I am a high school teacher in Cameroon, teaching computer science. When the kids work with things like Word, they like to have examples to work off of. Being the socially conscious teacher I am, I would like them to have examples that focus on:
Health (AIDS, malaria, turberculosis)
General nutrition
Locally appropriate environmental concerns (desertification, deforestation, biodiversitym erosion)
The importance of educating girls
General study skills (notetaking, test prep, applying to foreign colleges)
Personal finance and small business skills (personal budgeting, marketing for cottage industries, etc.)
Job skills (resume, cover letters, etc.)
Sadly, my written French is abysmal so I can’t produce these things myself. And my internet connection is very unreliable so I am limited in my ability to search.
If anyone has any good links to things I can print out to hand to the students, I’d really appreciate that. Keep in mind they are beginning computer users so they have trouble typing huge chunks of info. But some nice one-page documents they could type up in word or excel would be awesome. If you know of any good links, could you please post them? Thanks!
[Bumping for the US evening crowd, and hopefully getting the ball rolling a little at least.]
UNESCO and UNICEF ought to have tons of good material, with the added bonus that there will be equivalent-content versions available in French (for the students) and English (so you can be absolutely sure that you know what the text says, sven).
[To make this post SDMB-friendly, I’m quoting the English-language versions below, but obviously you’d use the French versions in class.]
(A) As a starter, how about UNESCO’s "HIV/AIDS and Human Rights - Young People in Action (A Kit of Ideas for Youth Organizations)" (1.1MB English PDF[sup][/sup], 1.2MB French PDF[sup][/sup].) 68 pages in all, but in manageable sections. For example, pages 13-14 contain an “FAQ about HIV / AIDS” with 11 Q&As:
(B) Then, there’s always the Peace Corps’ own “Life Skills Manual”:
Do you have a copy at post? If not, the 2001 edition is available in 1.9MB 253-page English PDF[sup][/sup] and 3.1MB 281-page French PDF[sup][/sup]. Lots of usable material IMHO: one that looked immediately promising was an exercise of “Peer Support Situation Cards” (English page 53, French page 57), with situations such as:
Are the above examples the sort of thing you’re looking for? If so, I’ll hunt for similar material later to cover the other subjects mentioned in the OP. If not, please supply feedback!
[[sup]*[/sup]Given your Internet limitations, the PDFs may be too large for you to be able to read or print pages from, so I’d be happy to cut-n-paste the relevant pages into Word docs and e-mail them to you if you so wish. This should be covered by “fair use” copyright laws, given that the documents were written specifically to help educate children in developing countries.]
A few quick Web pages (HTML with limited graphics, so fast-loading) that might be of interest from UNESCO:
[ul]
[li]Grassroots Women Gaining a Voice (French: Les femmes font entendre leur voix au niveau local):[/li][QUOTE]
“My dream is to be President of the World!” wrote an eleven year old girl, Zaliatou Zibaré from Boala in Burkina Faso. International Women’s Day is (an) important occasion to highlight women at the grassroots (level) gaining a voice. <snip>
Zaliatou has sketched herself in stiletto heels, ready to preside over the world.
[/QUOTE]
[li]Poverty Reduction (French: Lutte contre la pauvreté).[/li][li]Micro-finance (French: Microfinancement ).[/ul][If you click around the linked UNESCO English-language pages and find something you like, there’s always a “Français” link in the top-right corner of the page, that takes you to the equivalent page in French.][/li] Here is a (non-UNESCO) français-only site on the preservation of historic monuments in Cameroon’s North province; although it mainly concerns notable buildings, the final paragraph talks about “l’opération sahel vert” (Operation Green Sahel):
Thanks as always. This is exactly the sort of thing I’m looking for. I especially appreciate the things with English translations- one big problem I’ve had is a lot of the sources I’m finding end up saying stuff that I don’t exactly want to spread around (AIDS is a myth, gay people are bad, etc.) and it takes a lot of precious, expensive internet time to discern that.
