Training Day: 10

Langa, day 10 (of training). Because this school had 'discipline training' on a Thursday, we moved their slot to Tuesday. Note to self: one of the most important things of school training modules is that you need to constantly improvise. That means having to readjust your time schedule on short notice. Also, you need to evaluate the progress of the 'class' and always be sure to accommodate a slower/faster pace. Anyway, so the first problem we had yesterday was punctuality. Yes, we operate on African time. Which always means we start 30 minutes late. I arrived an hour earlier yesterday, announced myself at the secretary, and requested her to make an announcement that teachers be on time for the module, which starts (promptly, in an ideal world) at 14h30. I then proceeded to prep the room, making sure we have connectivity, and that the module content is loaded and ready to go. However, only three teachers arrived..and only at 15h00. 

I don't always get why. But yesterday it seemed like they were still busy in class. But the Department only allows research until 15h30. Which means, given that they take 10 minutes to log in and access the net, we only have like 20 minutes left! In any case, I made due with what was happening and we started with creating personal folders on the common server. I then did a recap on the previous lesson by asking teachers to create a new Word document, with a WordArt header on top. By this time, another three teachers joined us, and our Post Doc - and future Module 2 trainer - handled them separately. We then proceeded to Internet Explorer, navigated to Google, and searched for images. We then pasted relevant images - "things I like" - into Word, rearranged them and saved the document. Two teachers were extremely happy with what we've done: documents like these are very useful as classroom worksheets (apparently), and for the first time they were shown how to create it themselves. 

During the development of this module I realised that the smaller things can really make a difference. Something as simple as pasting images from a search engine into a document - these are what they seem to like and enjoy. And best of all: it doesn't require major bandwidth, nor advanced (browsing) skills. I came into this module again with these awesome software tools in mind, that I really wanted to WOW teachers with. But I did not really get that they are WOWed with the slightest information, in this case, that of creating a personalised worksheet. Until tomorrow!