The Power of Publishing

Recently I ran two online workshops via Google Meet for the Emmanual Foundation's Innovative Schools Project.  The workshops were to help their graduates try to meet the needs of online learning now that all schools in Indonesia are closed due to the pandemic.

The first workshop was designed for teachers that are new to Google apps. I introduced Slides and led the participants through how to make a simple layout with layered photos in Slides. 

I wanted to keep things very simple so we stayed completely within the app and used the Google Image Search that is inside. I taught the participants how to add .png to a photo search to get vector images with transparent backgrounds. 

The task I set was to make a lesson that used photos and instructions. The participants were so keen that the workshop went on for 2 hours. 

For the follow-up workshop, I taught the participants to create a virtual reading room. Here is the example that I used Virtual Reading Room.

The example that I used with the group was in Indonesian. I published these stories almost 8 years ago. They were written as a part of the backpack project that I did back in 2012 in a small village in North Sumatra. I worked with the children in that village to write every day stories about their life. 

There was a lot of discussion about these books and I hope that I inspired these teachers to try publishing stories of their own. I used Book Creator to publish these books and they even have a free version that includes 40 books. 

I was so proud to see that these teachers (70 attended my session) were able to make their own reading rooms. Here's an example from the class. Here is a screenshot of a virtual reading room created by one of the participants. She even put links to each book and filtered the YouTube videos with SafeTube. I'm happy because I did go in detail about online safety and whilst YouTube has so many awesome videos, it's much safer to filter out unwanted content.