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.
