Saturday 25 April 2015

Helping Our People - Certificate Ceremony - 'Introduction to Microsoft PiL Network'

Helping Our People (www.helpingourpeople.net) proceeded with the Certificate Award Ceremony for the Capacity-building of Educators programme for the 15 hour course on Microsoft Partners in Learning Network today on the 25th April 2015.The course was offered on a blended mode through the online learning platform of the association combined with 3 face-to-face workshops and seminars. 

The message of the President to the educators reads as follows:-

Dear Educators
Welcome to this small and rather discrete certificate ceremony for all those who have successfully completed the blended short course “Introduction to the Microsoft Partners-in-Learning Network”. As you would most probably be aware, the Partners-in-Learning Network is now known, if I am not mistaken since April 2014 as the Microsoft Educator Network.

Before I proceed further, I must present to all of you present here, our apologies for the delay in holding this ceremony as we were very much taken up in our professional activities and we also wanted to give the chance to a maximum of participants to complete the course. This course started back in 2014, with about 300 educators expressing their interest to join, and finally it was only about 172, who registered and collected their kits. We had about two to three workshops and seminars sessions and the rest of the course was run online. Out of these 172, around 60 participants have successfully completed the activities and earned badges online.

As you are aware, this course would not have been possible without the support of our main partner Microsoft Indian Ocean and French Pacific Ltd, represented by Caroline who has always given us full support since we established the association Helping Our People. Today we have completed more than 2 years of existence as a charitable NGO, and despite our commitment and achievement over these two years, we would have wished to do even more. Hopefully now, with our 2 yrs of existence we will be eligible to be recognized at the level of the national CSR committee. Our team is already working on a number of new and innovative ideas and socially engineered projects, for which we will be seeking funding to realize, and as usual we will count first and foremost of Microsoft, and we also welcome anyone of you here who is interested to give us a helping hand in any way you could.

Helping Our People has a MQA approved training centre, and we will certainly benefit from this first experience to launch a series of new courses on blended mode so that a larger number of educators and persons can benefit from same.

At Helping Our People, we are staunch believers that education is key in the fight against poverty and that a good education forms the basis of a sustainable society with constructive human beings. Our belief is however not sufficient and we need a key ally in this mission, and this ally is you all here, the educator community without whom the country will be on its knees. Yet by your effort the country is able to walk, but today in this globalized world where technology is dominant, we believe you can make the difference by being the change agents and the ones who will bring in a silent yet powerful revolution in the schools at grassroots’ level. Change and innovation cannot come from the top, but it’s a wave that starts from the bottom and brings with it change that brings further prosperity and development.

Remember, you are no longer educating the future citizens of the country to live in the industrialization era, but rather you are empowering them to face the challenges of a more and more virtual world with a blur line with the real one, and where knowledge and know-how are the predominant elements. In other words, you have to prepare the kids and the youth to face and live in the knowledge society.

The philosophy of education for the 21st century can no longer be same to the old methods and ideologies that governed our education systems in the former centuries. Sadly though, we still note that we are often confined within the same constraints and everytime we move one step ahead, the system’s rule will bring us two step back.

Here I would like to quote Agatha Christie I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas

I will end on this quote from Agatha Christie so that we can all keep the reflection ongoing in our minds for how we want the future of education to be.

Thank you.

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