Our school had started a community service project, where we students selected various activities that we will teach to underprivileged kids coming to the school. I opted for ICT because I am interested in computers and also because I feel a tool so powerful can be very helpful for students in the future. Even though I am fairly proficient in using computers, it was a different challenge altogether to teach computers from the ground up to students, who were unfamiliar with the technology.

We identified a few key components that we will brief the students with, which included parts, names and purposes of the computer. We made sure to minimize the theory part and keep most of the activity hands-on. Once they were familiar with the parts of the computer, we made them play fun games, which helped them develop their typing skills. These typing games helped them understand the position of the hand on the keyboard while typing. We then moved them onto more practical applications, which included web surfing. It included usage search engines and their purpose, safety on the internet and entertainment websites. We showed them how they can use Google to answer factual questions in seconds, use google maps to identify or find geographical locations and to browse images on google. Using this information, we guided them to make presentations and documents offline using Libre office. As a team, we split the task effectively. To keep things organized, I created a checklist for the things to be taught, and then I planned the curriculum for sessions. I found that during teaching, this changed a lot because I was unable to predict the pace of the students. However, planning certainly helped the team to be on track and understand the progress after each class. There were mainly two groups, one was teaching and the other handled individual queries for 2-3 kids assigned to them. This led to a quick and fun learning environment for enthusiastic kids. In addition, we had to also ensure that the activities they were doing remained engaging, because kids quickly lost interest in the few planned activities on the first day. Seeing this, we came prepared with more activities from that point on. Besides this, I also had a challenge of communication, because I had to speak in Gujarati with a lot of kids. With my peers, I found the communication to be easy, as they were working according to the task assigned. As education is such a powerful tool in empowering a person, I feel that this activity was a step in the right direction. When I saw the joy and enthusiasm in the kids, I realized the importance of this global issue.

Throughout the activity, I developed a few learner profiles-

caring- I was sharing my knowledge with others and was patient and considerate during teaching

reflective- After the first session, I identified the shortcomings, and improvised from the next class onwards

communicator- Other then delegating tasks to my team, I was always communicating with the kids in the language they are comfortable in

This activity is certainly helpful for the community because computers have endless possibilities to learn from.