Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Make Makers of Students Tell Me More / Commentary #npredchat

Dear Miss Martin and Mr. Gusman,

I was listening to your show, Disrupting Class To Make Way For Technology. I appreciated your discussion of technology and access to learning modern tools to educate our children. Expensive tools such as Apple products, especially iPads limit access to  technology. Not only do they cost 2-3 times what an open source tablet would cost, one running Linux or Android, but they are designed so that the student may not be allowed to delve into them deeply, removing memory, replacing the operating system, and so forth. If they are just using the tablet as a mere User, instead of digging into how the tablets actually work, they are limiting the amount of access to depth of learning these tools can otherwise provide. An iPad needlessly imposes limits on what Students can learn, never mind their expensive price tag. By contrast, one can buy a generic tablet for around $70 retail.
There are several very affordable areas of technology that is largely ignored by school systems. Everything on the below list is Open Source, free to use without buying a license. They are interoperable. They are relatively inexpensive in terms of the actual hardware as well as the related manuals and books that may enhance a learning environment. All of them have huge communities for support.

Perhaps a great view into this area is expressed by this article:
With a mix of Arduino, Raspberry Pi and fun, Maker Box hopes to bolster Africa's future tech skills


Here are some keywords to read about these areas that can easily be introduced into schools at very little expense.
Arduino
Linux / Android
Raspberry Pi
Make Magazine
Python Tutorial
Using Python in a High School Computer Science Program

Other FREE Online Tutorial "Schools" http://www.codecademy.com
http://www.w3schools.com/
One of the most disruptive repositories of technology is housed within the Open Source Ecology  website. "
The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts. - See more here





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