Guest post by Terry Donohue

Our bus pulled into the parking area in front of the Adeiso Presbyterian JHS around 9:00 AM after the hour and a half ride up from Accra.  Unlike the week before, when the school was a hub of activity upon our arrival, this time it was completely empty.  Our group of 20 students and teachers from the Lincoln Community School (LCS), found shelter from the already blazing sun under the canopy of some small shops, while I walked over to the school to investigate.  As usual, groups from LCS attract a lot of attention because our exotic multinational mix of people of all colors from all over the world, and today was no exception.

As I approached the Adeiso school, I could see a shadow moving inside the nearest classroom and hear the sounds of sweeping.  Soon I could make out the familiar bent figure of someone sweeping with a traditional Ghanaian hand broom, a bundle of short sticks with no handle.  They appeared at the doorway pushing out a huge pile of dirt, dust and plastic water sachets leftover from the day before.  I looked inside the shuttered window, unobstructed by glass or screening, and saw that the desks inside were in total disarray to make way for the sweeping.

Within about ten minutes the classroom was back in order and students from the village, e-readers in hand, began to gather within the cool cave-like walls of the classroom.  Myself, Joseph and the headmaster of the school began forming small reading groups of two to five people and spread them throughout three different classrooms and shaded areas around the small compound, giving each group a relatively quiet place to read aloud.  This process was facilitated by eager students and teachers from both schools, and soon the air was filled with the pleasant audible drone of dozens of students reading books.  Already, I could see that the Worldreader Program had done something that had never been done before – it had gotten books into the hands of these children.  I couldn’t help but think of the potential this program has to level the educational playing field for all young people regardless of their existing social or economic conditions.

I walked throughout the classrooms and the shaded outdoor areas to make sure that everyone had e-readers, to answer any questions and to rearrange some of the seating positions as to create a better noise buffer between neighboring groups of readers.  I noticed that many students had personalized their e-readers by writing things like “Joyce, a.k.a. Shining Lady” on the insides of the cases.  As I crept from room to room, I overheard the reading that was taking place.  Some students read fluently with little inflection and others read at a stacatto pace where each word was being sounded out one at a time.

It was time to form my own reading group.  I spotted two girls in their early teens, both with e-readers in hand, who had not yet settled down to read.  I called them over and they shyly sat down on either side of me at the edge of the porch.  They then, as if knowing the drill, turned on their e-readers.  One girl immediately started reading from her science book, just as a number of students had done the week before; when they had they immediately started reading from their chapter on “Natural Resources”.

“It’s Saturday girls”, I said,  “So lets read something just for fun.  How ‘bout a story?”

The girl who was reading stopped.  The girl sitting on my other side also stopped all movement.  I looked at them, and their eyes told me that I had asked them to do something out of the ordinary, like “fly to the moon.”  I think it is important to note, that though Ghana has a rich oral tradition of storytelling, these girls had probably never had access to storybooks or novels.  They had probably never read anything but textbooks.  The idea of reading a novel for pleasure, or the sheer joy of reading, was something foreign to them, and it’s an idea that could likely take some time to instill.

Check out part 2 of Terry’s story…

Terry is CAS/ Community Outreach and Global Issues Coordinator at The Lincoln Community School, Accra, Ghana.

by Susan Moody

Worldreader.org invites you to take just two minutes and watch the reaction that the kids in Adeiso and Kade had when we brought hundreds of Kindles into their communities.  In an earlier post, I wrote about a boy I spoke to who did not get a Kindle, and how it broke my heart when he said “it was too late for him”.   Juxtapose that with the excited faces in the video.  What we are trying to do is create opportunities, the kind that only education brings.  These faces show that they understand that.

A few days ago, the BBC World Service went to Adeiso and interviewed two teachers in the iREAD program,  Veronica and Francis.  Francis told the BBC that before the teachers had to share a meager amount of books between them- the children, of course, had none.

We are living in a historical moment for books.  Two days ago, the NYT’s Julie Bosman wrote: “the publishing industry used to be afraid of e-books.  In 2010, it embraced them”.  Recently, the Amazon Kindle team posted some pictures from Worldreader.org’s iREAD launch on their Facebook page, and we were impressed when we got 1.333 Likes – the most of any post in their history.   And you have to see for yourself the litany of comments.

