Background -
The TecnoTzotzil project will bring one-to-one netbooks to primary school students at two one-room Chiapas rural schools. The instructors are young high-schoolers that spend two years with the kids in exchange for a scholarship. We will initially prepare constructionist lesson plans for the instructors and later also help them learn to develop their own plans. We will research the impact of the netbooks on instructors, students and families with no previous experience with computers.
I'm calling this "instructor development" rather than "instructor training" following Seymour Papert's suggestion - Why do we speak of developing students, but of training teachers?
In this development session, Maria, fulana and sutano take part as community instructors. Also present are several people associated with the educational authorities: Sutana is in charge of training the instructors during a one-month full-time stint -these would be the two last days of that training period; Enry is the academic director of the Zone, and Luciano helps her; Silvano works at the regional level for one of the Chiapas school regions. "H
Action Yolanda explains the agenda - brief presentation of the project, followed by a one-day training on the laptop and its software, Sugar. The next half-day will be dedicated to present lesson plans, culminating with groups of students present developing their own plans. Finally at the last half-day we will explain the research aspects of the project. Yolanda then explains in 45 minutes the main aspects of the project - the McArthur competition, the laptops for each child, the special software Reflection. Of the people present, only Yolanda and Luciano have heard of the project before - for the rest, this is their first introduction and they look somewhat nervous as they see a netbook in front of them. We would later find out that one of the instructors, Mengano, was advised ot this project one day ago; and that the other two girls also were assigned to it after a short explanation and without giving them the option to opt-out. So they are naturally nervous... |