I’m amazed you found stuff on Operation Green Sahel, as just this morning I had a long conversation about it. It’s responsible for the pleasant green feeling (well, when it’s not 120 degrees out) in my town. It’s also nice to have stuff that isn’t just “Africa is all bad”. The kids have really internalized that, and it can be hard getting them to believe that they can succeed in life even though they were born here.
I do have access to the lifeskills manual and make good use of it, but in these situations I’d like stuff more fact based, so that I could make word formatting and excel lessons from them.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re looking for. Are they practicing typing up and formatting documents in Word? I.e. you want them to practice making a document look like a printout you give them? Or are they trying to practice writing a document based on information you give them?
This might not be something you want to do in a class, but Amnesty International France has a youth section youth section with news, and an action of the month (write a letter on a human rights topic).
Maybe they would be interested in typing up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a local language?
The other side of that coin involves reports on Africa in the Western media. On the positive side, there was a segment on CBS’ “60 Minutes” a couple of Sundays ago: "A Life Saver Called “Plumpynut”[CBS page with images and video / CBS low-bandwidth text-only page / Wikipedia article], about use of the peanut-based protein mix to combat famine in Niger. On the negative side, there have been recent reports – most likely based on a hoax – that the drug Jenkem[an inhalant produced by fermenting raw sewage :eek: ] has made its way from the slums of Lusaka (Zambia) to the high schools of small-town USA. (Snopes article here.)
Anyway, going back on-topic for the OP, I spent a few minutes poking around some likely websites. The ones listed below are all “trusted sources” (i.e. you don’t risk having your students writing that “Homosexual white men used sorcery to poison my neighbor’s uncle”), but the ones that are probably most useful are those that I’ve shown with links in the format “[English / French]”, which have 1:1 correspondence at the paragraph and sentence level. [A nice bonus is that these pages – being “Rosetta Stones” – should help improve your French vocabulary and reading comprehension, sven!]
UNICEF: [Pros: Great content, most articles that exist in both English and French have identical content for both versions.* Cons:** Many articles exist in one language but not the other. When both do exist, there’s no simple path from one to the other.]*
[ul]
[li]“West and Central Africa”Home page. [Similar page in French.] [/li][li]Cameroon Background page. [Similar page in French.][/li][li]“Malaria” *[English / French*][/li][li]“Polio drive seeks to vaccinate 100 million children in Africa”[English / French] [/li][li]Cameroon (Douala): “Cameroon: Peer educators help fight HIV/AIDS” *[English / French*][/li][li]Cameroon (Yaoundé): “Cameroon: Integrated approach helps cut parent-to-child HIV transmission by half” *[English / French*][/li][li]Cameroon (Gayak, near Maroua): “With mothers’ help, more girls are going to school in Cameroon” *[English / French*][/li][li]Cameroon (Mbang-Mboum, near Ngaoundéré): “In Cameroon, changing attitudes and safe water mean more girls in school”[English / French*][/li][li]Niger: “ECHO and UNICEF promote Plumpy’nut production to improve child nutrition in Niger”[English / French] []Niger: “Niger’s neighbours also threatened by food crisis”[English / French] [/li][li]Nigeria: “West and Central African nations join forces to end child trafficking”[English / French] [/li][li]Togo: “Micro-financing empowers women and changes lives in Togo” *[English / French*] [/li][/ul]
UNESCO: [Pros: Every document seems to exist in both English and French versions, with identical content. The French version is always just one click away from the English version.* Cons:** I haven’t found as much good material here as at UNICEF.]*
[ul]
[li]“UN agency unveils two web projects to fight disease and track medical progress”[English / French*][/ul][/li] BBC: [Pros: Massive amount of relevant content, at least in English. Cons: The French “BBC Afrique” versions seem to be edited during/after translation, so don’t have a 1:1 correspondence to the English versions. Many good articles at BBC Africa don’t make it to BBC Afrique.]
[ul]
[]Malaria ‘speeds spread of Aids’ (Afrique: l’interaction entre la malaria et le VIH/SIDA)[/ul]