Paul Blair: 21 Century Librarian?

The library here is one small room with a good selection of books, three working computers, and an unfortunate water leak from the neighboring bathroom. After poking around the library and reflecting on my goals, I wrote up a proposed timetable in which I use the library to teach “creative arts” at all grade levels, two times a week for each grade.  This has not yet been discussed with the headmaster, and maybe won’t be discussed until the strike is finished.  So the rest of this post is all speculation on my part.

The reasons I am proposing this:

• I like the idea of teaching creative writing.
• Working with all grades right off the bat will help me understand sooner rather than later where I can make the biggest difference.
• Two other teachers actually suggested Creative Arts, in different cases I think because:
  • it’s not a core class, so it doesn’t step on the toes of the more senior teachers.
  • it’s not tested on the big KCPE test, so I can’t do any damage, and by extension, I could just teach computers during that time as a bonus.
• Because it’s a low-pressure subject, I might have the freedom to assess the students and, I hope, act as a kind of “interventionist” in the sense that I can focus on basic English when needed.  I thought about this a lot after reading this report about the world’s best school systems (I tired of reading about the difficulties in Kenya) and in particular the section about Finland.  Finland is an interesting case because students start school relatively late and have short days, yet their language marks are excellent.  Why?  Apparently because they keep teachers on staff whose job it is to target the children who need help and to make sure they get it.  But how could I possibly focus on certain students when I have a whole class in my room?  Read on…
• COMPUTERS.  I really do believe that there is a solution for a lot of educational bottlenecks here.  The amount of time that a child is actually actively engaged in class is relatively low, and a computer could help with that tremendously, especially with English skills, as doing almost ANYTHING on a computer exposes you to a lot of repetitive, incidental text, which seems ideal for language learning.  Also, putting some kids on the computers allows me to split the class and focus on the non-computer-users.

So, what do so with these computers?  First, let’s take an inventory of what they’re made of:

1. Pentium, floppy, CD-ROM, network jack
2. Pentium, floppy, network jack
3. Pentium, floppy
4. Not working: Pentium MMX, floppy, USB, but no RAM (needs a DIMM)

They are all running Windows 95, and there are three monitors, two of which are pretty dim.  One problem immediately jumps out at me, which is how am I going to install things if I can’t make floppy disks using my laptop?

If I was going to go out and spend my own money, the simplest solution would be to set up a small LAN with wireless for my laptop, if not to simply replace all the machines.  That being said, I want to maximize the available resources before I do that, or go fundraising, or looking for donations, because I would really like to learn and document ways for future volunteers to maximize old computers in these types of situations.  After I’ve maxed these machines out, then I’ll consider the other options.

That being said, I’ll need to buy SOMETHING, probably a crossover network cable to hook my laptop, computer #1, or computer #2 together, and blank floppies. Seems kind of silly, but for philosophical reasons, it’s where I want to start.  So with this limitation, what kind of stuff will I try to put on these machines?  Surely nothing that costs money, so let’s see…

1. For the machine with a CD-ROM, I’d like to try (crossing my fingers) GCompris (check it out, it looks pretty impressive), running off of a bootable Linux CD, even though the computer doesn’t support that.
2. For both computers with network jacks, I would like to install some multiplayer Win95 games like FreeCiv which hopefully the kids will enjoy and use the game’s chat feature.  A standalone LAN chat program would be cool, too, as any encouragement to type would be productive on a number of levels.
3. For all three computers I think I’ll take a trip down memory lane with some remakes of some classic text-heavy adventure games like this one.  (Feel free to read a review of the games by a deaf gamer.)  And maybe Oregon Trail if I can find a legit copy…

Well, I hope you enjoy my long posts because my gut tells me that they’ll stop as soon as I actually start teaching.  (Or maybe my gut is just telling me that the milk I had today was bad…)  Lots of pictures coming this weekend, I promise!