Strategic Focus and Mission Expansion - Results from Rio trip

Having spent Thanksgiving break in Rio working at Projeto Uerê, I am reporting back on some minor changes to the project.  Overall it was a great success and despite the dire situation of many of the children, I was inspired and deeply moved by the work Yvonne and everyone at the school are doing to give the children a chance in life.

Strategic Focus

It became clear right away that the school does not have the infrastructure, both technical and of personel, for the first step to implementing a literacy curriculum for the children: getting them to blog.  Having the children blog and use this self-generated content as a basis for their literacy and communication and computer skills education is still the end goal.  However, to get the project started, the first step has changed from trying to get the children to blog to getting the teachers to blog.   This is not necessarily a set-back, but something we would have to have done anyway - training the teachers - if we were to scale the impact.  To that end, I gathered information on their mode of work and all the technical resources available there.  I spent time with teachers and coordinators, as well as students and got a good sense of what can be done by Winter Quarter.  I also brought with me a lot of content that has been gathered by the International Coordinator who shares it with international donors and private school scholarship sponsors.  I also started a mock up test blog to get some of the video clips I made there up on the web.  They can be found at the Projeto Uerê multimedia blog.

Mission Expansion

In formulating the blog the teachers will be updating with images, videos and drawings generated by the children, it became clear that we were not only creating the content for the eventual literacy curriculum, but also a digital portfolio for each of the children.  We were in fact creating a home on the internet for these children who don't have a real home to go back to.  This also fell inline with one of the big challenges for growth that the school is facing, which is in recruiting and maintaining the pool of sponsors for the private school scholarships.  By creating digital portfolios for each child, the sponsors have a way to follow the progress of the children without having to coordinate often unsuccesful chat conferences across different timezones.  Those video chats and emails and phone calls will still go on and they will still add tremendous value to the relationship between the child and their sponsor, but that was not a solution that scaled, given the time it took the teachers to faciliate those interactions.

So the mission has expanded from using blogging as a platform for literacy to using blogging as a platform for literacy through digital portfolios.