ICT | The International Educational Development Program at UPenn

Tag: ICT

written by Lisha Almeida
Of field trips in far away places
2 months into my internship, I got to the part I had been waiting for the whole time- field trips. I was tasked with visiting 20 schools in 12 days, across 2 counties and across a 100 km radius. The project I was meant to observe is being implemented in 43 schools across Mombasa and Kwale. Since I was not conducting an evaluation of the project but more looking at the perception of our material, I was asked to visit the 20 most successful schools and to conduct my research there. I’d spent two weeks writing out a proposal and creating an interview guide, and I was finally ready to get down and dirty.

For most of my IEDP compatriots reading this post, you know I am a proponent for ICT in education, for its power to make teacher’s lives easier and for how it can transform student learning. What I witnessed in at least 75% of these classrooms is the reason most ICT projects fail – execution. My reflections are in no way an indication of how my organization is doing, but more on how collective systems set teachers up for failure. My research was meant to answer 2 overarching questions
1. Does the introduction of ICT in classrooms make a difference to how teachers teach and how students learn?
2. Does the literacy material we have developed make a difference to how students learn and has it made teacher’s lives easier?
The long and short of the first question is yes. Every teacher I spoke to said they used the government projector and the government laptop (distributed as part of a Digischool initiative) in almost every lesson, either to project pictures, to Google things or, whenever relevant, to project the pre-loaded government lessons. Students demonstrated a familiarity with the tablets given to them, were able to operate them with a fair amount of ease and seemed excited to learn. However, the biggest roadblock teachers face is what they call ‘troubleshooting’. Teachers only received one 3 day training from the government in 2016 which taught them the basics of digital literacy, leaving them at a loss when faced by things like Airplane Mode accidentally being turned on rendering them unable to connect to the server, or the Ubuntu software on their laptops throwing up an error.

The second question, the one I was a little more interested in since it was my organization’s material, was slightly more complicated to unpack. Teachers in these ICT-enabled schools currently receive material from 4 different resources – the government, another international NGO that works in this region, a sister organization that we are attached to and then us. After 4 visits where we spent the first ten minutes talking about the wrong material, I started all future visits off with opening up our material and taking teachers through it before asking them questions just to make sure we were on the same page. The teachers are overwhelmed by the number of things they are being asked to use, and most often land up choosing the one that is directly loaded onto their tablets already- the government material. When asked about our material, the teachers cited the number of steps it took to get to it, and not the quality itself, as the issue.

What surprised me most about my visits was how enthusiastic teachers were about using ICT and how each of them requested more training for our organization. To get to the schools in Kwale I left work at 6:45 am every morning, crossed a ferry and then drove 60-75 kms one way on primarily dirt roads in 35* weather. The fact that the teachers were willing to endure that for a 2-3 day training every few months pleasantly surprised me and also motivated me to ensure we’re doing better by them. Luckily for me, my organization is extremely interested in the report I produce at the end of this, and intends to take my recommendations very seriously (no pressure..haha), which makes me want to work harder on it and churn out something useful. Despite all the challenges the teachers faced, I visited classrooms with happy, engaged and bright children and teachers that came to school and tried every single day. None of this is surprising to me, I expected it, but it’s still always refreshing to see. So much of what I saw in the past 15 days reminded me of home, and I am so grateful for the opportunity.

Throughout my visits I was accompanied by another intern who helped me translate when interviewing students and I learned a lot about Kenya from him, and he about India from me. Being able to share our cultures with each other was another part of this journey that I truly cherished.

I’ll end my rambling reflections with some pictures of Kenya’s Southern coast, its schools and its beauty.

Until next time!
Written by Lisha Almeida, on 25 Jul 2018
written by CC

When Work Meets Family

One of the best things about my time in India is staying with a loving host family. Not only do they prepare the most delicious homemade Indian food, they also have me try every kind of local dessert (jelabi, kheer, kulfi, gulab jamun and many more). In the evenings, they spend time taking a walk with my housemates and me and play “very competitive” scrabble with us after dinner. My host mom, who is in her late 60s, is an avid reader and lifelong learner. She takes swim lessons almost every day, attends a philosophy class three times a week, and is a member of a local book club. We often engage in conversations about world politics, cultures, and cuisines, and despite disagreements at times, I really enjoy listening to her life stories and learning from her experiences.

My host dad, who’s in his late 70s, is equally productive. He is the managing director of a college, but he also runs a government-aided girls’ school in Delhi called KBV. The school was founded almost 80 years ago to provide education for children from the lowest caste. It is free of charge and serves 800 girls from the ages of 3 to 18. Because the school is a charitable venture, all operations of the school are dependent upon government grants and private donations. My host dad’s responsibility as the managing director, then, is to secure enough funding and resources to ensure the smooth operation of the school. Recently, the school finished installing solar panels on their roof. It is estimated that they will save the entire cost of their very expensive power bill. With this, they will finally achieve some measure of financial stability.

As an early childhood education advocate who is now interning with a nonprofit for children, my first thought when I found out about KBV was to connect my host dad with my organization. I hope that the students at KBV can benefit from the educational resources that we develop. Coincidentally, my organization was also looking for local partners to participate in a community-based initiative that engages both parents and children from low-income communities. Knowing the needs of both parties, I introduced my supervisor and my host dad to each other and arranged a time for a school visit.

