helper CD.

We had a room full of people doing Turtle Art!  It was wonderful.

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