Laptops for students

Namaste

The Rotary Club International grant for this project included funding for two suites of computers; laptops for the primary aged students and desktops for the secondary students.

Porters arrived one morning carrying huge loads of these computers on their backs, having walked up the valley, two days from the end of the road.

The porters, looking amazingly cheerful, having carried heavy
loads of computers up the valley for two days.

What a difference these computers will make!

If you had lived all your life so far, high in the mountains, imagine the impression a computer would make.  Most of the children at the school have never left the valley. They had never seen a car, bus, truck or motorbike.  Suddenly, with the arrival and use of these computers, a whole new world will open up for them, and on the screen will be photos and video of things they could only imagine before.

The laptops are already loaded with a wide range of support material for the Nepali curriculum, which is simple to access.  There are practise exercises in Nepali, mathematics, science and English, and they are graded for each year group.  I spent time reviewing the English material which provided a range of different exercises; listening, choosing the correct answer to a spoken question, matching words by dragging, adding the correct word to pictures etc.  The students will love using these exercises, and won't realise they are actually working.

The package from the Nepali company supplying the computers also included extensive training for the teachers to enable them to use the computers in lessons and link the subjects they are teaching to the practise exercises on the laptops.  This was an essential part of the package as some of the teachers had not used a computer before!

I shall look forward to seeing these computers in action in lessons next autumn when I visit the school again.

Teachers undertaking training for the use of these computers