What surprised me were the “Why aren’t you doing this right here in your own country?” comments (I am not going to dwell on the fact that we are a group of internationals based out of Spain).  On the one hand, I completely understand this sentiment.  The US has a failing education system and something needs to be done about it.  On the other hand, I find myself wanting to drive home the point that in the developed world, access to books is not the problem; there are libraries in almost every single community.  In the developing world, there is no access to books, as Francis says.  And we are proving that e-reader technology and best practices can make an enormous difference.

In one of my favorite moments in Ghana, David said something along the lines of: “I am absolutely unapologetic about pushing reading.”  Worldreader is a bunch of book pushers- in places where they’re no books.   Let’s prove this can work in the most remote areas in the world, because then it can work anywhere.

By Susan Moody

This week Worldreader.org made an exciting discovery.  Since we left 440 Kindles in the hands of students and teachers in Ghana just 2 weeks ago, we wondered how much reading was going to happen.  Each Kindle was pre-loaded with enough books to keep any motivated student reading for at least a month, so we were surprised when we noticed in our accounts that the kids are already downloading new books!  Books like: Dracula, At Home by Bill Bryson, CK-12 textbooks (Chemistry, Physics, etc), The Paradise War, The Magic Thief, Fathers and Daughters and Sports, and Decoded: Jay-Z Exposed just to name a few.  This is pretty exciting stuff:  it means that all our hard work and all of your generous donations are….. working!  Books for all!

By Zev Lowe

The iREAD launch marked the culmination of months of planning and preparation and it was very satisfying to watch everything come together. Many of the difficulties that we foresaw turned out not to be issues after all. We thought that the Primary students, who are just beginning to learn English, would have trouble with the small and arcanely labelled e-reader buttons (5-way controller, anyone?), but after a slightly slow start, they rose to the occasion beautifully.

Education professionals in Ghana had warned us that donated items end up wrapped in plastic and kept behind locked doors, only put into use, shiny and sparkly, when funders come to visit. Instead, after only one day of training, we discovered a group of children clustered around an e-reader at the Adeiso market — their teacher, Mr. Francis, had allowed them to take the devices home.

This is not to say that we didn’t face our fair share of challenges along the way. We were taking on a never-done-before task (and a slightly nutty one at that, according to one of our funders). Putting 440 e-readers into kids’ hands in rural Ghana was not an uncomplicated task.

The Kindle 3, our e-reader of choice for iREAD, was designed for a connected world. Two simple clicks allows you to delete a book.   In truth, the book isn’t deleted. It is simply removed from the device, and can be downloaded again from the Archive. This download can happen near-instantaneously on a 3G or broadband Wifi connection. But with the slower GPRS or EDGE networks outside the capital city of Accra, accidentally removing the book that the rest of the class is reading can mean a delay of half the class period.

Most e-readers are also designed for individuals. They arrive in a virgin, bookless state, and the purchasing, downloading and licensing of books is handled on a per-user basis. E-reader manufacturers recognize that there is a market for group licensing and administrative tools for large numbers of e-readers. Amazon.com has been very helpful with many of these processes, but this is another area in which what we are doing is a bit ahead of the technology.

It was heartbreaking when the kids without e-readers asked us why they didn’t get them.

After thinking it over, we addressed the students when they convened for morning assembly. We recognized that some of them might be angry (murmurs erupted.) And jealous (“Yes!” they cried, in chorus.) But we had to start somewhere, and the children in the pilot study were chosen at random. While we work on getting them all e-readers, we decided to leave a handful in the care of their respective school libraries. It was not a perfect solution, but we hope it’ll improve matters.

It is challenging to recognize that the schools we’re working with have serious structural problems that Worldreader cannot solve. The system of education still relies largely on memorization and rote learning. The classrooms are hot, dusty and incredibly crowded. Teachers and resources are stretched to the max.  At Adeiso SHS, over a hundred students cluster together in a makeshift building while they wait for new classrooms to be constructed — the plan is to split the group into two classes in January.

Despite these constrained resources, the kids get by with an incredible generosity of spirit. During recess at Kade Primary, Elizabeth mentioned that she was hungry. Instantly, six tiny hands tugged at her sleeves. “Madame, do you want my food?” they asked her.  E-readers are not a panacea for a troubled system. Our work is anything but easy. But we are constantly energized by the positive signs that things are changing for the better.

