We finally met with all three government officials a few days ago: the DEO, the CEO, and the Collector. They were all super positive about the work that we’re doing and the plans that we have for the future. The DEO wants a copy of my curriculum, and the Collector had some good suggestions about how to focus our work to proceed more effectively, including dedicating more time to teacher training, which is something we’re pretty committed to already.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’ll have time to actually train teachers and implement our plan at the girls’ HS school (above). That process will have to wait until next year.

We’re thinking of leaving a couple of donated laptops at a middle school, however, because they have a teacher who was trained through Microsoft’s Project Shiksha program in 2006.  We’re still trying to decide what exactly we want the school to use them for – whether to teach students or simply watch educational English DVDs that we can provide them. We’ve been working with three eighth graders from this school for the last few days, and they seem to be picking things up just as well as the ninth graders I’ve worked with in the past.

The last – and best – piece of news is that the UPS units finally arrived at the boys’ HS school! Everything is now hooked up and in place for computer classes to begin again. All the government schools are closed from today through the 15th because of the crazy cold snap here in Madhya Pradesh, but as soon as they open again, I think the teacher will begin classes. We might run into the problem of final and board exams that are due to start soon, so it may well be that classes won’t begin in earnest until July, when the new school year begins. We’re trying to press the school to get the computers thoroughly cleaned with a special vacuum to get rid of all the dust that accumulates everywhere; the computers are getting really slow, and the dust is a big part of that.

Look at this boy! He’s grown up so much since I first photographed him a year and a half ago.

And here’s another cute little girl, wrapped in her mother’s shawl.

Our other plans haven’t been going quite so well. The UPS that arrived at the beginning of December was in fact delivered by mistake. It was intended for a middle school in Bijawar. We’re back to square one, essentially. We now have to buy individual UPS units for each computer at the school, which is a long process – we started thinking about this in July. I hope we can get the equipment and set it all up before we leave. I think the teacher is itching to start classes (and get paid for it!) again.

We’re also trying to set up a similar computer literacy program at the Girls’ HS School, but the principal has asked us to get permission from the District Collector and/or the District Education Officer (DEO) in Chhatarpur. We tried to meet with the Collector last Thursday, but he was out meeting with other people. We finally managed to get a few minutes with the district’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), who seems pretty nice and friendly. She gave us an appointment to speak with her again tomorrow (Monday). Since we’ll be in Chhatarpur anyway, we’ll try to meet with the Collector as well.

Our other plan is to try a computer education program at one of the co-ed middle schools in Bijawar, where the administration and teachers seem really into it – something which we haven’t always found to be the case in government schools. My main concern was English language skills; if the high school students struggle with the English required to run a computer, then middle school kids will be even less able to manage it. Eighth graders students, however, are at basically the same level as ninth graders, so we might be able to start there. We’re also thinking of recruiting an English teacher to co-teach with a computer teacher, so that the kids can get good explanations of words they don’t understand.

…which brings me to the next item. We’re thinking again about ways to supplement the English education here, which suffers from a lack of teacher expertise. We met with the English teacher at the Girls’ HS School yesterday to brainstorm areas which he thinks he needs help with, and we’re hoping to meet with a group of middle and high school English teachers today to continue that planning.

Board exams started at the school at the beginning of March and will continue until April (when the new school year starts), at which point the teachers will be busy grading and preparing exam results until the beginning of May. Everything is done by hand, so the process is time-consuming. We’re planning to restart the computer program once this process is over.

Computer maintenance

We talked to the people at two computer shops in Chhatarpur – Microworld Computers, whom we were referred to by an acquaintance who runs a cyber cafe, and Computer Care & Ware. We stopped by Microworld Computers, but there was no one in the shop to talk to, so we didn’t pursue it. Computer Care & Ware sent someone to the high school to look over the setup and give us a quote on how much they would charge for a regular monthly service contract, which includes cleaning, antivirus updates and scans, checking internet connectivity, and reinstalling any buggy software. Their quote came to Rs. 1000 per month.

