FOSA has made efforts to help St. Anne’s update and increase technology, but with our focus on scholarships, our efforts have been made in small doses and with dedicated funds. That was noticed by a friend who recently retired, and as a result, St. Anne’s will be able to learn networking skills, coding and to use computers in everyday learning!
I’m very excited to let this new friend of St. Anne’s introduce himself and his motivation for helping:
“My name is John Burnette and I’m a recently retired teacher of Math and Computer Science. At one point in my teaching career I had the good fortune to lead a group of American students on a school trip through Kenya. One highlight of our trip was delivering an entire lab of computers, computers, keyboards, mice, monitors, networking wires and even an impact printer to a girls’ school in Machakos. Once we arrived at the school my students eagerly organized this lab of gently used computers, somehow not hearing that the room we were organizing had been until that morning the teachers’ lounge. In any event at the very moment we were about to boot the computers, power to the entire campus blinked out.
So what do you do when the day’s plan had been to have the American kids teach what they knew about computers to their new Kenyan friends? Without missing a beat our Kenyan girls took the opportunity to show the US kids how to sew on a treadle machine. I could not have designed a better way to introduce the two groups.
I am grateful that every school I taught in my long career has provided a personal computer supplied with relevant software and a projector. But, as helpful as it can be to use computers as a demonstration in my classroom, nothing has been as positive as having students explore ideas together working on their own computers. To that end, I’d like to replicate that memory from my youth when I delivered a “lab” of computers, hopefully to be used by students themselves.”
John has been busy in this, his new retirement project! He has collected 10 MacBook Airs, 5 Apple Mac Minicomputers, 2 MacPros and 4 iMacs, as well as a Linux-based laptop and a Chromebook (to aid in networking training) and, with support from him and his brother Graham, FOSA has purchased 10 additional MacBook Air laptops.
Thanks to John’s advocacy, a Computer Based Mathematics curriculum is being donated to the school as well from Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica.
John, Principal Sarah and computer teacher Victor have made a lot of plans for networking the computers, for what to install on them (Office-type software, programming tools, mathematics software), and John is coordinating with Ginger for the configuration of the computers ordered from Kansas, and for the shipping to Kenya.
If you have a computer you’d like to donate, we’ll gladly add it to St. Anne’s computer lab! (We’ve purchased pre-2015 model MacBooks since that was the last year the batteries are replaceable by the user, but will accept any model.) Contact Ginger at fosa.kenya@gmail.com to arrange for pickup.
