April Eats

You’d think that when teaching kids the internet, the problem would be slowing them down.

Not here in Bangalore. At work, we’re running a Yahoo! pilot program to introduce students from eight Karnatakan schools to e-mail and the web. By the end of the two-month test in November, more than 1,000 students should be on chat and Yahoo! groups, collaborating with students across the city on classroom projects. The first step is getting the students e-mail accounts. Easy, until you consider:

1. Few to zero internet hook-ups,
2. Internet firms gone MIA,
3. 10-day school holidays,
4. Index-finger-only typing, and
5. Ignorance of English, the language of the Yahoo! interface.

The result at, for example, Adugodi Government Girls School is this: For each student who has come during the holiday solely to get a Yahoo! account, it takes her nearly 25 minutes to get from e-mail virginity to the send button. Girls struggled to manipulate the mouse, spell their fathers’ names in English letters or remember the passwords they had just created.

Now imagine all 250 students sharing one computer, split into six-hour shifts for five days in a row. You can see why the technology facilitator (blue scarf in photos above) sighed.

Scaling up, visualized on blackboard at the American India Foundation’s refresher for cluster coordinators in Karnataka last week. The coordinators, who train government-school teachers to use computers in the classroom, speculated on the resources needed to increase the reach of the program throughout the Indian state. Click on the chalkboard for more photos from the retreat.

At this month’s training for an e-mail and internet pilot program, we taught government school teachers in Karnataka how to access Yahoo! Answers. One instructor posted this query: “who is the best teacher?”