We are doing well. Before starting this post, we want to thank you for participating in our quiz, please check out our new quiz questions of today (you can find it via: https://deloittebe-marketing.polldaddy.com/s/tanzania-2014-01).
Yesterday we gave our firsts trainings! The first day of trainings started by dividing the team into two groups: Cliff & Klaas teaching the students at Buhare school and Diana, Ivan & Seb teaching the NGOs on the Anglican Church premises.
The NGOs group consists of 10 organizations, 2 participants per NGO. Our teaching session started with an introduction of the participants, the project and ourselves. Although we were prepared to teach in English, we realized that we would also have to use Swahili as many of our participants could not speak English. Obviously, we were not novices in Swahili, since we had already learned a few words during our stay. In the end, we were lucky to have Theophile, the director of the Anglican Church, to back us up as a translator.
During the first day, we focused our training on Microsoft Word as it is the most straightforward Office product and a good basis for the courses on other Office applications. The approach was to use practical exercises in parallel with live demos. Flexible to the needs of our participants, we adapted our material to the fact that some of them had never used a computer before. After teaching the very basics, such as how to use a touchpad or write a capital letter, we finally started the Word training. The training quickly gained momentum. Indeed, our students despite being totally novices were eager to learn and, by the end of the day, they all were able to create a basic Word document, using various formatting, titles, colors, bullet points and, some, even pictures.
On the second day, we shifted to Excel as many of the participants had expressed their interest in finding out more about record keeping and data consolidation. The approach was similar as for Word, as we continuously combined live demos with practical exercises. We immediately noticed that the effort we had put in teaching them Word paid off during the training on Excel. Our students were able to apply by themselves the functionalities of Excel that are similar in Word (size of the text, font, color…).
The student group is taught by Klaas and Cliff at Buhare School. You would think that school starts at 9am sharp, but in Africa they don’t worry too much about time, hakuna matata, you know…
We expected to teach 20 students but when we arrived at the campus, 31 students were waiting for us. To get to know our audience for the coming days, we started with a meet and greet session. Afterwards, we kicked off with a basic Windows training followed by a security awareness session. Continuing with a short introduction in hardware and computer components, we trained them how to navigate in Microsoft Windows. What immediately caught our attention was the big difference in knowledge between our students, which created a big challenge in keeping the group together.
During the first break, we finally got the chance to bond with our students. Unlike in Belgium breaks in Buhari School are not used to check your emails but to play games and make fun.
The second day we started with the Microsoft Office Excel training. Our students were eager to learn about how to make calculations and use functions in Excel. After starting from a basic introduction training, we ended up with making pivots and charts. We were surprised to see how fast our students picked up this knowledge.
We will keep you posted on the evolution of our students and our work.
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