Grants:Project/Rapid/WM EC/Galápagos Education Project/Report

Draft report

This is a draft of a grant report for a grant funded for fiscal year 2016-17. Please do not respond or comment on it just yet: it's not yet ready for review. To read the approved grant submission, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/WM EC/Galápagos Education Project.

Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went? We got to explain the editing process to ten teachers and six students, but we identified two advanced users among the teachers, one of them having participated before in a Art + Feminisim Edit-a-thon in the United States, and the other one is the computer teacher and ICT expert of the school.

To explain in more details what we did: We delivered a 20 hours (3 days) workshop, that covered the following topics: Reflecting on new educational practices, based on the use of ICTs, and the paradigm-shifting opportunities that arise from using Wikipedia as an educational tool (7 hours) Editing the Wikipedia training (7 hours). This segment included students’ participation. PResenting and discussing the Wikimedia sister projects that are of particular relevance for educators in a school setting (Wikibooks, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, and Commons in particular) Teachers designed initial classroom projects and received feedback from their peers, the school’s principal, and the trainer team.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
25 participants in the workshop	16 people efficiently trained on how to edit and create articles on Wikipedia, and on how to upload images to Wikimedia Commons.	We got to train 16 people on editing Wikipedia, since the high school planned the workshop on the week before classes started, but the Ministry of Education in Ecuador changed the general classes start date to the same week, which made difficult for teachers and students to attend the workshop. However, the principal supported the training workshop allowing teachers to attend.

Learning

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

• What worked well?

The training was well received by the teachers, with several mentionning that the workshop and the possibilities that Wikipedia editing offered opened their eyes to great new possibilities. The school principal also acknolwedged the vast opportunities that were brought to his school. The final part of the workshop, which consisted of having the teachers design classroom plans was also perceived as satisfying and concrete, meaning that it was ready to be worked on by the teachers. It is also worthy to mention that the students participated with high enthusiasm, and came back the next day expecting to receive more editing training (but since the focus of the third day was clasroom planning, they were excused).

• What did not work so well?

Because of the unexpected calendar change, there were less teachers than previously expected. This change also impacted the composition of the teachers’ cohort, making less teachers from the high school available than initially discussed. Adjustments had to be made, emphasizing the use of Wikibooks over Wikipedia editing.

• What would you do differently next time?

Considering the variety of ages, we could present and focus on WikiVoyage (Galapagos lives mostly from tourism-related actvitities) and Wikibooks (which can be used for projects at any age), instead on gravitating mostly on Wikipedia for the first two days.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.

• One round trip ticket ($468)
• Two Transit Control Documents ($52)

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

• $30 dollars, but we do not wish to use them for any other project.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project? This project is a long term one, in which we will be providing online support to teachers in the development of their class projects involving Wikipedia and/or sister projects. We expect that within a month we will get to see their class-plans which will very probably focus on Wikibooks and Wikivoyage to acquire experience with the Wikimedia platform. We expect that within three-months time they will have uploaded around 100 pictures to Wikimedia Commons.

You can check the pictures of the workshop at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_in_Gal%C3%A1pagos