Tea, Bread Roll, and Apps
Tuesday began with tea and a bread roll. As I believe I have mentioned, for some reason that we haven't figured out, here in Kenya I can eat the bread rolls. In the States, gluten ends up leading to rather debilitating effects. Here? I just get the joy of normal bread enriched by butter. Another of the joyful discoveries here.
After breakfast, it was off to the Volunteer Office to do the downloads. Matteo started them up first as I was initially a little under the weather and had to take a short rest. Too little sleep. This writer is way too nosey, and the different bird sounds through the night tend to have me awakened and wondering, "What was that noise? And what does that call mean?"
After my short rest, I joined Matteo in downloading a number of different apps, divided by the different subject areas. We didn't get all of the subjects - not business or CRE, for example - but all should benefit from the apps under Teacher Tools.
The apps we downloaded were:
Geography
Google Earth
Quakes
EarthViewer
Teacher Tools
Notability
Poplet Light
Nearpod
Tiny Scan
Edmodo
Khan Academy
ITunes U
Educreations
Sock Puppets
Evernote
Drive
Prezi
Blogger
Keynote
Pages
Math
Math on the Spot
Geogebra
PhotoMath
Graphing Calculator
Science
Science 360
3D Cell Stain
Nova Elements
History
Byzantium at the Getty
World History Games Pearson
World History Test Prep Pearson
Oriental Books
E-Codices
Today in History
Languages
Duolingo
Learn Swahili
Meditation
Omvana
Calm
Take a Break
Agriculture
DTN/The Progressive Farmer
Crop Nutrient Removal Calculator
Though the downloads took much of the morning, the good thing is that generally one app streamed to the other iPads so with Matteo and me doing downloads, we shortened the time greatly.
Recommendations for Paid Apps: Brushes, Comic Life, iMovie, Notability, and Evolutionary Biology. Most of the apps were in the arts, considering the pronounced interest of the girls in the arts. And I just thought about GarageBand being a last one that might be of interest to students here at Daraja that is a paid app. WolframAlpha might also be a very powerful tool.
After lunch, I walked Jason through three of the apps: Nearpod, Notability, Khan Academy, and Educreations. With those four, Daraja can create and utilize interactive presentations, create guided notes and collected instructional materials, find and use good and topical videos for educational purposes, and also create and distribute videos (ideal for preserving teacher knowledge and volunteer knowledge who come to share their experience with the students).
Jason left in the afternoon with two of the administrators to head to Nairobi and meet with lawyers to look into purchasing the Daraja Academy land. There are aims to grow, which is amazing! The school has done such great work, and it is now prepared to grow.
Before he left, Matteo and I met with him and those two administrators and Denis to talk about what more we can do while here. We crafted an additional schedule, including a Media Club talk (that afternoon in the evening, which was primarily on writing), two workshops on Wednesday with students (on Coding and Poetry, respectively), meetings with teachers for both of us on Wednesday and Friday, and also visits to Saint Mary's Nyeri on Thursday, Nanyuki on Friday, and possibly some local conservation spaces on Saturday and Sunday during the day. It's going to be a busy few days coming up.