Quantcast
Channel: coffeeandfingernailscoffeeandfingernails » Education
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 5

6 Months in Consuelo: Seeing the Future

0
0

Still Image_day1_crop

This is a repost of a piece that first appeared on the Community Connection International blog.  Reposting here to share more about my current projects and to let folks know about our current fundraising campaign over at Indiegogo. Click the link to donate whatever you can before April 25th.  

For the last two months, I have been teaching a course based on Microsoft’s Kodu software to students in Consuelo, Dominican Republic.  One of the many great things about working with children is that it forces you to spend some portion of every day imagining the future.  It’s not enough to prepare an 8 year old for the world as it is today, she needs to be ready to tackle the world as it will be 10, 15, 25 years from now.

That’s no easy task–my third grade teacher likely guessed that my generation would need to be computer literate, but I doubt she could have told you that my laptop would be the center of my professional and social life, replacing my phone, television, stereo, and game console, not to mention the post office and the local library.  Or that there would be little to no distinction for me between chatting with friends in California, Germany or the Dominican Republic.

Teachers and the organizations that support them have to be visionaries, and that imperative is the motivation behind Community Connection International’s efforts to expand its literacy program.  Two skills that we can be sure will be invaluable no matter what comes are the ability to read and computer literacy.  But the latter doesn’t mean what it did back when I was dodging dysentery on the Oregon Trail.  To be computer literate is to have a skillset that encompasses not only comfort with the basic hardware or the most popular software, but the kind of intuitive understanding that comes only from repeated use across a variety of platforms.

With that in mind, we are working to develop a program that will cover both the basics like Microsoft Office, general internet use, etc and innovative programs like Microsoft’s Kodu, designed to introduce beginners to the fundamental concepts of computer programming.  Kodu provides students with a basic, visual programming language that can be used to create simple video games.  This allows us to create a class that focuses not only on technical concepts but ties in discussions of storytelling and narrative structure, encouraging students to see the books they read in our existing program in a new light.

We recognize what an ambitious undertaking this is and so are starting small, working with small groups of students over the next several months and remaining flexible and receptive to the needs of the community.

Our hope is that our students will have every tool they need when the time comes for them to prepare the next generation for a world they can only begin to imagine.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 5

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images