Time Flies!

Hopefully we still have some faithful masses out there that are coming back to see the progress on the Nine Mile project.  I’ve been back in Toronto for almost a month now and the normal day to day lifestyle has gotten pretty hectic pretty quickly.  Still not a great reason for not having posted.  The more vigilant among you will have noticed that I’ve been posting more photos to the site, and this week you’ll find the added treat of some video clips from the school and the trip in general, in glorious High Definition, no less.

Soon after my return to Toronto, I met up with Ravi to debrief him on the ins and outs of the trip and we came to some fundamental conclusions about the direction of this project in the future.  One of the main points I stress to anyone who will listen is that literacy and numeracy need to be the main focus of any programs we run down at Stepney, and anywhere in Jamaica, in fact.

The Jamaican government has instituted a standardized test across the island to measure literacy among students in grade 3, and unfortunately the results are not great.  This year, island-wide, it was reported that the illiteracy rate among grade 3 students was as high as 70%.  At Stepney, were they’ve made literacy a priority and have been dedicating resources and doing fundraising to support to their literacy program, they have increased their school’s literacy rate to about 50%.  This is a great improvement over previous years, I’m told, but it’s still in dire need of improvement.

The key here, in terms of this project, is that we can leverage the enthusiasm the students have for using and learning about technology and computers to engage them into improving their literacy and numeracy skills.  The future focus of all projects launched at Stepney should have literacy as their guiding principle.  Instead of seeing the numbers above as daunting statistics, we can look upon them as a starting point and a way to establish clear metrics about the success of our involvement with the school in Nine Mile.

I will return with more photos and videos and, hopefully, more insights into the project and its future.

Until then.