Quick Update as we transition from SA to Kenya

I am writing this while being bumped and jolted along miles of deeply rutted highways on the plains below the Great Rift Valley as we travel to the Maasai Mara for team building. After we landed in Nairobi, We met seven additional members to TWBC who will form a second team providing maths, science and Eng;lish prof dev opportunities to two additional locations in Kenya. Maasai pastoralists, dressed in their traditional brighly coloured blankets, can be seen leading their herds of cattle, sheep and goats.

Yesterday we flew out of Cape Town - and I must admit that it was with a strong sense of sadness to leave behnind strengthened as well as new friendships.

It is difficult to compare my experiences from last year to this year - it was a different team and we were ground-breaking our relationships and approaches. This year we strategized - or attempted to - more carefully where and for whom we provided our workshops and sessions.

At the beginning of our final week in Cape Town we had a healthy post-mortem with Edunova and aired our frustrations and challenges from the previous two weeks - as well as the many months of planning be3fore theat. We identified breakdowns of communication and the necessity for transparency of goals and expectations. Just as importantly, we discussed the importance of earlier planning for the following year.

The younger and less experienced Edunova ICT facilitators expressed a better understanding of the need for orientation and communication in planning. Next year we hope to work much more closely with them and much earlier.

For each of the groups we worked with, teachers, principals, and provincial ICT facilitators, we had created a ning space to better facilitate communicatio9n, collaboration and sharing of resources. For each of those spaces, core facilitators were assigned to oversee and moderate the online community and foster its growth.

We spent one day working closely with the Edunova facilitators with more indepth training in multimedia ICT integration and moodle training. For two days we visited classes of learners and shadowed a teacher who had come to our workshops two weeks ago. We all agreed it was a highlight of our time in Cape Town - seeing young learners in their classes. We left behind several Flip cameras at three schools in order to kick off school exchanges.

Definitely a high point of my week was being asked to take over the teaching of a class of 50 grade 7 learners. I asked them to divide into groups, pose a set of questions based on their recent study of matter and materials, and use a Flip camera to record their responses.

I was amazed at the how seriously they took their "assignment". To my astonishment, all seven groups completed a first go, complete with video footage!They should be proud of their efforts. Unfortunately, their school's computer lab had recently experienced a burglary of the equipment and it looked as though it would be some months before they would have a working lab.

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We are now in Mbita after another nine hour road trip on the dusty and rocky roads (mostly unpaved). Mbita is a somewhat large fishing community along the shores of Lake Victoria. In two days we have visited seven schools and are currently working at the SUBA community centre examining the status of the 12 standalone computers the centre houses. To our dismay, while the computers are in excellent shape, they are lacking video and audio drivers and updates which may prevent the use of Windows movie Maker and Photostory 3. Today we are also hoping to install the eGranary unit along with a laptop. We also brought with us wireless remotes for some of the desktops so that they can be connected to the eGranary as well.

We thought we would have a house to ourselves here in Mbita, but that did not work out, so the six of us are staying with a couple in the community who are very involved in education at the national level. Jane and Daniel have been rich sources of information about the culture and Kenyan education system. Their generous hospitality has been overwhelming to these wuzungu (white folks).

The pace in Kenya is much slower and, in some ways, a welcome relief to my own hectic North American lifestyle.

Tomorrow we head off to Mfangando Island in Lake Victoria to visit 3 very remote schools.

We are tired teachers who are working late every night on our upcoming workshop sessions and rising every morning and out the door for many visits with teachers and students.

Thanks for your continuing support and encouragement. We would love to hear from you if you are following our travels....