Youth Advocacy Network: Teaching Multimedia in Cameroon

Monday I went on the Lycee campus to prepare the computers for editing later in the week. YAN will be using Windows Movie Maker. I met with Mr. Muluah who also works in the lab YAN uses and he told me he would add the program to all computers since it was only running on two of them.

Because there were no lights the very last Wednesday class (April 2nd) I was unable to print the homework I had made for the Advanced YAN students. Therefore, it was the first thing on the agenda for our first class back on Tuesday. As you may remember, we started with 8 students, but as the class got more serious and demanding, two students opted to drop the class leaving us with 6. On Tuesday's class, Maddy and I had 5 students present and working hard!

Oour goal was to have all of the videos shot before the break but various barriers prevented that from happening so the first thing I did was draw a table on the board and fill it as follows:

	Intro	Body/Interview	Conclusion
Scamming	X
Corruption	X	X
Nature Conservation	X (needs to redo)	X
Poverty	X
Prostitution		X

The students then moved to working on their Community Sensitization Proposal worksheets (which was supposed to be the homework over the break).

Because we are behind schedule, I decided to implement a strict deadline to get the students focused: All scenes from their film (intro, body and conclusion) must be filmed before the weekend. Desmond who is working on Scamming wasnt present. The Poverty group wanted to interview one of their teachers but he was rarely in school and they had problems organizing an interview time and date. I told the students to find someone else to interview before the end of the week and they agreed to look for another teacher. Henry who is working on Prostitution had Maddy film his introduction and then Jean who is researching corruption redid his introduction because the first one was difficult to hear.

The others worked tirelessly on their worksheet. Once I approved their proposal, they began working on the outline for their sensitization. Just like the podcasts and videos, this sensitization project will also have a introduction, body and conclusion. They were given a sample outline and were assigned to create their own based on their project, research, findings and interview. All students have chosen to present at various Primary and Secondary Schools throughout the Buea Municipality except for Jean who wants to present his sensitization on 'corruption' to the Ministry of Finance.

When the Advanced class met again on Thursday everyone had their homework finished meaning all of the rough draft lesson plans for their sensitization projects were completed. I took Cardaine outside to redo his introduction (there was too much noise in the first one) and to also finish his conclusion!

In the classroom, students worked on preparing a letter to request to give their presentation. In the letters, they introduced themselves, their topic, YAN and briefly explained what the audience will gain from the sensitization. Since most of the target audiences are students in schools, these projects will need to take place before the end of the term which is May 23rd meaning... we have a lot of work to do!