Post-view of teacher's training

In this blog i'm going to show my own view about the 4-day long OLPC teacher's training. I believe we (OLPC interns and CLL staff) achieved the goals we had aimed, even though we faced some obstacles I am about to talk about.

If I recall these were our target for the training:

1. Explaining OLPC mission and principles
All the speakers (Juliano, Sam, Desire, Jimmy,..) did a great a great job in achieving this goal.
Juliano's presentation was a nice explanation about OLPC's worldwide mission, and Jimmy and Desire proved that what the kids can do with XO is not a theory but a fact. The teachers were so amazed of the kids' projects about MATSIKO; therefore this was a productive motivation.

Improvement: I understand it would have been a terrible idea to teach them Scratch, but as one teacher suggested "We can see what the kids did, but we want to know how they did it" we should have printed the codes for one of the projects, and distribute them among the teachers. The majority will not even look at them, but some ambitious teachers will use the handouts (old ones) provided to try to figure out how to program. Scratch activity has some sample projects which might be abstract to them (99% of them have never seen Trampoline), but MATSIKOs are more realistic.

2. Helping teachers get comfortable with the laptops

I would say after the training all the teachers knew basic interfaces (checking the power available, changing battery, naming an XO, viewing the frame, ..). The theater (THUMBS UP) helped them to know more about troubleshooting.

3. Teaching basic activities

According to the decision from our meeting, the non-debatable basic activities are write, record, and memorize (plus Browse, Wiki, Calculate, just in case). In my view, the teachers understood pretty well how to use them.

Improvement: Even if I agree the fact of teaching one teacher (who is already ahead) other advanced activities like E-toys, Scratch or TurtleArt; I thought it was not a very smart idea to have some groups learning those A-level activities for the beginners.

Conclusion: I strongly hope MINEDUC will organize the next training phase in less then three months otherwise everything we did would be nothing. A final remark is that communication between us and MINEDUC needs to be improved.

GOOD/BAD? Although we didn't intend it, I think the lack of enough power strips (extension cords) was handy to show the teachers how they can handle a situation like this.