Cii Radio| Ayesha Ismail|22 March 2018|04 Rajab 1439
Teaching kids how to use a computer is hard enough already, since they’re kids, but just try doing it without any computers. That was the task undertaken by Richard Appiah Akoto in Ghana, and his innovative (and labor-intensive) solution was to draw the computer or application on the blackboard in great detail. His hard work went viral and now Microsoft has stepped in to help out.
Akoto teaches at Betenase Municipal Assembly Junior High in the small town of Sekyedomase. He had posted pictures of his magnum opus, a stunning rendition of a complete Microsoft Word window, to Facebook. “I love ma students so have to do what will make them understand wat am teaching,” he wrote. He looks harried in the last image of the sequence.
Despite the unavailability of computers in Ghana’s Sekyedomase town, the Betenase M-A Junior High School teacher stopped at nothing to teach his students about computers.
He would draw an entire layout of the computers or software he was teaching, and would differentiate one icon/function from another with the help of coloured chalks on the blackboard, and explain them to his students.
Picures of his unique teahing method went viral on social media, and particularly caught the attention of officials at NIIT Accra.
“We saw the news getting viral on Facebook and were so touched by the teacher’s dedication that we decided to support the school with the best we could do as an IT training organisation. We took a printout of the post and discussed the matter with our group CEO Kapil Gupta. He is the one who decided to sponsor five new desktops and books for the school and a new laptop for the teacher as a part of our social and corporate responsibility”, Ashish Kumar, the NIIT centre manager in Accra, said in a report.
Akoto’s dedication also caught Microsoft Africa, and they invited him to their Education Exchange in Singapore, which marks his first time outside Ghana. Akoto said, “I wanted to teach them how to launch Microsoft Word. But I had no computer to show them. So, I decided to draw what the screen looks like on the blackboard with chalk. I have been doing this every time the lesson I’m teaching demands it. I’ve drawn monitors, system units, keyboards, a mouse, a formatting toolbar, a drawing toolbar, and so on. The students were okay with that. They are used to me doing everything on the board for them.”
Extracts – tech crunch| Youth incorporated