By David Risher

One question friends often ask us is: what happens if the students lose their e-reader, or they get stolen?  Of course, it’s a real issue, and we have several strategies we use to deal with this.  (We won’t talk about all of them here.) But so far, we haven’t found it to be a problem.  These students know how to take care of valuable property: many have access to a cell phone, for instance, and take very good care of it.

Of course, stuff does happen to electronic devices, which is why we also distribute cases to protect against damage, donated by our very generous partners M-Edge. When we do so, it’s a big moment: the students get to personalize their e-readers and truly make them their own.

We also ask each student to take a pledge to take responsibility for his or her e-reader.  Here is a bit of video that gives you a sense of how that works.  The classroom teacher leads the pledge… in this case, she improvised a bit at the end, which is why you’ll hear religious language, but frankly it does feel a bit like a religious experience!

Finally, we ask the entire community to pledge to support this project.  We’ll write more about that soon.

Worldreader also works with e-reader manufacturers to be able to disable e-readers remotely, to reduce their perceived value.  And to be clear, Joseph and five volunteers spent an entire night keeping vigil over the initial shipment of e-readers– it’s naive to think that a large quantity of merchandise won’t attract attention.  But our early experience, both in our early trial in Ayenyah, Ghana, as well as this iREAD Pilot, has been that once these are in the community, theft hasn’t been a big issue.  In fact, here is the FAQ on this issue, which we wrote a few months ago, and still believe.

One of our students has said it like this: “Thieves don’t steal education.”  We’re finding that so far, he’s right.

By Susan Moody

If someone asks you to go hand out 440 e-readers, you might think that after, say 100, it could start to feel mundane.  On the contrary, every single time we handed a student an e-reader, it was as if we were handing someone raw power.   One of my favorite moments was when Barbara asked a class how many books could fit in the classroom.  When kids started yelling out “thousands!” she asked if they could carry all those books in their arms.  Of course they shook their heads no.  Then she said, “Today you will leave the room more powerful than when you came in….you will be holding an entire library in your hands!”

For documentation purposes, we took head shots of 400 children whose lives were changing at that very minute.  As I looked at the students who were holding power and possibilities in their hands, I wondered about where these e-readers were going to take them.  David wrote yesterday about the amazing teachers, and one thing we encourage teachers to do is to let the kids to take e-readers home with them so that the entire community benefits.   While we can monitor the effects of e-readers in the classroom, it is harder to measure how e-readers benefit the community as a whole.

One day after we had finished up in the classroom, we went into the market to grab some food.  Zev happened to look over and see a group of 5 kids clustered around something.  Upon closer inspection, we realized that it was one of our students, Augustina Kesewa at Adeiso JHS, reading The Monkey and the Crocodile to her friends.  It was a shining moment for us!  It’s the essence of what we are trying to accomplish—a culture of reading in a country where literacy rates are low.

The other day I wrote about how inspiring the 400 students participating in the pilot study were, but what about the millions of others who don’t have books?  At Kade Senior High a 17 year-old boy came up to me holding an e-reader.  I asked him how he was feeling, fully expecting to hear him say something along the lines of: “so excited about my new e-reader!”

“Very sad,” he said.  When I asked him why, he waved the e-reader he was holding towards the classroom where we had just spent the whole morning and said, “This is my friend’s e-reader… but I did not get one in my class. Am I not important?” he asked me angrily. “You are important–these students are selected randomly and if we can prove this works, many more will get e-readers,” I answered.  “It will be too late for me,” he said, “I graduate next year.”  I mentioned in a previous post that those kids stole a piece of my heart.  And I mean both Augustina, newly empowered and sharing her e-reader with friends in the market, and this boy whose name I sadly don’t know.  Worldreader is working hard for both of them.

by David Risher

Last week’s introduction of the iREAD e-reader pilot rolled out in four major phases over three days in each of the six schools:

1. The community introduction and pledge (Worldreader led)
2. Day 1 of E-Reader distribution and instruction (Worldreader and teacher partnership)
3. Day 2: E-Reader “deepening” (Teacher led; Worldreader absent)
4. Day 3: E-readers integrated into class (Teacher led; Worldreader observing)

It’s a thrill to be able to stand up in front of an entire community or class and talk about how much we hope all will benefit from our work.  It’s even energizing (in a very different way) to hold student assemblies in which we acknowledge how angry and jealous the students who haven’t received e-readers must feel, and how much of a responsibility they have to their brothers and sisters.  (We’ll write more about that later.)

