As per my last post, we were scheduled to start a pilot computer literacy program for students at the boys’ HS school in Bijawar from April 1 to 15. The principal of the school has now indicated, however, that he wants to move the whole program back by a week or so, starting April 6. [...]

The last post detailed the state of our work in Bijawar as of January 12, and this one will focus on the developments since then. The faculty at the boys’ HS school was unable to start a computer pilot project in February because of the schoolwide preparation for the state board exams that the students [...]

Note: What you see here is only the part of my summary that deals with issues and future plans. Click here to see the whole summary, which includes background information and a detailed explanation of the work we did in three weeks. Issues Education One of the major issues with computer literacy in Bijawar is [...]

This is the really cute little boy whose family rents out the upstairs part of my grandmother’s house. Onto the actual news. Today was a much-needed counterpoint to yesterday’s frustrations. We accomplished all the nitpicky little details that were left to finish in the morning to get the computers in the boys’ high school ready [...]

We got broadband in Bijawar yesterday! The boys’ high school was the first broadband connection that BSNL installed in Bijawar, which was super exciting. Since the computers don’t have WiFi, the school can only use broadband on two computers at a time (without a switch, anyway, which they don’t have), but we made sure that [...]

Something that I forgot to mention in yesterday’s entry was that we ran around like crazy for a couple of hours, trying to set up the process of bringing broadband to the boys’ high school. We managed to get the principal to cut the phone company a check for the required amount, and we turned [...]

We went to the boys’ high school in the morning yesterday, to work on setting up their computers while there was still electricity to run all of the computers at the same time. The boys’ high school is a middle school before noon. When we got there, the boys were doing yoga out in the [...]

Kalpana came by for the first time in three or four days this morning. Because we’re not working with the high school girls anymore, we finally had time to introduce her to Excel. We’d spent the last couple of days making a foolproof Excel template to replace the individual student report cards (called marks sheets [...]

We had a meeting today with Neha, Divya, Neeta, Menka, and Sonali to discuss our project at a higher, more village-wide level. We’ve been working with the teachers for a week now, and we’d like them to be more involved in the planning process. They know Bijawar, their schools, and their students better than we [...]

We met again with the teachers from the boys’ high school to flesh out more details of their plan to introduce computer literacy education to their students. They want to begin teaching the 10th and 12th grades when the new school year starts in April, because the 9th grade takes at least a month to [...]