None of the gifts are greater than gifting somebody with digital literacy
12 Oct 2014 - codefornepal
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** By Alina Karki
Code for Nepal Fellow, 2014
This summer I’m fellow of Code For Nepal. It’s working to increase access to practical data and improve digital literacy in Nepal. By the end of this fellowship we were asked to address one problem of our society and come up with its solution.
For my project, I did research and found that most of the government school students have least access to Computers. Based on the research, I initiated Computer Learning Project in a government school. To be part of this learning project, I nominated 6 government schools of Lalitpur district. I shared the idea with fellows of Teach For Nepal (a movement to end education inequity in Nepal) who are working on the shame school. They applied for the project online on behalf of their schools. Based on the application submitted Shree Buddha Secondary School located on Tikabhairab got selected to partner with my project.
After the school selection, I distributed 80 applications among the students of class 8, 9. The students were selected on the basis of eagerness to learn Computer and their thoughts on why Computer education is important for them. Among 80 applicants only 12 students were selected, for the 2 week long training. The training was from 14th September to 25th September 2014.
The main goal of the training was to make participants realize the importance of computer education.
The training mostly covered questions such as: Why computer education is important in their life? How to turn on and off computer, software and hardware, MS. Word, Ms. Excel, uses of Internet for academics, writing and sending emails.
Everyday before the class ended the students were asked question related to computer, which I named as “Question of the day”. This helped them increase their general knowledge on computer; the winner received a gift. By the end of the training all of the 12 students had gifts and had answered at least one question. These students were divided into 2 groups, one group was named as “Speaker” who usually speak up and other team was named as”Headset” who used to hardly speak. Both the team were given task such as writing an essay on what they have learned so far from the training, getting more answers by sharing more answers.
There was no hidden challenges beside my fear on students might not able to understand English well, as most the training was conducted in English language. We also used Nepali language at times.
To run the project Code for Nepal provided me with a grant. They also helped me by sharing my blog and updates on Social Media; as a result I received positive feedback and was highly encouraged to put best efforts on the project. Reflecting back on what I learned from the Code for Nepal training, blogging, looking for data, and sharing on Twitter and Facebook really helped me.
The training successfully wrapped up on 25th September, the students are now off for festival vacation. After their school resumes on late November they will make a group and share the training skills with their classmates.
I’m looking forward to run such trainings on near future, To see more updates on my future steps you can check out at writeupalina.wordpress.com, follow me on Twitter at @KarkiAlina