(The Vidyaloka Vidyalaya students that visited today playing after the English session. Pic cred: The author.)

Our endeavors in English and digital learning 

Just today, Room To Read launched our all-new immersive English learning program in the secondary library for some students of Vidyaloka Vidyalaya School! This was an exciting initiative that Ms. Lockwood had commenced with collaboration with software created by one of her close associates.

Thus, during today’s service session, the students arrived and spent the afternoon being taught fundamental English lessons on sentence structure, etc. It was exciting to see the young students engage keenly with the software! Meanwhile, our other members were working on a site to showcase other learning resources for the students.

(Everyone loves the slide. Pic cred: The author.)

During this time, Eleez and I were giving a presentation to Dr. Kleiss and Mr. Rappai on a prospective digital learning initiative. I admit, my favourite part of giving this presentation was the professional air of the boardroom! Essentially, our new project would target the upcycling of old digital devices at OSC and find a more sustainable way to refresh these.

What RTR planned on doing was having this technology donated to our partner schools in order to spread the students’ opportunities for digital learning. This would be a great way to engage the OSC community in carrying out projects that resonate with the school’s motto of compassion.

Dr. Kleiss gave suggestions to widen our horizon with this initiative, such as communicating with embassies and holding used-device drives. I believe this was highly beneficial in giving us room to increase our impact.

This meeting was just the start of our all-new initiative – and there will be future consolidations to make our vision a reality.

Learning outcomes:

• LO3 – Initiative & planning
  • The planning and creation process for this project proposal took quite some time, we had to work out the details and account for potential challenges that RTR may face when conducting it.
  • Additionally, we had to plan what our system for donating the old devices would be – which required some research. After this meeting, I believe there is still more information on device policy at OSC that has to be collected and consolidated prior to actually carrying out the laptop drive. 

• LO4 – Working collaboratively with others
  • Eleez and I had to work together to make the presentation in addition to planning out how we would give it out. I believe this was a success as we managed to work together and present this proposal in a very eloquent way.
  • Moreover, it took teamwork to decide what key targets to hit in our proposal so that we could convince our audience that this laptop drive would be positively impactful.

• LO6 – Global engagement
  • This initiative would engage with the global issue of disparity in learning resources across Sri Lanka. By providing our partner schools with these technological devices, we would be able to ameliorate this issue and accelerate the students learning of technology – which will be beneficial in an increasingly globalised world.