After an all too short lived month travelling through South Africa as a presenter at the EdTech Summit Africa, I’m back in the United States. Sigh. Travelling is too much fun! Since publishing my previous blog post, the EdTech Summit team and I completed the second half of our journey which took us through Swaziland, Durban, East London, Cape Town, and Pretoria (actually, some of the team continued to Ghana, but I had to return to the States for work obligations) with each location presenting a new set of unique challenges and triumphs. We successfully continued to work through more internet outages and overcame frustrations that sometimes come with training workshop participants who arrive with little-to-no technical proficiency. For now, I’ll reflect on highlights from the rest of the Summit circuit.

Greetings from Mpumalanga, South Africa! It’s been about two and half weeks since I left New York to embark on a month-long trip through the country to present at the EdTech Summit Africa conference and what a trip it’s been. After spending five fun-filled days of leisure and adventure in Cape Town, I met up with the rest of the EdTech team in Johannesburg where we held our first two summits at Dainfern College (here in South Africa, college sometimes refers to a high school) and Wits University. There, I had the pleasure of running a Scratch workshop for South African educators who were eager and enthusiastic about learning techniques and strategies for incorporating technology and digital media into their classes.

​The aim of every project was to make some sort of social impact in the local or global community. “Badges” were awarded to those whose projects demonstrated most social impact, most innovative, point of view, and most entertaining. Winners include Baruch Campus High School’s VakWay, a prototype of a vacuum cleaner that vacuums subway tracks, ScriptEd’s Styling with the Stars in which users must “dress up” a presidential candidate using a digital tool, and Mouse Design League’s Panda’s Box, a specialized wallet made for disabled persons. Of course, I have to give a special shout out to Global Kids’ Ears Wide Open , a radio podcast produced by middle schoolers from School of Human Rights about combating racism in their school (click here to listen), that won the badge for most social impact! I also need to give another shout out to Global Kids’ #GirlsMatter, a website created by middle schoolers at IS 109 that encourages female empowerment, who won honorable mention!