I’d like to start by offering my condolences to those who have lost loved ones in the attacks in Kampala.
Now, a word on my fellow interns, since they are such an integral part of my experience here, and since some parties back home may be reading this and I’m sure would like to know. To be as brief as possible, we are seven and have been more or less joined at the hip from the tie I’ve arrived, even on the fantastic trips we’ve organised to various places in and out of the country, all of which have contributed to a great feeling of togetherness within the program.
The past week has been a hectic one, with OLPC having been given the task of training 300 teachers in a five-day session, which was later cut to four when Monday was declared a national holiday. This post will be dedicated to the training session, what worked and what could be improved on.
The group had a discussion yesterday which I thought to be exceptionally fruitful. While I can only speak for myself, it certainly helped me clarify some of my intuitive impressions on last week. One pint that came up almost immediately was the issue of a vast disparity in the experience and abilities of the teachers we were training. While some were complaining that they wanted to use more complex programs, load data to their flash drive and so on, others were still learning how to use the mouse. While it was suggested that grouping teachers according to ability could alleviate this problem, I think there ought to be a better way. For a start, there will be situations in the future in which it will be impossible to create separate streams, for example if we are training very small groups of teachers. It could also be difficult to extract reliable information regarding experience and proficiency with IT prior to the training session. I also saw a great deal of peer-to-peer learning going on, which would lose much of its value if groups were streamed according to ability.
The obvious answer is that we should have more trainers and smaller groups of teachers, so that trainers have the time to deal with individual cases who are falling behind. However, this is beyond our control to an extent. Other than this, I can see two strategies we could implement: in the first, suggested by Desiré, we can confine more advanced functions of the XO to ‘bonus time’, when everyone has completed the more basic tasks. The advantage of this is that it will seem fair to those teachers who would like to move on, and they will also be encouraged to help their colleagues. Secondly, we can have workshops at the end of each day for those who feel that they have not grasped the main ideas communicated. Although one of the best things for me about last week was the feeling, at the end of the day, of having done a day’s work, I think interns could even push a little harder, and go home a little later, to ensure that every teacher is up to scratch.
Carrying on from this problem, I often found during teacher training that while the majority of teachers had grasped the basics of using the XO laptop, a few were unable, even by the third day, to bring up or use the frame. This brought to my attention that while we had some excellent lesson plans for teaching Write, Record, and other activities – indeed many of these few teachers could use the individual activities – we still have no procedure for teaching the basics. Furthermore, looking at the material in the handbook, the basics are a much harder subject to teach: they have no inherent structure or narrative which we can use, and no obvious way to break them up. I would therefore suggest that we either develop a way of breaking the subject up into a memorable lesson, or that we devote more time to teaching the basics than we did last week.
In all, I felt that a great deal was achieved in a small time, and that while there will always be areas we can improve on, the formula was correct, and we are building on solid ground for the next training in September.
Sam at OLPC 