Tanzanian secondary schools typically have very limited resources for things like books and laboratories. Many schools, even in remote locations, have generators that they run in the evening to give students additional study time. This trip I brought about 90 GB of digital content for secondary education with the plan to investigate possible projector options that could be used in a school in a village that could recharge batteries.
Much of the content I brought was assembled by a group of engineers from Cisco for developing countries. Their project is called the Rachel Initiative for "Remote Areas Community Hotspots for Education and Learning". They have a page for browsing most of their content and provide access to all the content files. I also have been collecting short videos of science experiments and explanations as a way to introduce experiments that would be very difficult to do in a village school. I have only about 50 videos so far and have started indexing them to the Tanzanian syllabus for Chemistry, Biology, and Physics. English is the language of instruction in Secondary School and most students struggle to learn English as they try to learn their subjects at the same time. I collected some free audio books from Librivox with the hope that they might help practice listening to English while having some interesting content including classic short stories, bible stories, and the entire new testament.
Collecting content is easy because there is so much available in a country with good internet access. Here in Tanzania though, internet connection is rare in schools and expensive. This content can be supplied to a village school in the form of DVD disks or preloaded on computers. I brought a 30 lumen Samsung pico projector that can play content from a media card without a computer that I had planned to use for the science videos. Testing this at Kilolo Secondary school made it clear that 30 lumens is not enough and the built in speaker is too weak. Fortunately, Ron Reed of Kilolo Star who is also interested in video for schools had brought the Optima Playtime projector, a 50 lumen projector that has a good built in speaker. He rigged up 12 volt battery packs from a drill that can be recharged and play the projector for an hour and a half. I think this solution, in combination with a laptop computer which will be available at most schools, and/or a DVD player will be the best solution and plan to take it to Village Schools next week to evaluate.
I met with Global Outreach who places computers in schools and has a learning center here in Iringa for both teachers and students and gave them a hard drive with all of the content. I have also given sets of DVDs to the director of education for Iringa Diocese schools and will visit Village Schools. The goal for this trip is to learn about a good option, return to the land of fast internet connections and collect more content, and maybe find a grant to provide projectors and content to a number of schools as a trial. I think the projector that Ron Reed had found will be the way to go until more technology comes along and for only a couple hundred dollars per school, teachers could have an excellent resource to help them teach. (Teachers will learn from this content as well)
Shika na Mikono is project for providing low cost science activities for village schools that I have also made a connection with. They are having a workshop of Tanzanian teachers in Morogorro along with a handful of Peace Corps Volunteers this week. Aron Walker is a second term PCV who is leading this effort and he has moved to Iringa to work with Klerruu Teachers college. Aron is interested in video content as well and he and I plan to visit Village Schools together. I created a web page for them where they are starting to assemble activities that will be put into a Latex document. It has been a great trip for this project already and I am looking forward to seeing what we learn at Madisi.
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