A Day in the Life of CREE — Kolibri flying high in Honduras
This is a guest blog post written by Dick Buten, Shoulder to Shoulder’s President and Chairperson of their Education Committee. Shoulder to Shoulder is one of our implementing partners in Honduras and a Kolibri Hardware Grants Program grantee.
The day was Monday, April 8, 2019. It was the end of a 10-day assessment of Kolibri, as part of our general education program, called CREE (Regional Center for Educational Excellence, in Spanish).
We started out in Camasca, Intibucá, where Shoulder to Shoulder’s Educational Headquarters is located. Camasca is at the center of seven municipalities that comprise the StS service area. The others are Santa Lucia, Magdalena, San Antonio, Concepción, San Marcos de la Sierra, and Colomoncagua. These towns are located in the middle of Southern Intibucá, on the border with El Salvador. It is part of a UN-designated area of extreme distress, where farmers eke out an existence among steep terrain and poor soil, whose yields are getting worse as the climate warms and becomes drier.
On a map, all seven municipalities fit within a 35-kilometer square radius. Zooming into Google maps quickly shows roads that wind around the mountains and down through valleys, making traveling around difficult and time-consuming.
That day, we were visiting the town of Colomoncagua, the capital of the municipality of the same name. We work in high schools in the town’s center, as well as in a village in the municipality of Santa Ana. “Colo” is about an hour’s drive over very bumpy roads from Camasca; Santa Ana is a small village, another half-hour down roads even more severe. My activity monitor records over 10,000 steps for the ride out and back. The going is slow and fatiguing as we bump over large rocks or jostle through drainage ditches in the roadbed. I feel at times as though walking might have been easier.
The Colo colegio or ‘high school’ is one of the last schools into which we introduced our curriculum delivery technology. On our way in, we met with the school principal. He is a distinguished-looking older gentleman who has been at this school for decades. My staff shared that he is not generally in favor of technology and does not have a computer or cell phone. He declined an earlier request to allocate a secure, unused science lab for us to use, leaving the teacher with only a rotating classroom in which to teach math using Kolibri.
When we started working with this high school in March 2018, the only equipment we had available for Colo was a server. Our objective was to let the teacher learn the system and the team would return at a later date with additional equipment. Our usual method is to begin with a so-called “presentation mode”. This implementation model consists of a server and display device, usually a projector, sometimes a large screen TV. The team monitors the progress of the teacher’s learning curve in Kolibri. They test out skills such as creating lessons and student usernames with passwords before they allow the teacher to go on to using the tablets.
In the case of Colo, the team’s reconnaissance trip a week earlier found an example of Honduran resourcefulness that led them to bring tablets for the class that day. What they learned is that the teacher, Veronica, had found a router locally and attached it to the server. She then arranged her class into four-desk clusters and found enough students that could bring in cell phones so that she could utilize Kolibri to deliver Khan Academy videos. See the photo below.
The photo also shows Edel, our Director of Information Technology, adding and configuring a second router, and installing a recent performance release from Learning Equality, so that the server was able to handle the full class of 55 students concurrently.
As soon as this was completed, we passed the tablets around and walked the students through the Android initial set up. We assigned half the class to router 1 and the other half to router 2. Edel gave them the IP address of the server and instructions on how to bookmark it for future use. Veronica then asked the students to log onto Kolibri and complete the assigned exercise. Shown below, she answers questions from two students.
We then got a tour of the school, including the science lab. After some discussion with the Principal, he agreed to give Veronica the use of the Science Lab. It is a good space with a secure door and windows. We moved the equipment into the room. The Colo colegio — like most secondary schools — operates double shifts, so our tablets will get plenty of use, about 500 students most days, plus the occasional chicken…
Our next stop was a kindergarten, only blocks from the Colegio. Here, our team has collaborated with a local teacher to install two large Android tablets with HDMI connection, loaded with Starfall and other Apps aimed at teaching English letters and sounds, numbers and colors. This teacher was able to successfully solicit World Vision for the donation of two large-screen TVs. Most of the kids don’t have televisions in their homes, so the colorful videos draw attention and engagement from the kids, despite our intrusion.
English language instruction is a Honduran government priority and, accordingly, ours. Currently, we have a total of four Kinders under this project, along with our bilingual school in Camasca and various other teaching aids in primary schools, new junior highs (centros basicos or CEBs), and colegios.
The CEBs represent the Honduran government’s new strategic effort to get more of the population to stay in school beyond the sixth grade. They bring 7th, 8th & 9th grades to the primary schools, all within walking distance. They are at best taught by one teacher per grade versus specialist teachers at all three 7th, 8th & 9th grades, as per what happens at the colegios located in the municipal capitals, several hours walking distance away. Some of our CEBs are small and have only one teacher for all three grades! The CEBs are the focus of our Kolibri grant installations. In addition to Khan Academy content, we are deploying our new CREE channel which features the digital Honduran textbooks.
Our next stop was the Santa Ana CEB, and one of our Kolibri grant recipients. This school has been running Presentation Mode and is about ready for tablets. Edel installs and configures the router. He then walks the teachers through signing in on with their cell phones for practice.
The 7th-9th-grade math teacher, Xiomara Esperanza Sanchez, is pictured second from the right above. Xiomara is our “leader” in this CEB and has helped the other less tech-savvy teachers be able to use the platform.
On the board is the class schedule for the use of Kolibri.
At the conclusion of this training, the team agreed that this school is now ready for tablets. The team decided to try out having this school come and get the tablets from our base in Camasca and configure them for themselves. In another municipality, they are trying out a still more aggressive version of self-installation and local support that, if successful, will facilitate further scalability with our limited staff.
After buying a much needed drink of water, we returned to Camasca to get ready for our meeting with the Director of the Department of Education in Intibucá. High on the agenda is to get her support for obtaining the government achievement test results for all the schools in our service area. This will allow us to assess Kolibri’s contribution to improving education. We have collected usage measures from all the servers we visited that week, and will continue to do so every two months. We are reviewing the complete program again now in the first week of September 2019.
Note from the editor: a few of Learning Equality's team members are traveling to Honduras for a series of site visits along with Shoulder to Shoulder now in September and will be reporting on their progress in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!