This whole exercise propelled the assistant principal into taking more interest in the maintenance and upkeep of the computer lab for what seems to us the first time. He thought the quote was too high and started calling people he knew to find a better price. The same evening, we decided to go to Chhatarpur to meet with one of his new contacts at Bundelkhand Computers to see if we could get the broken UPS fixed. We met with Subhash Tiwari, who told us about other computer work he does around Chhatarpur at different academic institutions. Although no one there knew about UPS systems, we did get the name of the LG service engineer I mentioned in my last post; he eventually came to the school, but he was mostly unable to diagnose the problem. Subhash also visited us eventually and cut the ethernet cables that the assistant principal had bought last March to the right sizes and connected all of the computers to hubs. We measured the distances in the new computer lab that has been under construction for at least eighteen months to make sure that the cables were long enough to work there. We also strung a 50-foot cable to the next room so that the babus (administrative assistants) would have a dedicated internet connection. Until now, they’d been moving the DSL modem between the two rooms, creating lots of frayed and tangled wires.

The UPS still isn’t working, so the classes are at a standstill. We measured the voltage across the batteries, and they seem to be holding a charge just fine, so we’re kind of at a loss as to why the UPS is unable to funnel that power to the computers. We’re still working on getting this issue resolved. The next step is to get in contact with a store that sells and services Amaron batteries (the kind that are in the school) and have their service technician check the batteries one more time. If he says they’re okay, then we know the UPS is the problem, and we’ll have to find a way to get that fixed. We have yet to find someone in Chhatarpur who can do that kind of work, so we might have to look in Jhansi (four hours away) or Gwalior (eight hours away, with two bus changes).

Textbooks

As far as printed material goes, we picked up a book called Dynamic Memory Computer Course (ISBN: 818419255X) at the Jain Book Agency in Delhi (here’s the book on their site, but there’s no picture or good description). It’s in Hindi, and it seems to be a really good reference for the teacher and kids in Bijawar. I think the teacher also found the books that the school already had, but I’m not totally sure where they are or what happened to them.

Former students

We spoke with some of the students from the first batch, and they’re really interested in being able to use the computers on their own time. Once we get the UPS fixed and the classes running again, we’re going to see if the teacher can open up the lab on Sundays to allow students who’ve already taken the computer class access to the computers.

Girls’ HS School

At the Girls’ HS School, we’re working with a passionate, young woman teacher to see if there is some way that we can get them computers so that they can implement a program similar to that at the boys’ school. I’ll keep you updated on this as we get further along in the process.

English language education

During this visit, we also wanted to explore the possibility of teaching English language conversational skills, reading, and comprehension to ninth and tenth graders. We first needed to assess their English skills grade level as compared to American standards in order to establish a baseline from which we could work, so we took some copies of short stories from the magazine Highlights for Children (aimed at US kids, ages 6-9). We asked Divya, the English teacher at the Boys’ HS School, to send us five girls and five boys from the ninth and tenth grades who might be interested in helping us with this two-week project. Not surprisingly, there was a huge response, and we were inundated with requests from students and their parents. I’m still not sure if this response was because they genuinely wanted to learn English or just because the classes were free.

We started the project with a group of five each of ninth grade girls and tenth grade boys. Most of these kids were the best students in their classes, with parents who had the most resources, but it very quickly became evident the students had absolutely no conversational skills. They could read at approximately an American 2^nd grade level, but their reading comprehension was very poor. Their theoretical grammar knowledge was pretty good – unsurprising, as this is something that can be written and memorized – but their ability to apply that knowledge was limited to nonexistent. Along the same lines, the students are being taught to memorize English. The teacher reads short passages from their textbook aloud and either dictates or writes down the answers to all the questions in that lesson, and the kids memorize those answers word-for-word. We went through a couple of the lessons from their textbook, and each one of the students just spit out the same rote answers.

In general, though, the students were very enthusiastic, showed up on time, and were ready to learn. They usually did conversational role-playing for the first half of the hour and then reading comprehension from the Highlights short stories for the second half. This pattern seemed to hit all of the points we wanted to emphasize, but our limited time in Bijawar made it difficult to assess if they were really retaining information and skills. When we left, they all wanted to know how they could keep learning – something which we’re still struggling to figure out.

