Teachers Talking From Rural Kenya

On Friday September 28th twenty teachers in rural Kenya left their schools early and traveled to Holy Rosary Secretarial College, Tala, where they gathered around the only computer that was online.

At home in the UK I was sitting at my laptop, logged in to the worknet chat room waiting for them.

The teachers were participants from the Teachers Talking (TT) Kenya course - and in August I had been in Kenya teaching them. I have published an edited down version of our chat here.

This TT Kenya initial programme is a COL / CAWD collaboration and consists of a one week course followed by monthly meetings for six months. Before I left Kenya the participants and I had agreed to try and meet in a chat room, next time they were online. We want to continue working together even though we are at a distance - the chat is part of that.

Our chat is about the practicalities of ICT training for teachers in rural Africa - not in theory, but in real life. We were joined in the chat room by a Kenyan living in Sweden, and a Nigerian, still in Nigeria, who had helped me to present TT there.

Please share the chat as widely as you can. The twenty people clustered around that one computer in Tala are experts regarding education in rural Kenya - they are practitioners. They are ready, willing and able to use the Internet in their own professional development, and to share what they know with their colleagues and their communities. Just imagine what a power for change they could be if they could get online more than a couple of hours once a month.

I don't know where to go to get the resources they need to build on their initial knowledge and enthusiasm - but maybe if this information circulates far enough some organisations will be able to help them. Alternatively we could "pass the hat" and collect donations from individuals through CAWD. (To direct an on-line donation to a specific CAWD project, simply name the project in the "personal message" box.)