Teaching Those that Teach

It was teacher training on Tuesday and we didn't get started as far from on time as one might expect (i mean, TIA...) just as we did expect though, it was raining heavily, but to be honest I think it gave the small dirty classroom that served as the Jamadianle school's main hall before they moved to the knew and bigger location some miles away some atmosphere and made all of us who were working inside feel a little closer. At least that's the way I try to look at the rain situation, for looking at it any other way would perhaps be rather dire as it is raining almost every day now. But on to the actual training :) we had about 15 teachers show up, including the Head Teacher of the primary school, and the Head Teacher of the nursery. Most of the teachers were well dressed in traditional looking attire and appeared to be in their thirties, quite a contrast with many of the Rwandan teachers who were quite a bit younger. We started out the training by mainly focusing on the fundamentals of the XO, how to open and close programs, how to turn on and shut down the computer, how to navigate the different views etc. We then went through a short sample lesson involving Record and Write, where they took a picture of themselves and copy and pasted it into write so they could label it. We also showed them several more of the XO's features including how to make a spreadsheet in Write, something that was very practical for their own use in the classroom and with which the head nursery instructor immediately began to compile a table of her students and their contact info with. 2 hours into the training and we decided to wrap it up, feeling like any more would be too much to introduce all at once and besides we were getting pretty hungry for lunch. Many of the teacher seemed very pleased and several approached me with questions about using the computers in their classrooms and were also eager to further explore the laptops at the next training, which we will be having weekly for the duration of the program. All in all this training went perhaps better than I had expected and I think the teachers may really be as open to them, given real evidence and a thorough understanding of their potential, as the Mr. Orock, the director of the UAC, has said on many occasion, though at one point one teacher did ask to speak privately with us at some point and I can only postulate that there may be skeptics among them who we would do well to sit down with and discuss rather than just read the feel of the room. All that remains to be done now is the grand launching ceremony on Monday, after which we will have another, more in depth training on Tuesday, in preparation for the start of classes and the Summer Holiday Caravan come this Wednesday. I can hardly wait!