March 8, 2017

TFFT’s Teacher Training Program conducted a four-day workshop on video education for teachers in Meru District and Arusha City.  TFFT collaborated with One Mobile Projector per Trainer (OMPT), focused on training teachers to create and disseminate videos, see the importance of incorporating videos into lesson plans, and improve the quality of education by sharing the best practices among teachers and students through videos.

Educational videos are powerful professional learning tools for nurturing the culture of teaching, learning, and connecting ideas and innovations. Ultimately, the more we develop and grow as teachers, the more we help our students grow as learners. We believe that the use of educational videos will contribute to TFFT’s efforts of securing quality education because we can reach more teachers through sharing videos produced after our workshop.

We had four trainers from OMPT and TFFT who led the workshop. The training participants learned through group activities, watching videos, experiential learning through creating videos, and lecture sessions to make quality short videos for educational purposes. Everyone at the workshop engaged in a number of activities including script writing, development of a storyboard, and editing and screening the videos. Initially, it was not a simple task, as it was the first time for some of the training participants to use video production computer programs. By the end of the workshop, all training participants were able to create videos and start to appreciate the importance of incorporating videos in to their work as teachers.

Each training participant was also provided access to equipment for making their own videos to use while teaching. This includes cameras for shooting the footage, projectors, recharge kits, and laptops for editing videos. The equipment works well in our environment, as some schools in rural areas do not have electricity. The recharge kits include solar panels to recharge the batteries in areas with no electricity, or if there is a power problem.

This workshop was a great opportunity for TFFT’s Teacher Training Program as we can make videos to use in our teacher trainings. We will film the best practices done by Tanzanian teachers in schools and during training this will show teachers how to put these practices into action. In our last day of training, we viewed the videos created throughout the course of the workshop.