New Teaching Programme

After discussing with another volunteer, Dan, plans for the rest of our time here, we found we were both interested in trying something new. Both of us have an interest in computing, and due to lack of funds, it is something not many students get the opportunity to do here. We decided we'd like to try setting something up to introduce more students to some basic computing skills that would help to extend their future job possibilities.

I was aware of a couple of schools having computers, so knew of a couple of options of places we might be able to set something up, we just needed permission to do so. Dan spoke with Maggie at NVS about the idea yesterday, who seemed quite keen on it, and contacted Pastor Regina (who's house I stayed at on my very first night in Kenya) who works at a school with some recently acquired computers. She also seemed keen on the idea, as despite having the computers, only her and one other teacher are able to teach, but do not have the time for it amongst everything else. We went to visit Regina at the school this morning to discuss the idea and look at what we have available on the computers, and were surprised to find they were brand new with up to date software installed, perfect for what we had planned (we expected some old out dated systems donated to the school).

We hoped to teach a couple of children per computer (10 computers so 20 students per class), however, due to the size of the room, this probably wouldn't work well. Instead, we have asked Regina to provide us with a class of 10 students, for Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, if there are enough interested (she seems confident there would be more than enough eager students). First we'll need to try to bring them all to around the same level being able to use a computer in each class, then we can move on to teaching them some more advanced stuff. Ideally we'd like to have some sort of 'course', a lesson plan for each week, over the course of so many weeks, then roll over to a new class. With something like this in place, it would be easy for other volunteers to come in and take over from the previous week, and hopefully keep this as an ongoing project after Dan and I leave in January. As long as NVS can help to get more volunteers involved, it should be possible.

It may take us a while to get some structure to the programme, but hopefully we'll have it running smoothly by the time we leave. We have almost a week to prepare for the first classes, which will likely be just assessing abilities and teaching the very basics of using a computer, giving us a couple of weeks to get together some lesson plans using Word, Excel etc.