But to me, even better was to sit down with the students on Day 3 and observe the teachers at work, using the e-readers in the class.  That’s when we really got to see whether all our preparation was really turning into something.  After all, no matter how much we talk, if the teachers and students aren’t taking to using the e-readers, we’ve failed.

Here we have good news: the early indications are very, very promising.  Let me tell two quick stories.  The first involves Jacqueline, a primary school teacher.  She used the e-readers to lead a fourth-grade classroom reading of one of the local (Ghanaian) book we publish called At the Beach.  The class came to the word “sea,” and Jacqueline used the Kindle’s built-in dictionary to find the definition.

Now, the built-in dictionary is too advanced for many primary school kids.  Here’s the definition of sea from the Oxford New American Dictionary: “The expanse of salt water that covers most of the earth’s surface and surrounds its landmasses.”   That’s a bit much for many of these kids— most children’s their first language is Twee, and their parents don’t speak much English.

But Jacqueline rolled with it.  She asked the class to look up and say what kind of water is in the sea.  The class responded: “Salt water.”  And right then and there, I realized that even though a more child-friendly dictionary would be great, in a way, the built-in one can serve as a mini-encyclopedia, with very quick access.  No need to bring out a new book, shuffle through pages, put it away.  It’s not perfect, but it’s a great tool in a teacher’s hands.

The second story involves Francis Kwaku’s Junior High School Social Studies Class.  Francis is a great teacher, plain and simple.  He has great command of his subject area, he’s a very clear thinker and explainer, and he easily holds the students attention (and note: there are 70 students in his classroom… a 90-degree, very dusty, far-too-small classroom that would feel full with 30 kids in it).  Watching him work was a thrill.

Here’s how he ran the class: First thing, he asked his students to turn on their Kindles and go to a specific location.  That took about 2 minutes… it’s still a new device, and frankly, the whole “Go To…” function is a bit clunky.  Then he asked the students to turn off their e-readers, and he began a 5-minute chalk-talk lecture of “Human and Natural Resources.”  At the right time, he said, “OK, now turn on your e-readers,” asked them to start reading aloud about the topic he was covering, and continued the class from there.

See what he did?  He took care of the messy bits up front, so that students fiddling around with the device didn’t interrupt his class.  By the time it came time to turn it on, the device was simply part of the background of the class, not the subject of the day.

Have a look at Francis at work.  This is very raw video (taken with an iPhone), so the quality isn’t great.  But you get a sense of how he manages to keep a 70-student class moving forward, even as they learn about tangible vs. intangible resources, commodities, and bauxite.

Not every teacher will be as strong as Francis or Jacqueline, and we have a long road ahead of us to keep the momentum going.  (We’ll write more about some of our tools to support teachers later, including on-going workshops in which teachers train one another.)  But the early indications are that teachers– already comfortable using books in the class– can incorporate Worldreader’s e-readers quickly, and then build from there.

by Susan Moody

Worldreader is back from our iRead launch in Ghana and yesterday I shared the incredible events in Kade’s Purple Church.  Now it’s logical to wonder, “How did the kids react to the e-readers?”  On Monday and Tuesday, we were in classrooms delivering 440 e-readers holding tens of thousands of pre-downloaded books (with the capacity of 1,760,000 books).  That’s pretty impressive when you remember we are a team of just 7 people—something that only technology makes possible.

I can describe the students in just a single word: inspiring.  After playing around with the buttons a bit, they quickly understood the e-reader’s functionalities.  They were disciplined and eager to learn.  It was especially fascinating listening to the kids read local stories—which shows us how the publishing work we’ve done of local textbooks and story books is critical.  It was wonderful to witness the students personalize their e-reader cases, which were generously donated by our friends at M-Edge.  This was a huge deal: suddenly the e-reader moved from being “someone else’s” to “mine.”

The students understood that e-readers can change their life.  It wasn’t a shiny gadget that has market value and can be traded for other goods.  11 year-old Deborah, whose little brother also got an e-reader in Primary, took Elizabeth and me into her home after school where her mother told me: “Deborah dreams of becoming a doctor when she’s older, and now she can read all about how to do that.”  Deborah told me that she had a lot of time after school, and now she would read.  Suddenly her dream seemed wholly attainable.  Other students told us: “This is going to help me become a doctor / barrister / nurse/ lawyer/ journalist.”  One boy told me that he wants to be a football player in Europe and by improving his English, he might have a better chance.

