My time teaching basic IT at Al Wifaq school finished last week with a grand little party, cakes and all, thrown by the children. It was a really nice way to draw all the lessons to an end. The last week or two had been mainly focused on doing more fun activities in an end-of-schoolyear style. The penultimate week I’d organised a “Paint” competition, with chocolate for the winners of each group, in a bid to get the children to apply themselves and get pictures that I could put up on a big board in class, in honour of their efforts! It worked, though I quickly learnt that I needed to give the kids a bit of inspiration and show them ideas for what could be done in order to get their best work. Otherwise, I would be presented time and again with the same old house drawings! To be expected, maybe. Anyhow, once I’d honed the format of the lesson, all went well, I got the good drawings I wanted and at least one group left the room at the end of the class with big smiles and chocolate smudges on their faces!
My final class was even more fun. I taught the children how to upload digital pictures (unsurprisingly, none of the children possess digital cameras- but maybe following Morocco’s development, things will have changed…we can hope!) and then open them in Paint. My focus on Paint was the last section of my programme which had previously taken in Microsoft Word, Excel and a touch of Powerpoint. Unsurprisingly, it was one of the most enjoyed, though Word too was very popular, especially with the use of WordArt, different fonts, colours and pictures. The kids are more than happy to have a go at learning the basics of using computers- the latest technology, webcams and headsets have landed in Moroccan cybercafes littering the streets, and surfing the web and chatting by MSN have become adolescents’ favourite pastime! It was a big surprise when I first got to Morocco to discover that broadband and Pentium 3 computers could be found in cybers everywhere. The other shops to be found pretty exclusively consist of fruit and veg stalls, all-purpose foodstore shopfronts, carpenters, hairdressers, bike repairmen and cafes- all age-old services. Moroccans are becoming increasingly computer-savvy, so providing IT lessons, especially to children who have not previously had access to computers, are useful for the community and are met with eagerness from the children.
That said, my final lesson with each class did turn into riotous affairs. I’d taken each group to the garden where I took a series of pics of them, before loading them up into Paint, where they could draw clown’s noses on each other and transpose their heads onto each other’s bodies to their heart’s content. It was very enjoyable, even if I did take exception when my head was drawn into the fray (as it were) and placed on the body of a particularly rotund little girl! Getting the kids to leave the room at the end of the final lesson was particularly difficult, with my tactics of locking the children in for a few seconds seemingly not going down well with a fellow member of staff…Oh well. It was sad to leave the children, but I hope to return to Taroudannt to see them- and, with any luck, they will have been able to take on what they have learnt and use their new knowledge for other subjects (or impressing their friends in chatrooms)!
