Bolivia

Just before the resuming of classes after 3 weeks of winter holidays, Educatic invited some of the more motivated and IT-literate teachers for a 2-day workshop on digital content production. The game digitalization process I described in my post about the last workshop is taking up a lot of time and resources with high-quality, greatly localized and personalized, but hardly efficient results. Teachers have started to enquire on how to develop their own games without having to rely on the technical support by Educatic. Therefore, as opposed to the complex game development approach which involved many people during the last workshop, this time, it was all about how teachers could create their own digital learning resources.

With 8 teachers participating, some of whom had to travel for hours from remote rural villages, almost all those invited attended and thus five different “unidades educativas” (educational units, schools or educational centers of a certain level) were represented.

The tools chosen for the workshop were Jclic and HotPotatoes – both are software written in Java and allow the creation of simple educational games such as multiple choice quizzes, puzzles, riddles or association games. One of the main reasons for the selection is that they are both localized into Spanish – a requirement which is essential as, although taught at school, English is not understood by many in Bolivia.

The first day was aimed at teaching the basics of Jclic. Teachers quickly learned how to create an empty project, fill the media gallery and soon started to create their first rompecabeza (“break your head” – a Puzzle) or association games using sound, (moving) images and text. With the teacher’s computer skills varying from being able to manage a variety of software applications until just learning to hit the right spot when clicking the mouse, the instructor, Ronald, did a good job in adapting its explanations accordingly.

On the following day, HotPotatoes was introduced in order to give the teachers the opportunity to select their favourite tool. Both applications are available across platforms, allow multimedia integration and have a functionality to combine exercises to a teaching module, thereby defining secuence of exercises and levels of difficulty.

After taking the seminar, the teachers came to the conclusion that they preferred using Jclic for usability reasons. HotPotatoes, they found, required many more steps to accomplish a certain function than does Jclic. They complained that HotPotatoes offered less exercise types and lacked behind Jclic both, usability-wise as well as graphic-wise. Integrating multimedia – something all teachers were very eager to learn about – seemed easier to accomplish in Jclic as well as it comes with a media library concept where all media resources are stored and can be reused across different projects. However, for creating crossword puzzles, HotPotatoes was by far easier to use.

Profesor Walter, a teacher from the municipy of Challapata, had already attended a seminar on Jclic and came for the HotPotatoe extension. He has succesfully integrated Jclic in his mathematics lessons and finds that students are having more fun learning with the computer and ironically remarks that they often listen better to the machine than to the teacher.

Meanwhile, the challenge remains: how can you succesfully and efficiently capacitate teachers with poor computer literacy in a content production software obtaining high-quality pedagogic results at the same time? How can a technology-driven result be avoided? Couldn’t the games produced be played just as well with paper and pencil?

The answer is probably complex: on the one hand, technology should never be applied as a goal in itself but rather as a means to an end. On the other, the goal of the Educatic project is to integrate ICT in the school curriculum and to enrich classroom activities. Therefore, the quality of the project outcome should probably not only be measured by the quality of the content produced, but also by the skills as well as the motivation to understand acquired by teachers and students alike. What is more, I believe that each student who has begun to understood and gained interest in the vast potentials that offer ICTs is worth the effort. Soon, this student will have understood the “secrets” behind much better than his teacher. And be it for having played a crossword puzzle in his maths class.

Anne Schanz studied International Information Management at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. In her master’s thesis “Web-based communication in an intercultural learning project – analysis and development potentials of the Global Teenager Project” she investigated the effectiveness of use of online communication software within the GTP and analysed data from 258 participants in 11 countries. http://anneschanz.de/blog/tag/ict4d.

Read more about the 'ICT in Primary and Secondary Education' project which Educatic executes and IICD supports.

Last weekend, I was able to be part of the first capacity building workshop held by Educatic during my stay in Oruro. It was the first of a round of 5 workshops during which local teachers will go through various phases of digital content production. At the end, this will result in a number of educational flash games invented and designed by the teachers themselves and implemented by the team of Educatic.

This time, a group of 10 teachers that were very new to ICTs came – a challenge in a way, as they will have to think about how to adapt their functional game design in a way that it will be feasible to digitalize it. Unfortunately, winter holidays had just started, so that the normal group size of around 30 wasn’t reached. During this first one-day workshop, the teachers – recruited through the local branch of the Ministry of Education – were presented with the main objectives of the project and got to know their fellow teachers who will likewise design their games in the same round of workshops.

The first challenge they were presented with was to think about an educational problem from their subject in a specific age group, e.g. sorting of natural numbers or spelling of specific words. They were then asked to think about an (offline) setting which is specific to their region or cultural group. This might be a game, or simply the natural surroundings of the villages they come from. As this region has always been a mining region, one setting was the entrance of a mine with the worker encountering various co-workers as the levels of the game increase. Another setting was taken from a children’s game which is played outside, where seeds are thrown towards an object. The closest seed wins. Thanks to this contextualized approach, the students will hopefully be more inclined to identify with the games and have more fun while playing and learning.

During a well-facilitated session, all teachers were able to come up with a first idea on paper. Initial drawings of the game design supported the imagination of the course of the game and identify potential difficulties. During lunch, the shy group started chatting over the traditional “charque”-dish (dried lama meat with a hard-boiled egg, potatoes and dried corn and a piece of goat cheese).

As it is not always easy to find an address here in the maze of small streets and shops, two teachers only managed to find us when the rest had almost finished. However, they were not sent home but welcomed just as warmly and received their private introduction which ended in them producing some very nice ideas.

During the coming sessions, teachers will define their ideas more finely, adapted their drawings and explanations and finally evaluate the prototypes produced by Educatic.

I admit that this way of digital educational content production is a long process. Teachers will have to travel several times and spend their weekends working. They will have to make a great effort to get involved in a new medium they might have no experience in. However, from what I have seen and heard, I do believe that in the end, the results are very valuable. Teachers will have developed a pride in their own achievements, feel the effort they have spent and are thus more likely to adopt the games in their teaching routine. Last but not least, they will leave with the feeling that they have been listened to and were able to apply their didactic and professional knowledge.

Anne Schanz studied International Information Management at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. In her master’s thesis “Web-based communication in an intercultural learning project – analysis and development potentials of the Global Teenager Project” she investigated the effectiveness of use of online communication software within the GTP and analysed data from 258 participants in 11 countries. http://anneschanz.de/blog/tag/ict4d.

Read more about the 'ICT in Primary and Secondary Education' project which Educatic executes and IICD supports.