Week 2 - Day 1

After the first week of getting to know the teachers and what they are capable of, we thought we could set some ambitious goals for the next five days (posted earlier). While we may make some minor changes, the schedule seems like it will work out well. We talked it over with the teachers, today, and they seemed semi-confident and excited that they would be proficient with almost all of the activities by the end of this week.

We started this class by taking a poll to see how the teachers feel about the laptop and how they are using it at home. While we may publish the full results soon, one thing that we noticed today was that some of the teachers are afraid to let their young children – the intended demographic – use the computers. In actuality, if the teachers would just trust that their kids won’t break the XO and they let their kids use it at night, the kids could probably teach their parents by the end of the week. To boost the teachers’ confidence, James picked up his laptop, walked to the center of the circle and dropped it on the cement, classroom floor.

The computer still worked.
The teachers were impressed.
I… needed a moment.

From there we began working with the newspaper articles that everyone had due for today. With the exception of one teacher, the entire class came prepared with articles and supporting pictures. Honestly, I was a bit surprised. I knew that almost all were capable, but I thought at least one would come early saying that they had trouble with importing the photo, formatting, saving, something. Nope – not one. Good job class.

The teachers paired up and peer-edited their papers before sharing with the rest of the class. There were articles on recent events, health benefits of the papaya, information on Malaria, and an incredibly candid interview on Education in Senegal. We were hoping to put these together as online newspaper, but the program we wanted to work with may or may not work – we’ll know for sure soon. In the mean time, we’re working with a blog and the teachers were quite impressed as they saw their articles begin to appear on the World Wide Web.

Next, we moved to email and made sure that everyone was able to write, send and reply to emails. This is not a program that is intrinsic to the XO, however, given that they have internet and they can utilize his in a number of ways, we thought it was important to work into the training. Also, the teachers may use this as an efficient way of collecting certain assignments from students, staying in touch with each other, and, helpful to us all, staying in touch with us.

For the rest of the class, we talked to the teachers about future project ideas, the rest of the week, and, again, how they were feeling about the progress. It is incredibly important to keep up to date on their impressions of the training and the computers. Something that we keep in mind, and something we made sure to impress upon them, is that Stephanie, James, Eli, and I are only here for so many weeks. Devon will stay after we are gone, but they still need to get as much out of these classes as possible. Issues that exist when we leave will take much longer to resolve than issues which we can work on in person – no matter how well they can use their email.