Guatemala

Guatemala

RACHEL Digital Libraries Provided to 100 Guatemalan Schools

 
 
Chatham Rotary, with the help and contributions of clubs in Guatemala, California, Washington State, and Alberta, has been instrumental in organizing two Global Grants that are providing laptops and 1 TB RACHEL digital libraries to schools in NW (Barillas) and NE (Peten) Guatemala.
 
A RACHEL (Remote Area Community Hotspots for Education and Learning) is a small computer server that, through the use of a wi-fi hotspot that it generates, provides access to thousands of electronic books (textbooks, reference books, classics and other reading material), Wikipedia, educational games and videos, to students equipped with a laptop, tablet or smartphone. The Spanish version of RACHEL was developed with the cooperation of the Guatemalan Ministry of Education, and contains a large number of Guatemalan textbooks and other educational material. See http://www.worldpossible.org.
 
The major elements of the project are:
 
  • Providing one Rachel system to each school.
  • Providing an average of 10-22 Chromebook laptops to each school, to be used for the learning applications that are made available on the RACHEL systems.
  • Provide extensive training to the teachers in various schools.
  • Develop new teaching modules in cooperation with local organization to teach girl empowerment/gender equality, environmental stewardship, and WASH principals.
  • Training facilitators, hired by the local municipalities, to teach the girl empowerment material.
 
District 6380 and the following clubs kindly contributed to these projects: Blenheim, Chatham, Chatham Sunrise, Lake Orion Sunrise, Tilbury, Troy, and Wallaceburg. Pictured above is Chatham Rotarian Peter Tanner showing local children how to access and use the RACHEL systems. For more background information on the RACHEL project, please see
 

Scenes from Guatemala