Teachers, Viruses and Transitions

Tuesday February 10: I am working at home today, which is one of the things that I have very much enjoyed doing since moving into this funky (and falling down) colonial house with a big garden. I can look out the window at the lovely trees as I reflect on what I am doing. Today I have been a bit more reflective (or maybe just scattered? Or lazy?) than usual as I recover from a Train the Trainers course that I organized and helped teach all of last week, clean up my email inbox, and attempt to clean viruses off my computer and flash drive. The reflections have to do with thinking about my learnings, successes and failures as I start to work towards leaving Zambia at the end of July (which doesn’t seem so far away at the moment!). I will try to write an organized post about this transition at some point. There’s more on the concrete tasks of the day below.

More on the Train the Trainers course: It was my first attempt at organizing a course to help teachers learn how to teach IT skills to other teachers, pupils or members of the community. This is an important direction to go in to help the schools keep the IT teacher training going after I’m not around, and also to encourage teachers to participate in the IT lessons for pupils (to take the strain off the lab managers) and to offer courses to community members as a way to generate income. As a first attempt, I think it went rather well. The other instructor (one of the computer lab managers) and I each taught some lessons (both to share content and to model good lesson preparation and delivery), and then set up a structure for each of the course participants to prepare and deliver a lesson (in teams of two). We evaluated the participants based on their performance on an exam (written and practical), their lesson preparation and delivery, and attendance. Of the 10 participants in the course, two did not pass, meaning they did not earn a certificate (which is quite valuable in this culture). In the previous courses I have organized, to teach teachers basic IT skills and how to use computers for educational purposes, certificates have been solely based on attendance. It is both good and tough to move to a system of performance evaluation. Overall, though, the participants seemed to appreciate that the course had standards to uphold. All of the participants felt that they had increased their knowledge and confidence with IT, and I am hoping that at least some of them will be able to find time in their schedules to help their schools deliver IT instruction! Now I need to write a follow up report, and prepare a CD-ROM disk for the participants with files from the training (and various anti-virus installers… see below). Shown here are a couple of photos from the training course: the computer lab managers (and intern) that I work with, and some teachers preparing their lessons.

More on the viruses: In Zambia, many computer users do not own computers, but use flash drives (thumb drives) to store and carry their work. As many of you know, these flash drives are amazing vectors for computer viruses. They spread them like people who don’t wash their hands! In general I am very careful about making sure to scan any flash drive before opening it in my laptop, and have done my best to spread this gospel. However at the beginning of the training we discovered that the flash drives were spreading viruses (or Trojans or worms?) that AVG, our anti-virus software, had not yet learned how to detect! So before we knew it every computer in the lab (including mine) was infected. At least one of these sneaky buggers had this funny trick of disabling the “Search” function and task manager on the computer, to make it more difficult for the user to find the infection! After much time investigating and fiddling, I have now figured out how to remove the nasty little programs from my computer (using AVG in combination with two other antivirus programs (Spybot and BitDefender). I then turned to the challenge of the infected flash drive, and realized I had to reformat the flash drive to clean it. This required uninstalling the Spybot program first because I couldn’t figure out how to get it to stop interacting with the flash drive…Who knew that this would be so complicated!