In the 21st century, technology governs almost everything we do, watch, hear, work with, or otherwise experience. A solid grounding in technology is as essential to a student's education as math, science, or the humanities because the language of the modern economy is composed of ones and zeros. Technology education programs in secondary schools struggle to keep students up to speed. Some kids absorb the information seemingly through osmosis. Others—like me—sit back and watch, hindered by the conviction that we're not “tech people.”
Enter Global Technology Academy (www.globalta.org), founded in 1998 at Garfield High School in Seattle, Washington. Garfield is an inner-city school that serves approximately 1,600 students from all income levels and from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Students in the technology academy bring refurbished computers to schools and orphanages in developing areas of the world and teach young people in these areas the skills they need to advance in an increasingly information-based global marketplace. Through 19 trips to date, teams of 5–15 students have taken computers and knowledge to 12 countries on four continents. They have visited such countries as Mozambique, Nepal, Gambia, Ethiopia, and Guatemala, setting up computer labs in places where students often have never seen or touched a keyboard.
Tempting pen-and-paper kids with international trips like these is a great way to bring them up to speed with computers. It also teaches students to respond in a socially responsible and sensitive way to a community's environmental, economic, and cultural issues.
Global Tech is a largely autonomous program run by a teacher in Garfield High School's business and technology department. The program gets no funding from the school, subsisting largely on grants from such companies as Microsoft. Students generally take an introduction to technology course and then move on to the academy, which offers one class in technology each day. Anyone can participate. Many students start as freshmen or sophomores and stay with the program until they graduate, going on three or four trips and taking on more and more leadership responsibilities.
What sets Global Technology Academy apart from other high school tech ed programs is that students are interested in something more meaningful than just getting a good grade. They understand that the success of the team's mission depends on their mastery of the material and their ability to complete a task. Moreover, non-technically oriented students learn that they can, in fact, effectively work with computers.
I came into the program knowing little about computers; I was accustomed to throwing up my hands when technical things went wrong. But then I became part of a team that was scheduled to go to Ghana. In our rush to get 45 desktop computers and 12 laptops ready, I became intimately familiar with both hardware and software, troubleshooting and swapping in and out parts whose names I didn't even know just a few weeks before. We dug up old monitors and computers accumulating dust in the back of someone's closet, then brought them into the lab. There, we tested the various parts—central processing units, power supplies, hard drives, floppy drives, motherboards, and power sinks—until the computer worked and we could install some software.
This process of cobbling together “Frankenstein” computers using any available parts we could find continued in Ghana. We went to three technical schools in the coastal cities of Takoradi and Cape Coast, setting up a total of three labs. Both towns are poor, but street markets and small businesses thrive, and we saw little evidence of malnourishment among the population. We worked through Ghana's Ministry of Education to select the schools, basing our choice on the schools' enthusiasm about participating as well as on the likelihood that they would continue to use the computer skills that we taught them long after we left.
Our team consisted of eight students from Garfield, two adult advisors, and four highly skilled young Ghanaians with whom we had worked on previous trips. We could communicate fairly easily because many people in Ghana speak English, which is generally their second or third language after tribal dialects. During our two-week stay, we taught 12 students ages 15–19 everything from the workings of internal parts to refurbishing computers and networking. It's amazing how teaching a skill to someone else solidifies it in your own mind.
U.S. students involved in the academy develop far more advanced technical skills than many of their classmates. Because they take on adult responsibilities, they feel more like professionals than like students. One team member uses Microsoft Publisher to put together a pamphlet about the project. Another sets up a blog to chronicle the journey for family and friends. An artistic student uses a graphics program to design a T-shirt that will serve as the uniform on the trip and arranges for the shirts' delivery in time for departure. Still another student keeps track of and maintains the walkie-talkies and digital cameras. When we set up labs, someone takes charge of configuring the network. The team must be rock solid on all these skills to accomplish its mission.
Students in the academy appreciate and use technology on a much deeper level than many of their peers because they become familiar with how the machine actually works, not just what it does. They have come up against and dealt with a wide variety of technical problems: In a third-world country, youare the tech help. This detailed understanding lays the groundwork for possible careers in a variety of technological fields, giving academy students technical expertise that even their Internet-addicted friends can't claim.
Students from the program gain other insights as well. They come to appreciate the edge they've gained by maturing in a technology-saturated culture, and they see what technology means to students who have grown up without it. The students with whom we worked in Ghana see this knowledge as their ticket out of poverty. They know that technology is enabling the rest of the world to get ahead, and they're desperate to get on board. Some of them will never make it simply because of where they were born. Students in the program come away with a burning desire to use technology for all it's worth.
Through Global Technology Academy, technology becomes more than just a means of interacting with friends, playing games, and completing homework assignments. Students in the program see it as a way of making a real difference in the world.
