The Eastern Visayas Technology Education Center had its first class yesterday, Thursday, January 5, 2017. It was an introductory class to discover any issues before we begin our official schedule on Tuesday, January 7, 2017. We discovered with our network structure and resolved them before the end of the class. We had nine hand-selected students attend. The first thing the students did was create Google accounts for receiving updates and logging into our Chromebooks. They watched a short inspirational video about Dado Banatao. He is a Filipino entrepreneur who grew in a level of poverty nearly identical to that of our students. The video demonstrated how through focusing on his education and on increasing his technology skills he was able to raise himself out of poverty and find enormous success. You can watch the video here. After watching the video students went to code.org and participated in the classic maze hour of code. Using block coding they moved famous fictional characters through a maze. Through the block coding abstraction, the students were able to learn the basics of Javascript including loops and if/else statements. We switched to keyboarding after coding. Most of the students had never used a keyboard, or a computer before so we began at the most basic level. The students used typing.com, starting by learning about the home row, j key, f key, and spacebar and were able to progress at their own rate. To finish, we discussed the importance of taking ownership of one's learning. We also provided ways for the students to take ownership of their learning outside of EVTEC. Firstly we stressed the importance of going to school and being an active participant once there. We gave them ways to absorb English by watching tv in English, listening to music in English, and reading books in English. To end the class we looked at websites where the students could complete college classes and receive diplomas and certificates for free like coursera.org, edx.org, and alison.com to demonstrate what they would be able to do in the future at EVTEC. They will be able to use the certificates and diplomas when applying for jobs or higher education. We're excited to begin our official schedule next week, and so are the students.
Oliver Dahl
P.S. - After the class, many of the students asked if we could hold classes every day of the week!
