Education/News/June 2023/The Journey of Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom Lagos State

The Journey of Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom Lagos State

Author: Semmy1960

The Wikimedia Foundation funded the implementation of The Reading Wikipedia In the Classroom in Lagos State with the support of the Wikimedia Education Team. The pilot phase was launched with an onboarding session for the teachers on November 27th, 2022. 50 teachers were approved by TESCOM for the training and we created a WhatsApp platform as a means of communication with them. Then the d-day came, which was the launching of the program on the 14th of December, 2022 at LCCI Alausa in Lagos State. The opening ceremony was attended by the commissioner for TESCOM (Mrs Ariyo) represented by the Permanent Secretary of TESCOM (Mrs Olubusola Ajibola), the Director of TESCOM(Mr. Adewale Oladele), the Executive Director of Wikimedia Nigeria,( Mrs. Omolayo Ogunsiji), The program director of the Wikimedia Nigeria was also in attendance for the opening ceremony( Ayokannmi Oyeyemi.

Summary: The implementation of RWIC in Lagos State was like a dream come through. It had already been launched in Kwara, but Lagosians always like to be first with any innovation in Nigeria. Yes, Kwara beat us to it but The Lagos State Teaching Service Commission accepted it. The commission approved a pilot phase for the training of 50 teachers. Then the real journey began!

The online training was where the teachers used the Wikilearn platform to access their training materials. The course was broken down into 3 modules. The teachers were taught how to

Access information
Create information.
To help the teachers improve their media and information literacy skills which is in line with the UNESCO MIL Framework.
It helps teachers to research content online and identify knowledge gaps in the information they consume.

They were also trained on how to contribute to Wikipedia and Wikicommons. The training ran for 6 weeks with a two weeks mentoring session. It was a beautiful experience training the teachers. The active contributions of the teachers on the Wikilearn platform made the training very interesting for the facilitating team.

After six-week of online training and one physical meetup, on the 24th of February, we had an online graduation for the outstanding teachers. Out of 44 teachers that registered for the training we had 36 who were able to meet up with the criteria, which was to finish with their modules and submit their lesson plans. 36 teachers graduated.