Almost every semester at FIU I have one exceptional student--intelligent, hard working and self-motivated. I usually try to interest the exceptional ones in working as unpaid interns at One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). The first one to work at OLPC was Melissa, a former school teacher in the Dominican Republic who wanted to learn to be an educational tour operator. When she finished her studies at FIU I found her a paid position working on the OLPC deployment in Rwanda (Africa). To work in Rwanda takes a special person who puts "mission" ahead of creature comforts or self-interest.
Melissa's blog post today reminds me of how important teachers are. I have quoted it verbatim below.
DAMASCENE
"Damascene is a teacher at Kagugu school, he was one of my best students in the beginners group. He had never used a laptop before April training. A few days after the training, I visited the school and discovered that Damascene had distributed laptops to all his students and was teaching using the laptops. This is a very difficult challenge for teachers to overcome, most dread the initIal leap of incorporating laptops into their teaching. “I learned how to teach through the laptop, how to make my own projects using the laptop, to change the color of the letters and the size of the fonts, so many things I learned”, he said. I asked him: Why do you think laptops are important? “Because students get so motivated to learn with them, even the ones that are not so good students, plus, the students improve their ICT (information, communications, technology) knowledge. For the teachers they have more time available to prepare for class because everything is easier with the laptops.” Then I asked him: Where do you see your students 10 years from now? “This will help the development of Rwanda , when they get to secondary school they will have a higher level in ICT because they started using the laptops since they were so young. They will teach those students that haven’t had the opportunity to use laptops before, and as they teach, they will increase their ICT knowledge even more.”
I’m so proud of you Damascene!"
I am so proud of you Melissa!
