Marketing Team/Pitches

Teachers
original draft by Walter Bender, posted on the marketing mailing list.

Teachers,

Imagine a classroom where instruction is complimented by learners engaged in self-discovery; where collaboration, expression, and reflection are integrated directly into the learning experience.

Through the Sugar Learning Platform, students appropriate knowledge by engaging in activities that are authentic to them. With Sugar, students at all skill levels can explore any curriculum goal more deeply. Your students will learn and they will learn to learn.

Features:

Sugar is easy to learn: teachers and students discover how to use Sugar through exploration and collaboration—together, you learn by doing.

Sugar can accommodate a wide variety of students, with different levels of skill in terms of reading, language, and different levels of experience with computing. It is easy to approach, yet it doesn't put an upper bound on the student's personal expression.

The Sugar interface always shows the presence of other learners. Students dialog with each other, support each other, critique each other, and share ideas. Activities such as peer editing are just one "mouse-click" away.

Sugar uses a "Journal" to record each student's activities: both what they make and how they make it. The Journal serves as a place for reflection and assessment of progress—a portfolio that can be shared with teachers, parents, and the student as they progress through grade levels.

Pedagogy:

Based upon 40+ years of educational research, Sugar promotes "studio thinking": demonstrations, projects, and critiques; as well as "studio habits of mind": develop craft, engage and persist, envision, express, observe, reflect, stretch and explore, and understand the art world. In the context of Sugar, studio thinking is applied not just to the arts, but to all disciplines.

Reflective practice involves students applying their own experiences to practice while being mentored by domain experts. In the context of Sugar, the expert could be a teacher, a parent, a community member, or a fellow student.

While Sugar is designed for elementary school classrooms, it will hold the interest of middle schoolers as well.

Getting started:

Sugar is a great way to augment your classroom: it is simple; it is powerful; it is boundless; and it is free! To learn more about Sugar and how you can use it in your classroom, see...