To our never-ending surprise, the computer education program at the Boys’ HS School in Bijawar is going pretty well. As the students from the first two batches (who started while I was there in July and August) learned to use the internet, each of them set up a Gmail account, and we received several emails from them. It was satisfying to see them use the Hindi transliteration in Gmail and become comfortable with sending email.

The teacher has now settled into a pattern of training each batch of students for six weeks – six days a week for one hour every day. Because the school has electricity from 9am to 11am every day, the teacher runs two batches at the same time, one from 9am to 10am and one from 10am to 11am.

Here are some numbers on how many students have gone through the program so far:

• Batch 1 (July 15, 2009 – August 31, 2009): eight students from the 9th grade
• Batch 2 (August 1, 2009 – September 15, 2009): eight students from the 9th and 10th grades
• Batch 3 (September 3, 2009 – October 31, 2009): seven students, four from the 9th grade and one each from the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades
• Batch 4 (September 16, 2009 – October 31, 2009): eight students, four each from the 10th and 11th grades

The teacher identified Lalit, a 9th grader from the first batch of students, as someone who would make a good TA; he’s smart and picked up things quickly. He’s currently working with the third batch as a TA. He stopped coming sometime in mid-September, and we talked to him, telling him that if he attended regularly for the next month, he’d get a stipend. Hopefully, this motivated him to come to class regularly as a TA. We’ve also asked the teacher to identify a student from the third or fourth batch who could serve as a TA in the future.

The electricity schedule changed in the second half of September due to Navaratri, a major festival that lasts for nine days. The teacher was only able to teach class from 11am to 12pm during this time. He had permission from the principal to teach the second class from 3pm to 4pm, but he was pulled into other official school business, like helping students fill out registration forms for upcoming board exams. When the schedule went back to normal starting September 30, the computer classes went back to the normal time.

As I’ve talked about before, there are one monitor and one CPU that haven’t ever worked. Wipro customer support is awful, but I finally forced them to supply the school with a replacement monitor. I’m having a really hard time getting them to fix or replace the broken CPU, even though the computers are under an active warranty. The teacher has reported that two of the other computers tend to freeze up whenever anything is opened in MS Office. All of this just underscores the continued need to identify people who can come to the school on a regular basis and provide IT support.

The teacher has also asked for more Excel exercises, which we put together and sent to him. He’s been using them regularly with the students, and he’s been sending us the results, which is kind of nice. In the past few weeks, he’s also gotten a lot more comfortable regularly sending us short emails to update us on what’s been going on. He’s started to understand the things that we’ve been so insistent on in the past – teaching only one kid at one computer, for example, or connecting all of the computers to the internet so they can be taught internet skills more quickly. It’s gratifying to see the teacher’s progress.

The principal at the Girls’ HS School informed us that the school was supposed to receive computers in October, which – well, I’ll believe it when I see it.

I’m planning to be in Bijawar for three weeks again this winter. Here’s a partial list of things that are on our agenda:

1. Identify IT support and set up a regular schedule for servicing the computers. This’ll be something of a challenge. I think there are people in Chhatarpur (about 70 km away) who can provide this kind of service, but we’ll have to vet them to find dependable and trustworthy ones to hire.
2. Get all of the computers connected to the Internet. This is something the school should really be able to do on their own, but it’s probably not going to happen unless we get it done ourselves. They have all of the equipment, and they just need someone to connect it all together.
3. Find good computer books in Hindi that can be used as a reference by the teacher and students when they have questions or need help with something. We’re not sure if books like this even exist (they should, but who knows). If they do, we’ll have to look in Delhi or Bhopal, since Chhatarpur is unlikely to have anything like this. We’ve also asked the teacher to find the books that came with the computers, since they seem to have disappeared between last winter and now.
4. Meet with the students who’ve already been trained and find out what they need in order to take their skills to the next level. One idea is to have the teacher open up the lab on Sundays. Students who’ve gone through the program can sign up for times to use the computers and keep their skills up. The teacher would just be supervising them and answering questions – he wouldn’t really be teaching at this time.
5. Explore the needs of small-business owners with regards to computer services. Perhaps the students can earn some money completing small computer tasks for the community. Part of the earnings could be used to fund the computer program.
6. If the Girls’ HS School receives computers by December, we’d like to set up a program there similar to the one at the Boys’ HS School.
7. Identify an additional teacher to help with the computer program. Doing so would provide something of a cushion, in case something happens with our current teacher. If the Girls’ HS School receives computers, another teacher might be able to start there as well.
8. See if there’s interest in a program that focuses on developing English language speaking skills for the students. Perhaps it would be possible to use technology – landline or cell phones, maybe – to pair students in Bijawar with people in urban areas who speak English well.

