Teaching Cambodian Students English and Digital Literacy

Recently, I started an online learning project to help Cambodians with Youjia, one of my friends from Singapore.

My project started simple. Initially I searched online, found out that a lot of Cambodian high school and college students don't have computers, and are obviously lack of computer training to help them use computers more productively. My original idea was simple: donate computers to them. However, where can I find that many computers to donate? I reached out to one of the companies I interned at, China Marine Bunker Co., Ltd. News (chimbusco.com), knowing they had 10-15 spare computers looking for replacement, convinced them to donate 8-10 computers to the Cambodians(due to shipping problems, we tend to deliver the computers to people in Singapore who need them for online education).

Our partner Lakeside – Changing Lives, Transforming Communities is a nonprofit organization dedicated to help youths to fulfill their potential. They have been very helpful since the beginning, they helped coordinate the Cambodian students' time schedule and ours, helped us build connections with them. The person in charge of this project from Lakeside, Anna, told me that we could do more to help the Cambodians by teaching them how to use the computers, giving them a series of lessons about different computer skills such as using PPT, Word, Excel, etc. This idea provides an insight in what we can do, what changes we can make. After discussions with my friends, we provided the following online courses to help the Cambodians:

1. Introduction + Computer Care + Basic Computer Operation

2. Google scholar + Search Functions + Cybersecurity

3. Microsoft Word

4. Microsoft Powerpoint

5. Microsoft Excel

Youjia's project is about teaching Cambodian's English and physical well-being. It is a great challenge as well, because most of her students have different backgrounds, and they don't understand English very well. Therefore, how to teach them becomes strongly demanding for creative ways of online tutoring. You have to use various tools such as Mentimeter, Kahoot, videos to find ways to let them understand you.

Together, we are around 20 people, from the most innovative class from my school, ready to make a difference.