Another quality I loved (and something that would like to better transmit to my own kids) was how the children collectively embrace a culture of sharing.  Actually it has me wondering about the effect on our impact evaluation studies: specifically the control group.  These are the kids without e-readers that we are testing to contrast changes in grammar and reading comprehension.  I wonder if it’s going to be hard to measure because these kids share with everyone in their community. I know I am not alone in saying that in one concentrated week, these children inspired me and stole a piece of my heart (once I get the video, I will share a song they wrote that gave the entire Worldreader team goose bumps).  Of course, without a crop of incredible teachers, this wouldn’t happen at all.

Next, David (who was voted best Professor at U. Washington MBA) will share his thoughts on the teachers.  Stay tuned!

By Susan Moody

This past week, Worldreader kicked off its iRead pilot study in Ghana’s Eastern Region where we brought 440 e-readers into 6 classrooms (2 each of primary, junior-, and senior high schools).  Those of you who have been following our blog know that Worldreader has dedicated the last three months to developing the pilot, uploading relevant content onto e-readers, training teachers, and setting up logistics including receiving a huge shipment of e-readers as diplomatic cargo.  Now that we are wrapping up the week and I have Internet access again, I will begin to convey the exhilaration of the week in a series of blog posts.

I knew that this trip would be wonderful but challenging.   Maybe it was the “toilet seat” that was included in the packing list that tipped me off.   Indeed the Ju’niel Lodge in Osenasi was rustic but stripping away creature comforts didn’t dampen our excitement.  Actually the cold showers and rice for both lunch and dinner began to grow on me, and the staff was lovely (and had good taste: they cheered for Barça during the big Real Madrid game on Monday night).   Okay, long hours in the 32 degree Celsius heat was a bit exhausting (5am to 11:30pm for seven days straight, anyone?).  Nevertheless, words cannot describe what I am feeling now: we are onto something BIG here.

In looking at raw data, I have always thought that Worldreader’s mission, while being ambitious/ bordering on slightly crazy, could work.   Just look at the facts.   The need is: literacy rates are too low and teachers in rural Africa have difficulties getting books–students practically don’t have them at all.  Dropout rates are high- especially among female students.  I always ask myself: “How can children learn to read if they have no books?”   The solution?  Cell phone technology has laid out a path for 3G e-readers to work in the most remote areas all over the world.  E-readers use little battery power and can be recharged on solar power.  Books are going digital resulting in a game-changer that some argue is reminiscent of the printer press.  E-readers are dropping in price.   Yet, having command over this data is one thing, while being there and living it brought me to another dimension completely.   During this trip, I experienced the massive impact that we can have on people’s lives using simple innovation.

What struck me as we landed in Accra and drove out to Kade is that we were leaving an area with infrastructure and going out into deeper Ghana, where Africa’s hackneyed images stretched out before me: chickens and baby goats zig-zagged the road, small wooden huts lined the pot-holed and unpaved streets, women with baskets of everything-under-the sun balanced on their heads.  While it was my first time in Africa, I felt as if I have been there a thousand times.  As I looked at the landscape, I confess I was thinking, “It’s a good idea in theory, but it will never work.”  In truth, I was alarmed at my own skepticism about a project whose mission,”Books for All,”  I believe in to my very core.

Sunday morning, we drove up to a purple church perched on a slight hill in Kade where the whole community had gathered for a Worldreader presentation.  There, the Village Chief, the church’s minister, and a select group of teachers addressed over 200 parents and their children.  While the speakers bounced between Twee and English, it was easy to understand that the community leaders believed in and were committed to having e-readers work in their community.  They spoke of how lucky their community was to be selected as one of the first in Ghana and how they are going to make Ghana proud for generations to come.   A 16-year-old boy named George was selected from the audience and was asked to read an excerpt from Pride and Prejudice, which he did beautifully and then declared that he loved reading on the e-reader.  Then the entire community took a pledge to support and care for the program.  I began to think, “Wait a minute, could this be happening?  Could the whole community support this?”  The collective support of the community would be an invaluable asset for something as revolutionary as this.   But there are going to have to be some heroes too.. .and sure enough there are.  Check back in with us over the next couple of days and we’ll continue with this incredible story.