Friday, September 20, 2013

Up and At 'Em! We had an early morning meeting with the Ministry and all the Members once again to report on our 10 day journey and the various meetings. I had to present a report. There were a few items that I typed in bold print. Diligently, everyone read the report and Mrs. Margaret Nsereko, the Commissioner really zeroed in on the bolded print and asked the members to comment. They disagreed with the finding that there was no ICT in the curriculum. Well, I explained that this item referred to the primary school children curriculum, so that was OK. They researched the teacher's curriculum and discovered that there was indeed some ICT training. I guess I was surprised there was any, but then surprised again when I saw it was only 3 hours. What can you learn about ICT in 3 hours. This just made me once again believe that the Microsoft ICT training was an essential piece to getting teachers up to speed. They were surprised that the Primary Teachers Colleges had no internet, pointing out that this was supposed to be in place because the teachers pay a fee for ICT. They were going to get to the bottom of that. In the end, I understood them all to be in favor of the project. I am now to send a Concept Note to Annet (to edit) with the eventual recipient to be the Permanent Secretary. Success! I must also compose a Memorandum of Understanding for Ronald Ssemyalo who will use it to seek funding for the research element of this pilot project. We were going to visit St. Lawrence University for Eric to give a talk to the students on Web development. He was so prepared, had his presentation on his iphone connected to my portable projector (small and charged) So elegant, really. Anyway, though, protocol set in. When I went to confirm the time, I was told that first, I needed to write to the University, then to the faculty to schedule the time. Now they tell us! Needless to say, we did not go as we were leaving the next day. We went back to the hotel to work on the Web. I now have venturesforgood.org/classes as the Moodle Distance Learning site and facebook.com/venturesforgood as my facebook page and www.venturesforgood.org as my responsive web design site and tons of categorized photos. Eric DiBari, web programmer par excellence, is great!