Since our group of Peace Corps Volunteers will be the last for Romania, a major topic of conversation for us pertains to our “Legacy.” What will we, as individual volunteers, leave behind? What will Peace Corps Romania, as an institution, leave behind? There are tangible things like books, other educational materials and marshmallows; and, of course, there are countless personal and professional relationships that we hope will have a lasting impact, but the third aspect of our legacy is skills transfer. These are intangible, knowledge-based, developmental, and educational resources that we impart on our host country friends and colleagues in the hopes that they will carry on some of the more beneficial initiatives that Peace Corps has brought to Romania for the sake of continued future development. Some of the most significant examples are the youth development GLOW and TOBE summer camps that we host (more on that in a future post) each year and, of course, the countless hours we invest teaching English. But what about the myriad of topics that don’t fall under the purview of GLOW/TOBE and English lessons? Workshops! That’s the answers.
From about the mid-point in our Peace Corps service the lovely women of our Bucharest-based Programming Staff have encouraged us to create, initiate and facilitate workshops on topics for which we have specific personal interest. These half to full-day sessions are intended to act as a vehicle to transfer some of the more unique knowledge and skills that we as Peace Corps Volunteers bring to our host countries and could range from “how to construct a composting bin” to matters of the high-tech. The latter is where I come in. Though admittedly, I’m no computer programmer or hacker I am probably one of the most wired Peace Corps Volunteers in existence with almost any Apple product you could mention, two Wi-Fi hotspots (classroom and home), 3G internet in my pocket, multifunction wireless color printer, dedicated postcard photo printer (thanks mom), a classroom ceiling-mounted projector aligned with a white board as a make-shift Smart Board and portable projector/speaker combination. Heaven forbid the power ever goes out. So from the beginning, as a known IT enthusiast, a backroom conspiracy was hatched to loop me into hosting a workshop on tablet computing at the American Corner in the Romanian city of Craiova; a conspiracy that I gladly went along with.
The goal, per the American Corner, was to provide a high-tech lesson on the effective use of tablet computers within the realm of education and for responsible social media usage for their group of about 14 high school students in a “Hi-Tech Club.” Thus, one Friday in March I travelled to Craiova and hosted the four-hour session and achieved these goals through real-time classroom instruction, explanation, demonstration and application and I threw in a bonus topic of plagiarism for good measure. In a flash, we covered topics from Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Blogging to publishing applications like Apple’s Pages, Numbers, Keynote and alternative presentation tools like Prezi.
The wonderful staff of American Corner Craiova set up a great, multi-week schedule for their “Hi-Tech Club,” which included visits from several other Peace Corps Romania Volunteers over the course of three months. Coincidentally, I was their first speaker in March and their last guest in June. They requested that I return for an encore performance and to serve as a fitting bookend to their project. My second session was in the same vein as the first but focused on Internet safety and security this time around. My thinking behind this was, now that they know about all the wonderful tools the internet, social media and tablet computers have to offer, these students should now know about some of the more common Internet threats and how to avoid them. Thanks to another volunteer (thanks Melissa) who clued me in and to all the hard work that the folks at NetSmartz.org put into their materials, this second session was a piece of cake. NetSmartz is an organization that creates content designed specifically for educating kids, teenagers and adults on Internet Safety and best practices. The session went well and, in fact, at the last-minute, I was asked to do an encore of my encore, in the same day with two four-hour back-to-back sessions for two different groups of kids. Even though I was exhausted at the end of the day, I knew that the material we talked about had made a difference.
Not only were these workshops a benefit to the idea of skills transfer, but also they were a real breath of fresh air and change of pace for me as they provided a different venue and different topic of lecture apart from teaching English. The students were highly engaged and interested with lots of topical questions, but also showed genuine interest in learning about Peace Corps Volunteers and America. As it often happens with our work, nothing is limited to the scope of what is defined; there are always breakaway conversations and opportunities to expand beyond the confines of the subject at hand. After all, our mission is “Promoting World Peace and Friendship,” and that is our ultimate legacy project.
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