XO and the teachers

Last time I rambled a bit about building a community around the XO in India. An important aspect of this task would be to obtain buy-in from teachers who are enthusiastic enough to adapt to this new method and tool to impart education. A significantly high percentage of the success rate would be determined by the effort put in towards ensuring that teachers feel comfortable using the XO to teach the children between 6 and 12 years. This means that while new activities are being created, they have to be woven around the ways teachers impart the content of the book. The XO would change the teachers as much as it changes the students by providing learning opportunities for both of them. The XO along with the School Server is designed to provide repositories of information in a manner that is not readily available through the conventional teaching pedagogy. The XO Teacher Community would require sufficient attention towards transparent collaboration in order to ensure that the deployments are effective. This includes going above and beyond just creating activities – it demands that there is communication amongst teachers to understand the impact of re-usability of activities and learning materials that can be shared. A fundamental change that the XO drives is that it creates activities and workflows around the notion of “sharing” and “collaboration” and this thought is evident in the current set of applications and activities that make up the hardware. Do read the Learning Vision page if you think you know an educator who would be interested in this and mail the team if you want to participate.