Teacher Preparation Workshop

Teachers Preparation Workshop at Mehfooz Shahid Model School April 16 -24,2008

• We launched a teacher preparation workshop (TPW) in collaboration with National Rural Support Program (NRSP) in one their schools located in a Islamabad valley. There are 9 teachers that are permanent faculty of the School along with volunteer and visiting faculty who are mostly community members interested in helping the school. For this TPW(Teacher preparation Workshop) 10 teachers registered and 19 showed up to participate – this included mothers of pupils in the school and volunteer teachers.

Teachers Preparation Workshop at Mehfooz Shahid Model School

• Workshop was designed specifically for this purpose by Habib Khan.It emphasized on constructionist approach of learning by using OLPC. One training day consisted of 3 hrs per day as the female teachers. The attendance and the excitement of the teachers was high we had more participants from the school and community.

Workshop was designed specifically for this purpose by Habib Khan. It emphasized on constructionist approach of learning by using OLPC. One training day consisted of 3 hrs per day as the female teachers. The attendance and the excitement of the teachers was high we had more participants from the school and community. Detailed Workshop design can be seen as attachment. It mainly focused on the following disciplines:

• Problems and issues of Education in Pakistan.
• Different methods of learning using the constructivist theories by Piaget and Seymour Papert
• Introduction to XO laptop, and its features
• Basic Activities i.e. Paint, Record, Write
• Musical Activities, Tam Tam bundles
• Turtle Art , E-Toys
• Mesh networking and Sharing activities
• Examination and Evaluation of the experience.

OLPC team that conducted TPW consisted of Waqas, Salman, and Habib. It concluded on Thursday 24 April, 2008 after a detailed session on evaluation and a hands-on exercise. It followed the constructivism approach to learning. Exploring, discussions and sharing approach this as our workshop strategy enabled us to demonstrate to how learn learning and to think and to employ it in classroom teaching by the participating teachers.

We provided every participant of the workshop with an XO which they took home and showed it to their families. It generated a more excitement among the entire community. It is very interesting to observe that teachers who never used a computer were equally as good as those who used PC. One teacher commented “ OLPC is easy to use because it has no Windows.” A volunteer teacher and mother of three exclaimed that home view needs to be more colorful and attractive.

Some main finding of the workshop based on teachers feed is summarized below:

• Most teachers believed that the cause of poor quality of education is due to lack of understanding by the children because schools emphasize rote learning a by product of instructional method of education
• They maintained that that the quality of education can be improved by Preparing teachers
• Most of the teachers found that:
  • The easiest Activity was writing where as Turtle art was the most difficult activity this may be attributed to their training in a system that does not encourage thinking.
  • Tam tam and Record activities were the most interesting and fun activities
• Some teachers found XO better than Windows who were familiar with conventional computers
• Some teachers wanted a more colorful Sugar user-interface with the ability to make pictures as wallpapers
• Quran Activity was very popular amongst all teachers.