We still have a lot of planning to do for December, so I’ll keep you posted!

We did a little bit more Word with the first batch of kids, then we skipped straight to Excel. I figure that the teacher can handle Word and more basic Windows stuff on his own, but he’s a little weak on Excel, so I wanted to give the kids a good grounding in that myself. They’re picking it up pretty fast.

My car didn’t show up this morning because the driver had gone to Jatashankar in the morning instead of coming here, so I got something of an unexpected day off.

The teacher has been coming over regularly in the evenings to go over the next day’s lesson plans, which is nice, but hasn’t totally fixed my frustrations with the different style of teaching. There seems to be a lot less long-term (or, really, even short-term) planning involved, and the teacher just covers whatever seems to strike his fancy any particular day. The concept of making lesson plans for the day or week or month, to make sure that all the material gets covered, and nothing is accidentally skipped over or repeated, is absent. While I understand that this is just sort of the way the schools in rural villages work, it’s frustrating at a personal level, because I’d like to give the kids a higher quality education than that (and also because the lack of order bothers me).

I tried to get Wipro to fix the CPU and monitor that don’t work, but no dice. They say the parts aren’t covered by any existing service contract. The school’s only options might be to a) write it off as a loss or b) hire an outside repairperson. Wipro has to have the worst customer service ever – just finding the right number to call took me three hours of Internet searching and cold calling.

I got mehndi done on my hands today (I’ll try to post some pictures tomorrow) because Rakhi is on Wednesday. The girl, Priyanka (above), who drew it on talked to me about how she’d love to learn English and computers. I’d really like to explore options for teaching students conversational English – not even reading and writing, which some can manage on their own, but actually speaking it, which is just as important in the job market.

I’m writing this in bed, and the house next door has live music and prayers blasting through loudspeakers mounted on their roof; the speakers have been on non-stop since Saturday afternoon, starting with the reading of the Ramayana and moving on to aarti. There has been other stuff, too, but I don’t really understand most of it, so I’m not sure what exactly. The house was recently built/renovated, so I think this is a housewarming of sorts. It’s a big community event – people have been in and out of the house all weekend to read, visit, and pray.

The mosquitoes are eating me alive. One actually bit my lip the other night, and it swelled up and made me look like I’d been punched in the face for a good 12 hours. I’ve been trying to keep them at bay with a combination of Odomas and some Repel Lemon Eucalyptus stuff that doesn’t have DEET in it, but that only goes so far. The super-carcinogenic mosquito coils available here work pretty well, but they make my eyes water and give me a headache (as well as mutating my DNA, I’m sure).

One of the teachers at the Bijawar Boys’ HS School called us from Sagar (about two hours from Bijawar), saying that he was at a store, looking to buy some new equipment – chairs, tables, and assorted computer hardware – for the school’s computer lab. He asked us a few questions about what kind of switch was needed to connect all of the computers to the Internet, as well as how many ethernet cables he should buy (and of what length). We were happily surprised by the school’s enthusiasm for pushing forward on the project!

