Zone of Proximal Development | Writing to learn and learning about learning.

My son has tremendous difficulty making legible letter shapes. Writing stories is really a trial for him. A teacher suggested perhaps a laptop would work for him. He has no problem typing and he’s actually an excellent speller. Maybe that would work. So, I went laptop shopping and found a Toshiba A200-AH1 on sale at the Future Shop for $530, for $50 more I picked up an HP C4280 printer/scanner/copier. I don’t need a printer, but I’ve been wanting a new scanner. I brought the system home and booted an Edubuntu install disk. A short time later, the drive was reformatted and the laptop is now running Edubuntu.

My kids are delighted to have two systems to play on now. One uses iggy (the iMac) while the other uses tosh (the laptop). They’re learning there are multiple ways of doing things. They’re also learning that what works in one environment doesn’t necessarily work in the other. Even so, they can still get done what they want to do. Mind you, their needs aren’t all that demanding, yet. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.