from Kathleen
These last few months I've been thinking about why we have not had more k-5 classroom teachers adopt Etoys here in Champaign.
Some conclusions:
1. There are not enough computers in classrooms: a laptop cart shared among rooms is inefficient, time in computer labs seems dedicated to common business production tools or web research into topics decided by classroom teachers, rooms that do have computers don't have enough of them.
2. There is not enough time in core curriculum classes where standards, goals, and lesson plans are already embedded entrenched, and bench marked. My best example is that math teachers already know what mathematics is although a lot of what I see in the books looks like arithmetic. The collective memory of math teachers bases its teaching in methods thousands of years old and leads them to believe they already understand how to develop mathematics reasoning. It seems rigid and tradition bound.
3. The focus on standardized testing limits teachers' enthusiasm and willingness to try new ideas which take time from test preparation.
4. Computer Science will become a standard part of school days when there is a curriculum that people can look at and judge whether it would benefit their students. Right now, CS is not part of the testing mania and may be a niche we could exploit. . .and fill.
The Squeakland site (and Etoys Illinois) have, so far, focused on showing how Etoys could benefit children in many subjects and we have produced projects that exemplify this idea. Avigail Snir who I work with here, still firmly thinks it will be best if classroom teachers use it with their students in many subjects and wishes it could be integrated into the school day, in classrooms, as an inquiry tool. But are teachers willing to invest their class time for the new tool? My answer is no.
Will schools start to look for ways to provide their students with an education that prepares them for a future where computers will be ubiquitous/pervasive? Maybe. I am beginning to suspect that no matter how many wonderful projects we show in the web sites they are only activities and what is needed is a well conceived curriculum that leads children through the development of CS ideas and concepts using Etoys in a systematic way.
My belief in all of the above has led me to change my goals. I am starting to write an Etoys-based K-5 curriculum because I think we can not convince enough classroom teachers one at a time to tip the balance toward a wide spread adoption of Etoys. We will be better off addressing decision makers, policy makers, and public opinion.
Etoys/Squeakland has educators in France, Spain, Brasil, Germany, and Japan. What if . . . each of us wrote a curriculum for a proposed k-5 course in our country. When Marta wrote to me this weekend about the OLPCs in Uruguay she said she doubted if they would use any materials or web site in English. We can't translate curriculum and we shouldn't since each country has its own goals. But we can provide model curricula for people to consider, to comment on, and to compare and, we can provide a big idea . . . computer science is beneficial to students much younger than high school.
We don't need to coordinate our efforts beyond saying we will do it. I think it would be very good to have many points of view represented; there are many paths to the same goal, there are many worthy goals.
I will be writing for K-5 because I taught at that level: music for 18 years, plus Enrichment for 8 more. My experience at the middle school is too far in the past. I am pretending it will be a scheduled class students take like music, art, pe, and library. These courses are taught by specialists my degrees are in music. The course will be scheduled for two half hour sessions every week, 40 weeks a year for six years.The course will be built around many of the same kinds of activities we are already doing but the activities would be organized by scope and sequence and given time to be incorporated into how children think, inquire, and analyze ideas in many subjects.
Do you know of any universities that are pioneering degree programs for teaching CS in K-12 schools? Most of the K-12 CS curriculum I have have seen focus on grades 11 and 12 and get very blurry at the middle school level and totally miss the target in their vague suggestions for elementary students.
In addition, I think we could use the fact there are curricula in other countries to support the idea that it should be looked in our country. Along the lines of, "Well, I see that schools in Germany and France and Brasil offer a course like this in their primary schools, are we failing our students?" There is no point in our saying, a curriculum is possible it just hasn't been done yet. The people we are trying to persuade need to see it, they don't know as much about it as we do, it needs to be tangible not hypothetical.
What if the Squeakland site put a Call for Curriculum? And we answered the call. We could circulate this idea among all of the ed team at Squeakland.
