Monday, October 5, 2009

Holy Cross

While the centers are on break, I now have enough time to talk about some of the things we are doing at Holy Cross. Holy Cross recently got a new volunteer who will be there for the year, and one of his responsibilities is to continue the laptop program after others leave. We are happy that we are able to spend time with him to teach him about the laptops, as well as to develop learning projects with him before we leave. His first wee at Holy Cross we had the students, and the new volunteer, do the "XO Scavenger Hunt." This is the same thing we had the St. Mary's volunteers learn in the training session. This is a great way to see all of the things that the XO can do, as well as make people more comfortable with the activities.

At Holy Cross the children usually do their homework before they use the laptops, except on Friday which is a laptop only day. As a part of this, we have been encouraging the children to use the laptops to help them with their homework, making use of the Wiki Activity in particular. This helps the students understand the many ways in which the laptops can be used, as well as helps develop important research skills. To encourage the use of the laptops for homework purposes we have done a few projects where the students had to use the Wiki Activity. We asked about 6 students to report on and make a presentation of a planet. They had to tell us how often it orbits the sun, how large it was, if it had any moons, what it was named after, and two unique attributes of the planet. They were also asked to draw the planet in paint and show the picture as they presented the information. The students are seeing that they can use their laptops to look up information, whereas before they had to ask the volunteers to tell them
or look it up for them on the computer at the center. We hope that the students will continue to explore the many uses of the XO, and that they will continue to use it to assist them with their homework.

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