This year’s ICT holiday workshop
Big run on the ICT vacation workshops. – This year we offer 8 courses for a total of 96 students. Each course encounters twice a week for 2 hours and the course size is limited to the number of available working stations.
These Christmas holidays, the AIM. ICT training centre is going to open its gates for an ICT holiday workshop. During the past term, Michael and I realized that, for many students, AIM. and its ICT training centre provide the only resources to get in touch with a computer and how many students would be eager to be given more of this opportunity. This inducement, the students’ gratefulness after every lesson and their fascination in using the graphical user interface were reasons enough to offer this workshop at our partnering Junior High Schools.
Our biggest concern was for the students to participate at this workshop on a voluntary basis. Therefore, we are happy that the contact teachers succeeded in communicating this intention to the class. The students already must subordinate their Saturday activities, like washing their school uniforms or selling snacks to support their families, to the ICT workshop so we put much effort not to further deplete their motivation.
Moreover, we intend the give them room to independently deal with a computer. Of course, Michael and I will never be able to grant them identical opportunities to familiarize with the graphical user interface: we were privileged to spent countless hours preparing a PowerPoint presentation for school, playing video games, even dragging boxes on the desktop. But we attempt to let them make them learn from more targeted experiences.
Our aspiration is to orientate the workshop by these concepts. We want to establish a flexible usage of the laptop, detached from the determined school lessons. We hope to create an atmosphere in which the students can familiarize and explore the concept of a computer, and make them experience the potential of ICT.
I am looking forward to report you about the outcomes once the vacations have ended.
