OLPCorps UD Tanzania

StudentsTeach: Tanzania/Walimu Wanafunzi: Tanzania

OLPC Summer 2009 Proposal, 03/23/2009

Mission

StudentsTeach: Tanzania is dedicated to helping students educate themselves and their communities through the unique opportunities presented by the OLPC program and the XO laptop. Through their increased access to knowledge, current events and communication with fellow students worldwide, students will be empowered to teach and spark change in their local communities and across the world.

Team

Three students from the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Delaware: http://suapp.udel.edu/ seek to deploy 100 XO laptops to St. Pius English Medium School in Tarakea, Tanzania:

• Cate Elander: US Partnership Coordinator; Education Coordinator

• Jeff Mascornick: Technical Lead; Web-Learning Coordinator

• Fratern Tarimo: Tanzania Partnership Coordinator; Local Expert

The team will also be assisted by six technical and/or educational advisers in the US and three advisers in Tanzania assisting with the project – please see: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/StudentsTeach:_Deployment_Team for a complete list of team members and advisers.

The Project

Note: We recognize, as we are planning this project remotely and are unable to have unlimited access to the students, teachers and leadership at St. Pius, most of the plans below will change. We are committed to flexible implementation, and will adapt the project to the needs of the teachers and students.

We plan to deploy 100 XO laptops to St. Pius English Medium. School will be in session throughout deployment, so we will work with teachers in the afternoon and on weekends. We have identified a community member familiar with laptops, to whom we will send the our XO prior to deployment; he will facilitate the first teacher trainings. Training of both teachers and students to reach a level of comfort with the XO that allows seamless curriculum integration and the completion of the projects discussed below may take more time than we anticipate; we will identify and extensively train specific teachers, community members and students so that the school will not be reliant on team members to initiate or continue projects.

While the school supports about 250 students, we plan to first deploy the laptops to the three oldest classes (ages 8-10 years.) Emphasizing peer to peer learning, afterschool and Saturday sessions will be held for the older students to teach the younger students how to use the laptops. Although we will be unable to achieve a 1:1 ratio, we hope to use a library system to facilitate saturation. This will allow students that are particularly interested in further XO exploration will have increased access to the laptops. We will work with teachers to integrate the laptops into daily lessons, sharing them between grades as appropriate.

Recognizing that the curriculum at St. Pius is very structured to ensure compliance with National Exams, the extracurricular aspects of the XO Cultural and Community Exchange Project (CCEP) will occur after school and on Saturdays. CCEP will use a two-pronged approach to foster cultural exchange and student engagement in local community development:

• Through identified classroom partnerships between St. Pius and Forest View Elementary in Durham, NC, and via Voice Thread K12[1], students will use audio and digital photography to teach each other about life in their respective communities
• Through facilitated discussion with teachers and community members, students will identify community needs and upload student-prioritized community projects to a website that aggregates small donations, Global Literacy Foundation or GlobalGiving; as projects are funded, students will become the trailblazers of important work in their communities

Perhaps most importantly, St. Pius students will be able to use the church’s fellowship hall to present their CCEP projects to their families and friends, transferring their knowledge to the local community.

Sustainability

Each team member has experience working with local communities domestically and in developing countries, and we have all learned that local support and perspective is crucial to the success and sustainability of any project. Accordingly, we have been working daily to ensure that local leadership and community members have been consulted and engaged in the development of this proposal, and we will continue to engage their participation and leadership during deployment. In addition, we are confident that the following factors will increase the sustainability of the project:

• Direct connection to school leadership; Fratern’s mother is the Vice-Chair of the St. Pius Board of Directors
• Steady source of volunteers from local volunteer tourism program, Volunteer Tanzania
• Entrepreneurial internet cafe at St. Pius, offering low-cost computer lessons and web/document services, to sustain internet costs; an urgent need for these services has previously been identified