[2013-02-15] New Year Wishes
The Lunar New Year bell has rung on the vast land of China at middle night of Feb 9th. Far away across the Pacific Ocean on the same day, Shin Shin volunteers were attending a monthly meeting to update program progress and discuss project plans for the new year, while our hearts going out to those children in mountainous areas. Did they have a good New Year celebration? Have their mom and dad got back home yet? What are their New Year wishes?
A news article titled “A 50 cents New Year Wish” from China shocked Shin Shin volunteers. It was about a little girl in a village of Jiangxi Province. Both of her parents went to be labors in the city, and only her 80 year old grandpa was home. Their poverty made them even reluctant to buy pencils, so she could only use cheap ball pen refills to write. Her New Year wish is to have a pencil and a notebook.
Read More
[2012-10-15] E-Learning Project Update by Qing Bai: Virtual Desktop Classroom in Jilin
On October 15, 2012, accompanied by Director Cui (Jilin Provincial Oversea Affairs Office), Director Liu (Board of Education), and Director Liu (Baicheng Municipal Oversea Affairs Office), President Steve Ting, Jenny Lin, Christina Simons and I visited a Shin Shin school in Tongyu County of Jilin Province, focusing on the school's virtual desktop classroom that was installed in May of this year and has been put to use since then.
After we arrived, the school first arranged Director Cui of the computer lab to present us the usage status of the virtual desktop classroom (VDC). She gave each of us a copy of the report for reference. The main content of this report includes the utilization of the VDC. They use the VDC to prepare students for computer courses from easy to difficult. For poor families who could not afford personal computers, they use the VDC to teach the children how to use computers. The VDC is open to all the teachers in various subjects, who can make appointments before hand, and obtain assistance from computer teachers in the VDC. The computer teachers of the school also provide training for the teachers who have not attended the Shin Shin teachers training program (ECTT ), so that they can develop their computer application skills.
Read More
[2012-09-17] Reading Room Programs Approved for 31 Shin Shin Schools
In the past 6 months, the Literacy Program team worked diligently with Shin Shin's regional managers (RMs) to review the 2012 Reading Room program applications submitted by Shin Shin schools. They have approved more than $57K to build 31 reading rooms or reading corners for the schools distributed in 13 provinces in China. The majority ($54K) of the fund is from The Rotary Foundation (TRF) matching grant with contributions from the Cupertino Rotary Club, the San Francisco-Chinatown Rotary Club, the Shanghai Rotary Club, and an anonymous family foundation. Many of the supported schools have completed the required steps (budget planning, contract execution, and fund allocation, etc.) to begin their projects, which are expected to be finished by the end of summer 2013.
A Shin Shin school in the Guangxi Autonomous Region has finished its 2011 reading room project in August 2012. The reading room was built in memory of an elderly mother from the Dia & Liu Family Foundation, which donated $5000 to fully fund this project.
Read More