A number of reasons, I am passionate to work with education technology and I wanted to use my skills and abilities to empower the under privileged children in my home town Peshawar, to provide quality education experiences. I had time and I thought of utilising it in an effective way giving back to the society. It is great to see the children in my class interning at the same school after years.
I work voluntarily at two schools in Peshawar, city in KPK province in Pakistan. One of the schools is a school for street children (Ranaa Child Welfare Foundation) and the other school is a school for orphan kids (SOS Children Village) in Peshawar. I spend an hour or 1.5 hour thrice a week at least voluntarily with the schools and do various numeracy, literacy, ICT and arts crafts activities with these children. The children in SOS Children village were gifted around 6 tablets. They used to do different numeracy and literacy activities on tablets. The children at both schools participated in a Oneworld Classrooms art project. Their art work depicting their culture was shared globally with students. The students also participated in a book reading project of iEARN with a school in New York. They have worked on a number of edtech resources including Khan Academy, GSUITE for education, Scratch, iEARN projects, Coding among others. All activities enhance 21st century skills in learners.
The innovation is active in two schools currently, whenever I have free time I work voluntarily with the children at these schools. They do activities on computers mostly. But we do a lot of arts and craft work as well. The kids recently learned about newspaper craft and made some wonderful objects. These children are native pushto speakers so it was initially very challenging to teach in English. I used to teach both in Urdu and English at times. The kids were keen learners, they come from backgrounds that are very tough financially etc. They are aged between 5 to 15 years or so. They are given proper meals at the schools and a proper doctor checks up on them.
I have a proper drafted activity plan for the kids at these schools, I can share the activities. The Facebook page has all the videos and details of the activities done with the children over these years. People can get an insight and idea. They can implement the same activities in their schools too.
