Talk:Teacher's Tools

Talk about what you want or don't want in the project here.

Version 0.1

Design & Prototype comments from User:Wade

I'd like to suggest a name for this activity: "Pop Quiz".

- The 1st screen is what the teacher would see, and have the opportunity to input a question, an answer, as well as the maximum time the students will have to answer. Then they would click send/submit and the students would receive the question on their screens.

This screen is very straightforward and nicely done. However, I think the format should be multiple choice. Text answer/response is way too slow and inaccurate. The teacher should be able to provide several answers to choose from (e.g. multiple choice). The question and answers should be able to be text, a picture (imported from the Journal) and/or sound. It should be possible to create a sequence of questions offline and save them to the Journal (with the pictures and sounds included in the Journal bundle).

- The 2nd screen is what the student would see after the teacher submits a question. The teachers question is displayed as well as a timer and a space for an answer. When the timer runs out, an answer is submitted regardless, otherwise the student can just input an answer and send/submit it.

This is screen is also well done. In multiple choice, the user should just have to click on the right answer.

- The 3rd and 4th screens are both for the teacher. The 3rd screen is the general statistics of the class: Percent that got it correct, the number of students that selected each answer, the average time it took them to answer. The 4th screen is a representation of the class room organized by the name of the XO per student. The teacher can hover over the XO symbol to see the XO's name immediately, and if they continue to hover over it (like in the XO user interface) more information about that particular XO will be displayed such as what answer was selected, and the exact time it took them to answer.

I feel that these screens need to be redesigned. First, eliminate the third screen - this information could be a small box at the bottom of the fourth screen. On the fourth screen, the XO images hide critical information. You should display a grid with the XO's name and answer, highlighted based on whether the answer was correct or incorrect. There should be no clicking or hovering required by the teacher.

Finally, there should be a button for the teacher to "end" the quiz. This will show the teacher final percentages for each student and the class as a whole, and will show each student their complete list of right and wrong answers and percent right.

If you need help figuring out how to code this activity in Python, let me know!

Best, Wade 17:27, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Why FLash?

Is there any advantage of developing this activity in Flash instead of as a native Sugar app in Python? The disadvantages of course are (1) that it requires loading Flash (or Gnash) which is not easy on the systems currently in the field (less of an issue in 0.86+) and (2) Flash is difficult if not impossible to localize. --Walter 17:39, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I should have been more clear about this. I plan to eventually have it coded in Python, but I don't know any and in the course of a couple weeks, felt that I was unable to learn enough to code this project in Python. Instead, this is just a prototype that I created to get across the general idea and feedback. It's in flash because flash is very graphically oriented and I can easily code in it. The final deployment will be in Python, or whatever else is easily supported by the XO that the end developer chooses to code in --Alex

Student create the questions

Could we have a mode where students could create the questions. A scenario might be that each student creates one math word problem and the class does all of them. For this mode we might want just the teacher to be able to see individual answers.

Making questions takes the teachers time and deprives the student of a learning experience of creating.

The problem is what if the students question or answer is wrong?

--For now I think I would like to keep most of the work on the teacher because they would also have more control over how and when the activity is used. Yes, later on it can be implemented to allow students to create questions, but for now I view the project as more of an easy aid for the teacher to quickly see their students' knowledge in certain areas. As for creating questions, yes this does take time, but eventually I'd like to work with the school server team to try and have them host 'pre-made' packets of 20 or 30 or 50 questions that teachers can download and use. The other thing is that these questions don't have to be unique to the activity, if it was a homework question that most students got wrong, put it up on the screen and quickly see what the response is, rather than check through all the homeworks to see who got it wrong. Also, in case it wasn't made clear (because I'm not very good at that yet), this is tailored towards elementary classes in developing countries. Regardless, thank you so much for your feedback and like I said earlier, it can all be implemented, I just might not be the one to do it. --Alex

Contact

If you need any help contact/email Alex Jones email: acj3840@rit.edu
IRC: Boe08
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