Week IV

This week at Escaf, I was fortunate enough to be able to have a conversation with one of the teachers regarding the role of the XO laptop in his classroom. Despite the language barrier, the teacher began telling me that he loved having the option of having the XO, and that he thought it was a great addition to the learning cirricuculum. This seems to be a pretty standard answer where the teachers don't really delve into the negative aspects of it and instead lavish positive attention on having it even though they dont really know how to use it in the classroom. Knowing this, I asked him if he found it easy to include the XO into his cirriculum. He responded by saying that he, himself, found it easy to include laptop and had been using Record and Write with his students. Still, he went on to explain, he knew that a lot of his colleagues had issues incorporating it into the cirriculum. When pushed as to why this was the case, he said that a lot of the programs were a little too complicated for the students. I found this answer quite surprising, considering that i usually find the students learn the programs faster than the teachers. Not wanting to be rude, I stopped pushing and left thinking that he has just given me any answer offhand.

Since I wasnt satisfied with the answer, I was happy to have the opportunity to work with another teacher at Kagugu, where we just started to have clubs. Since Adrien was there, the language barrier was less of an issue and I was able to learn that the teacher had been strugging with the issue of having to come up with two lessons plans. One, for his normal classes, and the other specifically for the XO. This goes back to how the XO can become more of a burden than an extra tool in the classroom. the teacher also noted the situtation with the generational gap, where the older teachers seem to have more of a problem with the laptop than the younger teachers.

In my opinion, the problems that we are facing must be focused on making the teachers more comfortable so that the students can learn more. We really need to make it clear cut and specific on how the XO can help teachers. It would be optimal if we could sit down with the teachers and help them structure their lesson plans so that we can help them design just one cirriculum that combines both their normal lesso plans and the XO. For instance, at Rwamagana this week, there were a couple new teachers who had never attended a teacher training session. When I found out that one of them taught Kinyarwanda and the other one taught Mathematics, I quickly showed both of them Memorize and demonstated how they could alter it to their individual lesson plans. Both were very pleased and impressed. If we continue to provide this sort of help, we can really help the teachers become more comfortable with the XO. As one of the teachers said after the Rwamagana session, there will be "no fear" when dealing with the XO and the students will be able to benefit from the increased exposure.