50 Dell Laptops Received Today

Today, Sherrie Howey picked up 50 Dell laptops from Pueblo West High School, in Pueblo West, Colorado.  PWHS is replacing all their student laptops and donated 50 of the old ones to Laptops to Lesotho. 

A very special THANK YOU to Principal Martha Nogare, the Pueblo West Board of Education, and the students of PWHS who helped raise over $1000 to ship the laptops to Lesotho.

Project Evaluation Meeting

On Monday 09 July 2012, Janissa Balcomb, Fortunate Gunzo, and Sherrie Howey held a conference call via Skype to discuss the project evaluation.  Janissa will be sending out a draft brief this week to interested parties for comments and suggestions. 

Why an evaluation is important

• We want to determine if the approach we are using is effective and if there are ways we can improve it.
• We need to determine if the project is successfully meeting our objectives or not.

Short-term aims: to evaluate

1. project implementation process
2. student academic achievement
3. student computer-related job skills
4. role of the computer program within the school curriculum
5. views about the project

Data for short-term aims 2-4 will be collected by L2L volunteers.  Fortunate and Sherrie will be brainstorming methodology for these aims and will meet again in August to draw up details. 
Data for aims 1 and 5 will be collected by independent outside people.

Long-term aims: to evaluate

1. long-term impacts on students, including
   - education (highest level achieved)
   - employment (income level, job type and level),
   - finances (annual income, net worth, debt)  
   - societal (status in the community, size and quality of social network),
   - family (marital status, number of children), and
   - health (psychological stability, risky behaviors , physical condition, and longevity).
2. long-term impact on teachers, including- skills acquired or improved on, such as computer proficiency, teaching skills, language and math skills, and interpersonal communications, 
   

   - formal education (highest level achieved), 

   - employment (income level, job type and level, location of employment),
   

   - finances (annual income, net worth, debt)  

   - societal (status in the community, size and quality of social network), 
   - family (marital status, number of children), and
   

   - health (psychological stability, risky behaviors , physical condition, and longevity

Data for both long-term aims 1 and 2 will be collected by independent outside people.

We hope to have 1-2 control groups for comparison, one at a school with no computers and possibly another school with computers that were deployed using a more traditional approach (i.e. computers are deployed with little or no preparation of the human resource prior to deployment, training and support is minimal or short-lived, and no effort is made to provide supporting educational materials or to incorporate the computers into the existing curriculum).

Janissa, Fortunate, and Sherrie will meet in September to finalize the evaluation plan. We hope to begin implementing the evaluation process and collecting data starting in January 2013.