OLPCorps UniversityofBritishColumbia Kenya

OLPCorps_University of British Columbia_Kenya_Dumont

Introduction

We are two graduate university students in the department of Education at the University of British Columbia located in Canada. With the guidance and support of several local Kenyan NGOs, we will deploy 100 XO laptops to Mbita Primary School in Mbita, Kenya – a rural community along the shores of Lake Victoria. The school is very close to the Suba Youth Resource Centre which can also be used as a meeting place for when schools are closed in August.

Primary school finishing rates are sometimes not above 50% in Kenya. Most rural areas have limited access to digital technologies. This community has a small computer lab of older generation stand-alone machines with limited software. A program currently exists to train teachers and women how digital literacy skills, but currently there are no such opportunities for learners in primary or secondary schools.

Working with Children

The XO machine offers a wide variety of activities that can be used to facilitate learning in many areas. We are making ourselves familiar with the Kenyan primary school curricula in order to better integrate its use naturally into the classroom. We see music education as an approach to reinforcing some of the course content in several areas – such as language arts, spelling, arithmetic and writing skills. The XO has capabilities for the children to read, write, capture music performances through video and audio and to create and edit music projects.

The primary school curricula of Kenya are divided into thematic topics that are covered throughout the eight years of primary school. Some of these topics include the environment, health education, and global citizenship. We would be willing to work with the teachers to integrate the activities of the XO as they explore these topics.

Local Partner

The main partnering NGO will be Rural Schools , Computers and Educational Materials program (RUSCEMP-K). Mr. Dan Njiriri and Dan Otedo will be the contact persons for this project. Also implicated in this initiative are NGOs Suba Teachers Guidance And Counseling Association (SUTGUCA), The African Center for Women,Informations and Communications Technology(ACWICT), and Teachers Without Borders who are deploying a team there for teacher professional development in early August of 2009.

Impact on Children

Typically, primary school learners have a passive and quiet role in the Kenyan school classroom. This does not always promote the most effective learning. Collaboration and communication between students as they use the XOs to construct and create content will be emphasized as an approach to learning. Students will be encouraged to learn from each other through talking and collaboration while they use the XOs.

It is hoped that students will feel empowered as they share their music and other created content with the local community. To that end, we would like to ensure that there would be a music festival where the community would come and observe the accomplishments of the students.

We would also like to emphasize the theme of global citizenship with the students by introducing them to some digital content created by our own students. By showing them the videos our students from Canada created for the Kenyan students, we hope that we can create a lasting relationship that we will take back with us to our students at the end of the program and that we can continue to promote over the long term.

Communication

The languages used at the school we will be working at are both Swahili and English. Although neither of us speak Swahili, we chose to work with the older children at the school that have a higher level of English than the younger ones. As teachers, we have worked with many children whose first languages are not English and both of us have taught abroad in a variety of countries including Korea, Thailand and Burma.

We are hoping to facilitate literacy by providing additional ebooks in Swahili and English to use to encourage reading and listening by the students.

Because of our focus on music education, we would like to use the various features of the XO to create and record music both in the local language(s) and in English.

Financial Support once we leave

We strongly believe that it is important to continue working with the community once we are gone. Projects that allow our students, here in Canada to partner with students in Kenya using their new laptops are endless. Myriam’s grade 5 students are currently involved in fundraising 80$ a semester to send a child in Kenya to school. They also have been educating other students in the school about the cause and have many students of all ages involved. We will ensure that once we have returned from Kenya we are not solely the ones responsible for providing support but to have the communities we live in and work in collaborate on ways in which we can provide financial support for this school. We have also worked with teachers without borders canada for a number of years.