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Distance driven today: 14 miles / 22 km
Cumulative distance driven: 8,115 miles / 13,059 km
Today’s trip: Panama City to Miraflores, Panama
Schools with donated e-readers visited: 1
Today we went to the Balboa Academy, which is a K-12 school just 10 min outside Panama City. Last winter we donated Kindle e-readers to Balboa Academy, and this morning we met Katherine Reid who is the Principal’s assistant and Mrs. Kim Cox who teaches English and who has been using the e-readers in class for a whole semester. Both Zoe and I have been looking forward to this school visit ever since we left Tegucigalpa in Honduras, and we were certainly not disappointed today.
Katherine gave us the tour of the school and we talked for over two hours with Kim about how she used the e-readers in her 8
th grade class for the Honors students. She told us how the students had loved the e-readers and constantly explored their functionality, and generally how happy she and the school was with the devices and the capabilities thy offer. As always, I demonstrated some of the more advanced functionality of the e-readers, and Katherine and Kim seemed
genuinely interested, and positively surprised at the same time, when I told them that they could also distribute to their students their proprietary produced content. Kim immediately caught on to the idea and though that it would be great if she could left the students have their English essays uploaded to the Amazon cloud, and then share those essays with the other students in the English honors class. Unfortunately, the middle school building where the Kindle e-readers were being stored was being fumigated this week, and we weren’t allowed to see the actual devices.
As we were getting ready to leave, Marcella came in through the entrance and we got introduced. Marcella is one of the founding teachers of the Balboa Academy, and she has been with the school governing board for over 15 years. She got interested in both our donation program, as well as, in Zoe’s and my Pan-American Highway adventure. An hour later, we had learned from Marcella all the school history, the Panama Canal which is just 300 m / 1,000ft away, the Panamanian school system, the background of the teachers, many of whom come from the US, the international student body etc. Perhaps the
most intriguing story was that of the actual school building itself. We learned that it used to be part of the US army barracks in the mid-90’s, back when the US army managed the Panama Canal on behalf of its owner, i.e. the US state. When the US handed over the canal to the Panamanian state in 1999, the US military facilities left behind got repurposed for civilian uses, such as this school.
I include here, in its entirety, the email I got a few days from Kim regarding the Kindle e-readers we have donated to the school, how they have been used and the effect they have had on the curriculum. These are truly gratifying words to read J
“Dear Zoe & Christer,
The students were very excited about having the opportunity to use the e-raders. The students began to use them for their independent reading assignments. Every week they have to present a reading log for their independent reading. The students must read an average of 45 minutes a day, five days a week. They found the Kindles an excellent tool for doing this since they are easy to carry and
had a diversity of novels and plays to choose from. They also found the dictionary helpful when faced with difficult words in the text.
We also used them for classroom study. We read
An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde in class. The students used the highlighting tool to mark important quotes and text they would need to analyze later on. They also found this tools very useful. They also wrote notes as they read. They absolutely loved using them in class and so did I.
During my formal observation done by our school's principal, Ms. Rita Sosa, we used the Kindles for a reading circle. We read out loud from the play and discussed important quotes and character development. Ms. Sosa was very impressed with how useful they were for highlighting and taking notes as we read.
At the end of the school year the students were sad that they had to turn in the Kindles and said that they would miss having them. They found them so convenient and useful. Thank you very much for this opportunity.
Mrs. Kim Cox, The balboa Academy“
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