Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom Kenya
Program Goals
- To create awareness among teachers across the country on the effective usage of Wikipedia as a learning tool for retrieving, creating, and evaluating information before January 2023.
- To onboard and enroll teachers in the reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program inorder to understand, access, retrieve, and effectively integrate the lessons learned from this program into their classroom activities by May, 2023.
- By May 2023, at least 40 of these teachers will have received a certificate of completion showing they can implement new classroom strategies to foster media and information literacy using Wikipedia.
Before the onset of the covid 19 pandemic, Kenya had a well-structured face-to-face system of education. The Primary and Secondary school calendar ran from January to December and comprised three months of learning and a month in between for mid-term breaks. The syllabi were structured to be covered in nine months at most. However, once COVID-19 ran supreme and education institutions began to close their doors, a new challenge emerged. How would the students not fall behind in terms of learning and keeping up with the set curriculum? This is where the importance of embracing technology in education really shone. A handful of the schools that had already trained their teachers on digital literacy skills were hardly affected and were able to easily engage their students virtually, however, the majority of institutions had not prepared for this and hence were left behind. With the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom Program, we are helping both educators and students to develop vital media and information literacy skills for the 21st century. Through proper implementation of the program, we will impact the teachers with skills that allow them to leverage Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool.