Bosco Boys is very lucky to have such a well-equipped computer room. I have to keep telling myself this when computers are crashing and breaking and lessons are falling apart at the seams. Just to have a computer room at all sets it apart from most other public primary schools in Kenya. The director is very keen to have a fully-functioning computer room which the students can access regularly and has set aside two computer lessons a week for the forms 3-7 as a signal of his intent.
A typical lesson goes as follows.
Gary and I spend the half an hour before the class turning the computers on and loading up the program that the students will use. I then walk to the pupils' classroom, enter and wait for the kids to calm down. It's normally pandamonium when I get there, with kids walking around, shouting, hitting each other, still writing notes from the previous class, sleeping, walking in and out of the room etc. etc. and so it generally takes a good 5 or so minutes of commotion before I get anywhere near 'nyamaza' or silence. Fortunately I have the advantage of a. being relatively patient and b. being safe in the knowledge that on the whole they want to have their computer lesson and get a go in the computer room, so they know it's in their interest to shut up so that we can get there quicker.
Once I have something close to peace, I explain what we'll be doing in the lesson. For the first couple weeks, Gary and I just opened up Word on every computer and told them to write about their holiday one lesson, about their school the next and to write a letter another. Running out of things to set them to write about, and acknowledging that many students only managed to write 'mynameis soandso' in the half hour class, we change tack last week and got them practising using a keyboard using a touch-typing program.
Annoyingly this 'Rapidtyping' program is not as rapid as I would like and is unreliable on the computers we have, requiring Gary and I to spend the lessons dashing around the room restarting the game every time it crashes. On the plus side, some students have really taken to it and are whizzing through the levels. And we've almost managed to teach some of the older students to use Shift when writing a capital letter.
Apart from the typing program, there's also a German game called Moorhuhn that Gary downloaded which inovlves shooting flying ducks by moving and clicking the mouse. The kids love it and it's a fun way to get them used to controlling a mouse but sadly it only works on half a dozen computers at the moment, so we can't use it for a whole class yet.
Looking ahead, I'm thinking of giving the kids texts which they have to type up into Word and format correctly. I'd also love to do some kind of project or even a quiz to set them, but I think that may be a bit ambitious given the level of many of the students. One day I did try to teach copy and paste (using the mouse and the Edit menu as I thought that would be simplest) but I didn't get anywhere at all.
All suggestions for things to do in future classes are extremely welcome!
As I type this I'm doing Google searches to see if I can download some kind of sporcle style quiz game which could be used offline as a form of info-tainment...
Anyway, during the class, as I say, Gary and I patrol the room, restarting crashed computers, breaking up fights when the pupils refuse to share and somehow in between trying to pass on a few tips and tricks. At the very least, it's important just to let the kids have access to the computers, to get them used to using them and to remove any fear or mystery about them from an early age.
The end of every class is always the same and is always a fiasco.
The bell is rung. I open the door. Gary calls time on the lesson. Nobody moves. I remind everyone to not turn off the computers (as we'll need them for the next class). Gary asks everyone to leave. Nobody moves. Gary tells everybody to leave and switches off the server, thereby disabling half of the computers.
Panic ensues. The kids, realising their time is up, frantically start clicking buttons left right and centre, bashing away at keyboards, turning off screens, turning off computers and when finally they move away from the computer they were using they start doing the same at another computer closer to the door. Gary and I literally have to shepherd every boy and girl out of the room, cajoling, bribing and threatening as we go.
For the youngest class, I've started telling the kids to put their hands in the air and then on their heads as soon as the bell goes and tell them to leave like that. It's a tactic I might start using for the older students if they continue to not listen to our pleas to not fiddle with the computers as they leave the room. However, even with one hand on their head, the other invariably strays back towards the nearest mouse to squeeze out those extra last few clicks of desperation as they are dragged kicking and screaming from the room...
Obviously they like our lessons so much they don't want to leave!
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