It seems that the school has received money to spend on computer equipment. We also learned that the internet hadn’t been working for a couple of months, which frustrated the principal immensely, because he had to spend an extra Rs. 1000 each month to send his administrative assistants to Chhatarpur to file the payroll. We spoke with the person who initially installed the broadband line at the school, and he went to the school to fix whatever was wrong. As far as I could tell, there had been some problem with the billing, and the server in Indore had apparently been down for a few days, contributing to the problem. We had also asked him to bring a speakerphone, which he did. The school is still working on getting the 16-port switch up and running.

All systems seem to be go to start a pilot project in July. Our current plan is to spend the first two weeks of July training the teacher we’ve identified, then begin teaching students. We hope the project will go for about three months, after which we will evaluate the success of the project and determine how to move forward. We’re trying to get volunteers to sign up for one-week slots to help out in Bijawar during this time. We’re still working on a rough curriculum, which will be posted once its finished, as will more details about the project itself.

We’ve been trying to get in contact with someone at the Girls’ HS School to see whether they received computers, but we’ve had no luck so far.

We talked to the principal at the Boys’ HS school in Bijawar on April 8th. We were scheduled to start the pilot computer project at the school from April 10th, but unfortunately, this project will not take off in April, which is something of a disappointment. The principal has now agreed to start the pilot project in July when the new school year starts in earnest (although the school year officially started on April 1).

We have to deal with some issues on the ground: the general elections, communicating with the school administration, and electricity. Bijawar is on a strict electricity schedule. They have three hours off followed by three hours on. During the normal school hours, electricity is available from 9:00am-12:00 noon and then again from 3:00pm to 6:00pm. Since the HS school session goes from 12:00 noon to 4:00pm, the computer project has to run outside the regular HS hours. We need to plan for this issue, which we were certainly aware of before, in consultation with the principal.

The 2009 General Lok Sabha elections will be held through April and will suck up all resources in small places like Bijawar. The school facilities are turned over to the election commission for training election officials, setting up election booths, storing ballot boxes and other election related materials, and other such activities. The government school teachers are also mandated to participate as election officials.

We also need to develop a better strategy to have the principal at the boys’ HS school become more invested in this project. One of the fundamental issues we keep running into is the tendency to push the issue of the pilot project further and further – if it’s in the future, he doesn’t need to deal with it right now. While understandable (the principal is busy, and the school is involved in many things), this attitude is also extremely personally frustrating.

It might be useful if we are more completely able to explain the need for careful, long-term planning. We’d like to keep him informed at the different levels of planning – show him in more painstaking detail the work being done to develop a suitable curriculum, train teachers, and procure the hardware and software required for the project, among other things. We’d also like to impress upon the principal the idea that starting some project – any project, no matter how small – will give us and him the tools and knowledge to move forward in a more productive manner.

Development of computer curriculum

We’re still working on outlining objectives for the pilot project and preparing the appropriate lesson plans. To help with this process, we’re thinking of trying to reach a block education officer to find out if they already have a curriculum to introduce computers to HS students. Whether or not this will be successful or useful is yet to be seen.

Volunteer teacher network

We’re looking to start an email conversation with software engineers (and other computer-savvy people!) who are interested in working as volunteer teachers for this project. If they’re willing to donate one to two weeks of their time for this project, they would have to travel to Bijawar to work with teachers and students in an extracurricular pilot project. Their responsibilities would be as laid out in my last entry and which I’ll quote again here:

“Ideally, their role both in and out of the classroom would have been to assist the teachers and troubleshoot problems, though they would of course help the students as needed as well. I was hoping that this sort of hands-on teacher training would have allowed those teachers to carry on this program more independently in the future.”

Next visit

We’re planning a one month trip to Bijawar again at the end of this year. We hope to meet with education officials at the block and district levels to get a better understanding of what the state government’s plans are for computer education in rural schools. We also want to identify teacher and IT resources for this project in the Chhatarpur area.

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. They’re running behind in getting the final examination results out, and they cannot start the program until that work is done. Additionally, the Bijawar Boys’ HS School is a block-level school, which means that the examination papers for all middle and high schools in the block (smaller than a school district, but it’s the same general concept) are graded there. The good news is that the principal is willing to let the program run through the end of April, adding a week to the time we thought we had.

