Jul 01 2008
Boniswa’s first flight with a computer
I am still at the conference in PE and had one of those WOW moments this morning at one of the presentations. It was also one of those really humbling experiences.
Yesterday one of the teachers from rural KZN came to my collegue, and told her that she was doing a presentation on “How I teach”. Her words were “How do I get this into the computer“. She also wanted to have a PowerPoint presentation to accompany her paper, but has never ever even touched a computer.
So last night my colleague sat up till midnight making a PowerPoint for her. I was quite dubious that it would work as we did not have time to teach her how to use the equipment and the programme, even if we could get it “into the computer“. I was tasked to assist her with the presentation. Quite frankly I hoped that she would look at it and decide not to use the slides as I had only 10 minutes to explain it and go through it with her. But she was adament. She had to have her things “Up there“. I asked her if she wanted me to stay with her in the front and help her and she assured me that she was okay. I hovered around the front row ready to “save the day”.
The room was packed with about 100 delegates. She started off by reading her presentation from her paper and completely forgot about the laptop presentation. Then she remembered and frantically pressed too many buttons, which happened to catch the presentation up to where she was. Then she relaxed and swapped over to the PowerPoint’s pace. It was poetry in motion. It calmed her down and she followed and talked to the slides. Like the professional she was!
Then came question time. One of the delegates asked her to go back to one of her slides as he wanted to ask her something about it. My heart froze. I almost jumped accross the desk to help her, but I froze in my seat as she calmly hit the back button till she got to the correct slide.
Not only did she gave a great presentation, she used the technology like a pro. Considering that it was the very first time that she has ever touched a computer, I suddenly was filled with hope for the future. I watched as new bounderies were crossed and I now know that I am not wrong when I say that the digital devide can be crossed- we just have to allow people to be brave!
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