Education Team/Meetings/2009-03-06

Minutes

The meeting log has been transcribed.

Introductions

We had introductions from walter, rita, FGrose, caroline, jt4sugar, manugupta, deepank, tomeu, and garycmartin and regrets from tony forster (for whom a 2am meeting time was not going to work) It was noted that none of us are classroom teachers, although many of us have intimate connections to teachers.

Discussion of our mission

We had a general consensus around our mission and spent most of our time discussion means and goals.

• We made some headway in defining our target audiences, but not much progress on defining goals for those audiences.
• ACTION: We discussed broadening our channels of communication to include social networking sites, including Facebook, linkedin, Classroom2.0, ning, etc. and tools other than IRC, such as VOIP (SKYPE). We need volunteers to oversee those efforts. (If we build it and they come, we need to make sure that there is a community connection.)
• ACTION: A concrete suggestion was made to set up tagged email threads for each Sugar Activity, perhaps by language as well, but fed back into IAEP (or perhaps Sur), e.g., Subject: [LABYRINTH]...Subject: [BROWSE]... Subject: [TORTUGA ART]... We are looking for someone familiar with Mailman to help set this up efficiently.
• We discussed some needs, such as preparing introductory Sugar materials for workshops as short as 2-4 hours or as long as a week.
• http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/fourthgrademath/ was raised as an example of interaction between developers and teachers.
• We discussed the need for teacher-oriented tools for creating/distributing/using PDFs as a first-class Sugar object.(Similar discussions are underway re web objects in general, FLASH/GNASH, and Javascript).
• It was observed that we want to foster communities of practice because that is the only scalable way to support teachers; but its important to understand which are our needs and wants and which are the teachers.
• We had talked about the need for scalable support structures; examples such as [1] were offered.
• ACTION: We agreed that for next time, everyone would bring 1-2 "means" for to the discussion that we can discuss in order: what, why, how, by whom

Survey design

We are putting together a survey for the teachers attending a Sugar workshop in Uruguay. We'd like to be comprehensive, covering a range of topics; we are targeting a 15-minute length and will encourage teachers to include a link to more information, such as a blog, and to encourage them to survey their students.

• ACTION: Please add your questions.
• We are considering using http://www.limesurvey.org to host the survey. It seems to have good multilingual support.

Decide on a regular meeting time

We acknowledge that the meeting time was not ideal, especially for teachers and those living in UTC+11.

• ACTION: Please add your preferred meeting time to the list we are accumulating.