Open Source Education Consulting at Middle School in Bronx

James Governor has talked about open source industry analysis, I attended a talk organised by the ACS Toowoomba chapter, from an open source consultant. No he doesn’t implement Linux servers. Pat Wagner does his consulting openly, and blogs publicly about how his consulting engagement is going over at the 339 middle school in New York.

Pat talked about how Google docs and spreadsheets collaboration features were used to devastating effect on helping teachers to work together with unit plans, meetings. Students had blogs to keep their daily reflection, and parents and other students were able to comment openly, providing feedback. The principal had a blog detailing events of the day. 

Pat consults from Australia, and made regular use of Skype and Google chat to keep in touch with the teachers. In addition, he is able to watch changes made to spreadsheets and word documents and comment on them as they are written.

An interesting application of Google docs is the use of version diff. For example, after an English lesson on the use of strong verbs, a teacher can use diff to see if students had applied the lessons and made changes to their original essays.

Not every student has been assigned a computer. Instead, they have work areas of 6 computers, and students rotate into the work areas during class to update their blogs and do computer based exercises.

This is a success story that bears repeating and shows how much more can be done with our schools. Over in Australia, there’s been a lot of discussion about how we can lift the standard of education in Aboriginal communities. There’s no reason if it can be done over in New York, it couldn’t be done in Aurukun or Alice Springs.