Project Description:
On our recent trip to Tanzania we brought 12 computers for Shepherds Junior School. We arranged an Internet connection at the school with the local ISP and set up a wireless router. We   taught a three-week curriculum to Class five. They learned everything from how to double click and use a mouse, how to send replies and updates on Twitter, and how to post to a Tumblr blog. The students now have their own Twitter and Tumblr accounts. Each student was also connected to a Twitter pen pal abroad.

Project Goal:
Our goal was to connect the 30 students of Class 5 at Shepherds Junior School in Arusha Tanzania to the Epic Change community through Twitter and Blogging.

What Tools Did You Use?:
- Blogs
- Twitter

What Happened?:
We successfully installed the web at the school and the students quickly took to the computers and the web. We met our goal of connecting Class 5 with a larger community. We were also surprised by the enthusiasm of teachers at the school who realized that the web could be helpful in their lesson plans and save them trips to the library for resources like maps and images.

We expected that Twitter and the web would benefit the students as they began to ask questions and explore topics they were curious about. We underestimated how much our existing community of supporters would benefit from this program as well. Twitter surprised us with the release of the Lists feature while we were teaching the students. Sharing the list of all the students made it easier for supporters to interact and excited the students as they interacted with more people.

 Lessons Learned:
Next time we would arrange to have a volunteer back in the US supporting us in the Twitter stream while we are teaching the curriculum. Bandwidth in Tanzania can be very slow. This made it difficult to thank people participating and to send updates of our progress at the school. We would also like to bring more computers so that fewer students have to share at a time and so we can move faster through the curriculum.

 URLs:

http://tweetsgiving.epicchange.org/twitterkids/

Avi Kaplan

Epic Change