The Beginnings - Part III

Mr. Atta managed to get everything all nice and packed sometime around the end of May.  We debated all kinds of plans about the best way to pack the computers.  I called every shipping place I could to ask advice.  In the end, I have no idea how they were packed.  Atta called me one day and told me it was done and that was that.  Not how I had planned, but he is a man of action and I was glad to be one step closer to getting the computers on the ocean.  Atta contacted a shipping company that he had worked with before and set up a time for them to pick up our containers.  Twice Mr. Atta set up these appointments and twice they did not show.  Once again another road block presented itself.  We were ready to begin seeking other options as our containers had been packed for several weeks now and sitting in Atta's garage.  This was an incredibly frustrating time.  To make a long story short, eventually they did show and our computers were headed for Africa.  I was excited and nervous.  We had just turned over 3 crates full of computers, clothes, and school supplies and I had no invoice.  I was assured that everything was in order, but it just wasn't the way I was used to doing busines.  It was well over a week before I was emailed an invoice and we didn't even pay anyone for a couple of weeks.  When the crates were picked up Mr. Atta had told them he did not have time to pay them because they had made him wait so long.  They would have to wait.  Wow.  He is a man of action and I am impressed. Eventually we got a real invoice, paid our bill and I even got a tracking number.  I checked it daily, as if it would make things move quicker.  After a stop in Amsterdam our container finally made it to Tema where it would sit in port for another solid week before being received by Community Eleven School.  Mission accomplished.  Kind of.  School was out for the summer so the crates were moved to the headmaster's house to await the new school year and installation.  Again we would have to wait. That pretty much gets us to where we are now.  CESC is working on the installation process, aparently with an outside organization.  There is so much I don't know about what is going on in my own project.  It can be frustrating at times, but it has been an incredible learning experience.  I've had to accept the fact that I can't control every little aspect of this.  It's just not possible. I'm not really used to that, but I'm coming to terms with it.  I've also learned to accept that there are different ways of doing business.  Mr. Atta has helped me many times with reassurance that everything was ok.  It's been fun, it's been frustrating, it's been a challenge.  We've only just begun...

Recruiting, Writing and Soccer Gear

Thanks to my wife, Robyn, who is a school social worker in our district, I was invited to share our project at Joyner Elementary School yesterday.  I presented to the 5th grade students and their teachers as well as a few other staff members.  I wasn't real sure what to expect and basically just adapted a presentation I gave to our staff here at Mendenhall.   The kids were excited and had some great questions.  They were curious about how our schools differ from theirs.  So their plan is to come up with a list of questions that Robyn and I can take with us and work on answering as we visit Community Eleven.  We also provided their teachers with the idea of possibly having the students create an autobiographical poem that we could take with us to share and hopefully have CESC kids complete as well. In my classroom our students are working on creating an essay about a pivotal moment in their life to share with students in Tema who are preparing the same assignment.  I'm pretty excited about this for several reasons.  One, this is potentially our first real exchange between our students and I have a feeling that the topics the students have chosen will be radically different from each other.  I can't wait to see what comes out of these.   Finally, thanks to another connection provided by Robyn, we're communicating with Soccer.com's Passback program and are working on getting some gear to help Community Eleven build a soccer team.  This is kind of a side project from the original plan, but if we have the chance to connect through soccer (football) I'm all about it.  Mr. Atta also sees this as another opportunity for the kids in the region to find a positive outlet. Lots of stuff going on right now.  All kinds of ideas and possibilities.  I can't wait to see where all this takes us.

The Beginning - Part II

The success of Ghana days had us planning to make it an annual event.  It didn't happen.  I was also a little disappointed with the fact that the kids raised a bunch of money, presented Atta with a check and then had nothing else to do with the project.  The students had participated in the fundraising, but did not build a real connection with the project itself. We had done some good, the money raised was used to refurbish computers, but I felt like we could do better. We needed a way to better connect our students with Community Eleven School Complex. I had a student teacher and therefore a little time on my hands so I started looking into grants for technology to use in my classroom.  I wanted iPads for my students to use and I was searching for ways to make it happen.  I found two grants that I thought might fit my needs and came up with the idea to include a connection with Community Eleven.  I presented the idea to Mr. Atta and he said sure.  I'm not sure that what I was proposing was really clear, or I explained it all that well, but it was all still hypothetical.  I wrote the grants pitching the idea that we would purchase 6 iPads and 6 FlipVideo cameras to be split between our two schools.  Students would use the technology to create videos about their daily lives, school and communities that we would then share via the internet.  It worked.  My idea was funded by both the NEA Foundation and the Lego Children's Fund.  With both of the grants I recieved almost $10,000 for the project.  Game on! Once we had the funding, Mr. Atta and I started talking seriously about how to implement the project.  We ran into a roadblock right away. CESC didn't have internet access much less wireless.  I hadn't even considered this as a possible problem as I was developing my initial plan.  I figured we would order the iPads and have them shipped to CESC and we'd be exchanging videos in a few weeks.  I was quickly introduced to reality.  Obviously our plans changed.  We began to focus on providing CESC with enough desktop computers to develop a computer lab.  Mr. Atta began purchasing used computers at UNCG's surplus sales and we asked our students and staff to donate their old computers as well.  We found a local computer repair service that offered to refurbish the computers at a discounted price and we managed to buy 3 new desktops along the way.  In the end we added 2 laptops and 2 printers as well.   It took us an entire year to collect the computers, monitors, keyboards, and other accessories and be certain that everything was in working order.  At times it seemed like we would never get everything organized and ready to go.  Thanks to Alliance Computers and the UNCG Computer Science department we finally had enough refurbished computers that were ready to ship.  Enter the next roadblock... To be continued...

The Beginning

I'll have to recreate this the best I can.  This project has been several years in the making and just now gotten to a point where I feel like I should start writing about it.  I wish I had kept a little better record of events as we were putting things together, but I had no idea what this would turn into.  So, to the best of my recollections this is our story...

I met Mr Kweku Atta in my first years at Mendenhall.  Somewhere around 2006 I guess.  He was (and still is) the custodian on my hall, so we would strike up conversations from time to time as he worked in the afternoons.  Eventually I learned that he was from Ghana and we tried, somewhat successfully to set up something where he would share with the students about his home since we studied the Africa and the Eastern Hemisphere.

When UNCG ran this story in January of 2010 it opened the door for the beginnings of our project.  It started with my wife and I making a small donation to Mr. Atta to help with shipping costs and turned into Ghana Days later that year.  Students in the 7th grade were assigned to create a project about a specific time period in Ghana's history.  We then came together as an entire grade level for two days of presentations and sharing about the history and culture of Ghana.  

The final aspect of Ghana days was an afternoon Survivor tournament among the grade level. Students created teams of their friends and donated a small entry fee to play one of their favorite Physical Education

games.  Students who decided not to play were asked to make small donations to come out and watch.  In the end, no student was excluded and we had an excellent afternoon of games and socializing.  We were able to present Mr. Atta with a check for $550

To be continued...