The principal has already spoken to the teachers who we know to have some computer skills – Salar, Divya and Sanjay (all residents of Bijawar) – and they are on board for April. Since Ashish commutes from Bada Malehra (about an hour away) and his contract for the new school year has not yet been renewed, it will be difficult for him to join the program at this time.

It was rightly pointed out to me that this first pilot experience needs to be a relatively smooth one, or we might lose interest and momentum in moving forward. Since it’s not feasible for my family or I to fly to India for two weeks right now, we were actively working with a couple of software engineers from Noida to come down to Bijawar for two weeks to help out in April. Ideally, their role both in and out of the classroom would have been to assist the teachers and troubleshoot problems, though they would of course help the students as needed as well. I was hoping that this sort of hands-on teacher training would have allowed those teachers to carry on this program more independently in the future.

Unfortunately, the people we were talking with will not be able to spend the full two weeks in Bijawar, but they are still very committed to the program. They’ve talked about wanting to take Fridays off work to go down to Bijawar to teach on the weekends. These software engineers have also been talking about the project at work, and it looks like several other people are interested in volunteering their time.  It would be great to harness this interest, but we’ll have to see how to make that possible logistically.

Due to the elections scheduled for later half of April, it is going to be extremely difficult to find lodging for volunteers coming from elsewhere. Bijawar has only one guest house and no hotels. The guest house is fully booked due to the elections.  These volunteers may have to stay in Chhatarpur or Khajuraho and commute to Bijawar. We will also be looking for possible teacher resources in Chhatarpur.

As another follow-up to my last post, the cost of getting a speaker phone, an 8-12 port switch and associated Cat5 cables to hook up all of the computers to the Internet is approximately Rs. 3,500 – 4,000.

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 in grades 10 and 12 take in March. However, after weeks of talking with the principal, he agreed to teach students from April 1-15 from 9am-12pm, before classes but while the school still has electricity. I’m really excited to see some development on this front!

Although exam results for grades 10 and 12 come straight from the M.P. Board of Secondary Education), the boys’ HS school teachers are available during this time because they’ll be at the school grading exams and preparing marks sheets for their grade 9 and 11 students. The principal has agreed to let some of them – exactly who that will be is yet to be determined – teach computer classes at this time. The new school year technically starts in April (their school year is different from that in the US), but students tend not to show up after exams because about half of the student population comes from smaller villages around Bijawar.

We would have liked to try the program for the whole month of April, but elections in India for the 15th Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Parliament) have been announced to start April 16. Any available government school facilities will therefore be occupied after April 15.

Our recommendation to the principal is to pick for this pilot program two groups of nine motivated students who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to learn computer skills. There are ten computers, but the last is still broken, and the school needs to get it fixed. As a minor note, the principal has agreed to change the faulty fuse that keeps burning out when more than two computers are turned on at a time. This is fantastic, because it’s such a small problem that would prevent any computer classes from being held.

For the last couple of days, we’ve been working on a 13-day curriculum for the teachers to follow. It’s loosely based on the Operation Fikelela Curriculum put together by IkamvaYouth and the Shuttleworth Foundation to teach computer skills to kids in South Africa. Once that’s finalized, I’ll post the PDFs here.

I’m currently trying to figure out the best way for the teachers to document each day’s work and any problems, evaluate the students’ progress, and communicate the necessary information to us. I’d also like the students to briefly evaluate, possibly anonymously, the program at the end of the two weeks, to see where we can improve it.

We’re looking to maybe hold a summer computer camp once school lets out in May, but the viability and details of that plan are heavily depended on how this two-week program in April goes.

We’re also working on a way to get an 8- or 12-port switch and Cat5 cables so that the school can connect all of the computers to the internet simultaneously. Along those lines, I’ve heard some talk about how the school might be exceeding (or is expected to exceed soon) their current broadband plan and therefore incurring additional costs, which is something to watch out for.

The last I’d heard, the girls’ HS school was expected to receive computers in April. I plan on checking in with them soon to see whether that’s still the case, and if so, what their plans are for using them.