We are delighted to share a blog written by student Manuel, from SEK Alboran International School Almeria, who is part of a team delivering a Global Goals project for the 2021-22 GSL Global Goals Competition.
Their project is among over 957 social action projects currently running as part of the GSL movement and we are excited to be supporting them to design and lead positive social change in their community!
A wonderful experience bringing everyone the opportunities they deserve
Project Summary
This project has been in our hands for more than two years; we started by carrying out campaigns to collect children’s clothes, books, school materials, toys… and sending them in a container by sea to Honduras together with other associations in our town. As we became more involved in the project, it grew and we started to contact directly with volunteers from NGOs in Honduras so that they could tell us about their reality there and share it with us. Our aim was to find out how we could help them more effectively.
Last year we started a new branch of the project, we gave online tutoring classes in an adult school in Honduras in collaboration with the NGO ACOES Honduras; our students were a small group of 15, 16 and 17 year Olds who were failing at school. At the end of the course, many of them obtained their school certificate, so we are very happy for their success and for having helped in some way.
The initiative was such a success that we have been offered this course to teach reinforced classes in Math, Spanish and English, but now in the four schools that the NGO also helps. There are currently around 7000 students attending classes in these schools, from preschool to high school.
Our aim is to give online classes reinforcing what they need. We have recently got in touch with the NGO teachers so that when they return from their holidays, they can tell us what they want us to reinforce in the classes so that we can create a syllabus together on a platform and organize ourselves well. We are going to teach Math, Spanish and English.
We will provide them with the right tools and help them get used to using them. Together with their teachers and educators we want to create a resourceful platform with the help of Microsoft software.
Our team, consisting of seven students, is in charge of gathering the volunteers who are in charge of providing the reinforcement. We currently have 20 people from 4th ESO and 15 students from Hight School, and two schools in Granada have also volunteered to give online support classes. In addition, we have the support of most of the teachers from our school, SEK International School Alborán.
With this we will be able to reinforce the people who find it most difficult to study and we will be able to prevent them from dropping out of school and to give them access to a better future in the labour market.
The Journey
This project is already underway, but we want to go one step further. Last year we were only able to attend the students of the adult school (students between 15, 16 and 17 years old who were failing at school) and we didn’t really know what to teach them, so we improvised a lot. So now we are collaborating with the teachers of the NGO ACOES Honduras and together we are planning how to organize the support classes and the syllabus. We want to improve the project and overcome the mistakes we have made.
In order to impact as many students as possible there, we are creating a Microsoft platform with the help of our school’s computer scientist. Microsoft Spain has donated the software to us as this is a humanitarian project and the beneficiary is an NGO. With this tool we will be able to share resources and organize videoconferences with those children who need it.
Currently we have agreed to jointly create a pilot programme with the Maths, Spanish and English syllabus for Honduran children who need reinforcement in the fifth grade. Fortunately, the NGO Honduras provides its Honduran students with the Internet connection, which makes the project possible.
When the fifth grade level works, we will move on to the sixth grade, so we get a better organization. This will help us to go little by little and adapt the resources to their pace so that the teachers, the pupils and we can get used to their ways of teaching and their levels. As in this project we are going to use a lot of technology to communicate, we all have to become familiar with it. For this we will organize meetings with all the volunteers to teach them how to use this new technology. As well as teaching the volunteer students, we will also show how run the platform to the teachers in the school, and all of this will be planned over months in the short and long term so that we have a way forward.
The Next Chapter
Our next steps are going to be to create a pilot for each level, but at no time are we going to divide as a group, but we will all work together in one level and until it works splendidly, we will not climb to the next. That will help us trust each other and be able to work faster by having more opinions.
Also, we want to create global awareness in our school so that the rest of our classmates participate in the project in one way or another and that they get to know and learn how lucky they are to have good studies and opportunities.