The ASU SolarSPELL Samoa team recently carried out its third training in Samoa, with both Peace Corps volunteers and their local counterparts. This training was spread over two half-days, May 17-18, 2018, and each of the SolarSPELL team members played an active and valuable role in the training.
The first day kicked off with a background and overview of the SolarSPELL digital library project by Dr. Laura Hosman.
Bruce Baikie then provided an explanation of SolarSPELL’s technology and how the library works.
The training continued as the volunteers and teachers received their SolarSPELL digital libraries and started exploring the content on the libraries.
SolarSPELL team member Maddie Arnold led the group in a walk-through of some highlights from the library’s content.
The next day kicked off with the always-popular scavenger hunt, which brings out the competitive spirit of the teams! The prizes are also always a hit—we’ve heard that they’ve been talked about for months after we leave!
After this, Kristen Linzy led the group in a discussion of potential challenges—and how to successfully address those challenges—when teachers and volunteers introduce the SolarSPELL to their schools and communities.
Upon completion of this discussion, we headed out to take our group picture with the new SolarSPELL graduating class!
Samoa was the first country that suggested we hold our trainings with both the Peace Corps volunteers and their counterparts, and we are extremely grateful. Since then we have worked with the other offices to seek a way to include the volunteers’ counterparts in the trainings (even though this has not always been possible). We could already see some amazing outcomes from having been able to include the counterparts, at many of the schools we visited across Samoa.
Thank you, Peace Corps Samoa!
