Moleihi Sekese: Integrating Technology with No Electricity? #msief

 
Moleihi Sekese from Lesotho, Educator’s Choice award winner 2009 for the Microsoft Innovative Education Forum, is a teacher who has no electricity in her school.  While studying endangered indigenous plants, she began by having students borrow parent cell phones to text her their observations about the endangered plants. (“I was receiving texts until midnight, she said.)

Moleihi Sekese

The students had a bake sale to raise money to go to the Internet cafe in town (15 km away) to blog. When they wanted to raise awareness about protecting endangered plants, they had teachers bring charged laptops to school so they could scan the hand drawn images and make flyers in Microsoft Publisher.

To create a botanical garden growing these plants, they raised money to go to a botanical garden and filmed how to create their own. They produced the film and then went home and watched it to re-learn the steps for making their own garden to grow the endangered plants and protect them.

This science teacher with more than 50 children in her class makes no excuses and integrates technology anyway! If she can do this, what can other teachers do. (She now has over 100 students in a class! And this class size is definitely NOT OK, but look at her – she has a positive attitude and positively radiates beauty and energy! Look at the nobility of this teacher!)
The only thing limiting technology integration is the excuses we make to ourselves for not doing it.

Note:
 
Part of the Microsoft Partners in Learning Worldwide Innovative Education Forum 2010 series. Click the msief tag below to see all posts in this series.