Blogging in Maldonado
Saturday, I traveled about two hours east to the city of Maldonado with Mariana and Diego, who work with Tus Ideas Valen, for a blogging workshop at School 93. Diego told me that the school was in a poor area– a “critical context.” The school itself is relatively new, though, and while there was definitely less “stuff” around than in a typical American school, nothing struck me as a really huge disparity except the lack of desktop computers–no longer an issue because of Plan Ceibal. There were two parts of the workshop. A class of kids were in one room, and a group of teachers were in another. My job was to film the workshop, which was nice because I got to hang back and observe without being completely useless.
Mariana taught the kids’ workshop. I’m not sure how long this school has had laptops (they were phased in over a few years), but the kids seemed to know their way around the computers and the Internet well. Many of them had stickers of cartoons or fútbol logos on their laptops. They all had email addresses and more or less knew what a blog was. More importantly, they seemed comfortable exploring and Googling things to figure out what they didn’t know. Mariana started by asking them what a blog was, why someone would make one, and how they are different from other websites. One of my favorite moments was when she asked a few kids their fútbol team preferences, then asked, “if Cristian and Ana both have blogs about fútbol, but Cristian roots for Nacional and Ana roots for Peñarol, are they the same?” Loud chorus of “NO!” Then they set about learning how to set up a blog. The EduBlog software isn’t ready yet, so they used Blogger, the same tool I’m using for this blog. It was Saturday, and they had come to school just for the workshop, but none of them seemed at all bored or eager to leave. Mariana, who has a master’s degree in technology education, told me it was ideal when the students taught each other, and that’s exactly what happened. Even though they each have their own laptop, they spent a lot of the time walking around, looking over each other’s shoulders and learning from each other. This is an advantage of the small, durable laptops–it would be harder to do that in a computer lab with desktops, or even regular (fragile) laptops. It was a cool dynamic that you don’t see that often–kids can’t usually walk around and check out each other’s math worksheets.
While Mariana talked about what a blog is, most of the kids already had their laptops open and were surfing around as she talked. It didn’t seem to keep them from paying attention, though, and that really is how you learn about the Internet. They’re very eager to learn a little bit and then go play with it, while the adults tend to want more specific instructions. The kids were so excited to show their teacher their blogs, and even more excited when he suggested they go downstairs and teach the adults what they had learned, like they’re doing here:
Diego spoke to the group of adults, and went into more detail showing how different parts of Blogger work. My first impression was that the adults looked frustrated and weren’t having as much fun as the kids were. I can’t understand everything that’s being said, so I don’t completely trust my interpretations, but it would make sense. Andrew told me that like in the US, there is often a generation gap, where the students know more about the computers than the teachers. Not all of them had computers to try things out right away; a lot were taking notes on paper. But when the kids came downstairs to show them the blogs they’d made, the room got a lot more lively. Before we left, Diego and Mariana signed a certificate for each kid saying they had completed a blogging workshop.
Then I went to the miniJAM I wrote about before, that focused on the arts. Many people there were artists and teachers who hadn’t been involved with ceibalJAM before, so there was a presentation about what ceibalJAM does and how the arts are incorporated. Then everyone got to experiment with a table full of XOs (and their art-related applications):
I’ve been doing some translation work this week. When we get a few technical issues resolved, I’ll be editing down the video from the workshop, and hopefully posting some of it here. Tomorrow I’m helping out at an event called FLISOL, whose name translates to Latin American Free Software Installation Festival.
