Week 3 - Day 1: Start of Student Training

Our goal is that the teachers are able to most of the teaching for the student training. This is the reason we trained them for two full weeks before starting student training and are continuing their training along with the students. Although we could train the students ourselves, there is no way we could do it as well, and the teachers need to practice working with the students anyhow.

To start off Monday, we talked to the teachers about what they thought the students should learn first. The teachers were a bit timid, first suggesting that the students get comfortable with the mouse and keyboard. We agree that this is important but thought that the students could handle a bit more their first day. The next suggestion was that we focus on just opening and turning on the computer, and then opening, writing and saving a document. Again, we thought this was a bit too simple for the entire afternoon. In the end, we agreed that Paint would be an OK way to practice some of those skills and had the teachers make the Senegalese flag in Paint to brush up on the activity.

From there we reviewed Turtle Art, making sure that all of the teachers were able to make shapes and designs without our help. At first, there were a few that needed some reminders but all them had a pretty good grasp by the end. They even used calculate to figure out the hypotenuse of a Right triangle and then make a few other shapes using calculate.

In the afternoon, teaching was delayed a little. Right before class was to start, the sky opened up and dumped a small lake on our school over the course of about 30 minutes. This meant that even though some of the kids were there, the teachers were not. Also, leaky metal roofs function similarly to snare-drums in hard rain – it was nearly impossible to speak to the person next to you, let alone a class of 40 children.

Eventually the rain slowed and we began handing out the laptops. Unlike the teachers who had a bit of difficulty opening the laptops for the first time, as soon as the children had them, they either quickly figured out how to open it or had taken note of their neighbors approach – it never takes a kid long to open up a present. They started the computers, entered their names, picked their color theme, and changed the language.

By the time the students were finishing with that, the two teachers for that day had arrived. I have to admit that they were better than we were at getting the kids attention. The teachers started by allowing them a bit of free time with the program to let them explore.

It was interesting to see the way kids get ideas from each other. On one side of the room, the kids made a number of shapes and a variety of colors create all kinds of designs and images. In the middle, the kids used a decent amount of these things but seemed to be working on more focused ideas. On the opposite side, most of the kids were working on one image and starting over with a clear screen if they had either finished or disliked their picture. It was good to see that they are taking ideas from each other and that they working together to learn the computer. I just hope that they don’t let the people around them influence their projects too much.

After a while, we did a few directed activities with Paint just to make sure that the kids understood most of the basics and then finished the day by letting them look around the computer a bit. The kids loved the class and can’t wait till tomorrow. Rain or shine, I have a feeling that they’re coming back tomorrow.