*******

We arrived at KBV on a cloudy Thursday morning during the students’ recess time. The four-story school building was painted pink and looked very lively with girls in their green uniforms roaming around in the schoolyard. The first class we visited was a kindergarten class with very young girls between two and a half and five years old. The classroom setup looked very similar to that of TBGS (the non-profit girls’ school in Ghana that I worked with through IEDP’s Curriculum and Pedagogy class) where five or six girls sit around a large round table.

Despite some similarities, I noticed more learning materials stamped to the wall, from Hindi alphabet to English vocabulary posters. There was also an aide, in addition to the instructor, who is responsible for taking care of the girls’ non-academic needs. What surprised me the most was the large LED TV screen in the classroom that is connected to an Lenovo laptop. My host dad explained that he wanted to introduce ICT to the classrooms so that these girls can keep up with the latest developments in technology and education. However, very few teachers are willing to engage students with these tools and online resources because they think the technologies are “too much trouble.” One of the younger teachers demonstrated to us how she utilizes technologies in class: she downloads educational videos on vocabulary and other topics from youtube to show her students or she plays music so that students can sing along. The more senior teachers did not use technology much at all in spite of the availability of TV screens and laptops in the classroom. The teacher training for these technologies is nonexistent due to the cost associated with training and the teachers’ lack of motivation.

I remember reading about the ineffectiveness of many ICT projects in Dr. Wagner’s class:

..But the problems with these projects were neither isolated nor random. Rather, these same types of problems occur again and again in technology projects around the world, which too often focus on providing hardware and software and pay insufficient attention to the human and social systems that must also change for technology to make a difference… As seen in these three vignettes, meaningful access to ICT comprises far more than merely providing computers and internet connections. Rather, access to ICT is embedded in a complex array of factors encompassing physical, digital, human, and social resources and relationships.

–Warschauer (2004), Introduction; Chapter 1, Economy, society and technology

What I saw was just one of the many cases where technology has not been utilized to its fullest potential, but what is the solution? My host dad has lobbied for investment in teacher training many times in the past. However, with “educational ICT” and “the digital divide” being such popular buzzwords in today’s world, who is willing to invest in long-term teacher training when handing out digital devices is so convenient? Case in point, KBV has already equipped every student with a tablet.

The slum right next to KBV.

The railway station next to KBV.

I left KBV that day with many, many questions in my head. I know I probably won’t be able to find answers to these questions any time soon, but I’ll keep looking. Connecting my organization with my host family allows me to see how educational resources can be mobilized in a positive way and I hope this partnership will blossom into something beautiful one day!

KBV from the outside.

Written by CC, on 23 Jul 2018
written by Lisha Almeida

Whose curriculum is it anyway?

A little more than a month into my internship, and I now have a better idea of the ins and outs of the organization and how it functions. While work was slower during the month of Ramadan, things are slowly picking up post Eid, with all 15 people in the office each day.

My first order of business had been aligning the literacy material developed by AKF to meet the standards of the new competency-based curriculum, which included life skills, values and thematic areas. The manager of the East Africa region is in Nairobi, and so communication with him is infrequent. While the lead of this project here is lovely, she views me as some sort of ‘expert’ (something I most certainly am not) and has therefore handed me the reigns of this project entirely. While I believe I have successfully completed the task that was assigned to me, I am unsure whether it meets all the expectations, and am still eagerly awaiting feedback. (The Penn impostor syndrome continues).

In the meantime, I have moved onto putting my research methodologies class to good use my designing a proposal for the research I will be conducting next month across Mombasa and Kwale. This project is implemented across 43 schools in these two towns, and while it has been going on for a year, has never been formally evaluated in any way. Going through reports written about past projects has been extremely helpful in getting an idea of how this kind of research has been done before. In preliminary conversations with teachers, it’s easy to see that they are overwhelmed with the number of resources being thrust at them, both by NGOs as well as the government, leaving little room for them to improvise or innovate in any way. The new curriculum expects even more from teachers, but provides little guidance on how they are to achieve this, causing them further distress. My aim is going to be to get the most honest and productive responses from them to make these materials most useful to them. Too often development projects create materials they think will be useful to their stakeholders with little to no user input, something we discussed a lot in our Curriculum and Pedagogies class with Dr. GK.

Outside of work, life has been intermittently eventful. I dropped my phone in the Indian Ocean, and after trying multiple things to revive it (rice, isopropyl alcohol, sunlight), caved and bought the cheapest, smallest smartphone out there. I was invited to a barbecue hosted in my apartment complex, where the piece de resistance was crocodile meat, definitely a first for me (Being vegetarian, I didn’t partake, but was definitely fascinated). Homesickness and loneliness kick in from time to time, but keeping in touch with my IEDP family has definitely been very helpful and gets me through the hard days.

I’ll leave you with this gorgeous rainbow I saw a few weeks ago, when I still had my fancy phone with its decent camera.

Until next time!

Written by Lisha Almeida, on 26 Jun 2018