Sixteen-year-old Gaukhar Isabekova from Abai School had not volunteered a day in her life before the Tech Age Teens program came to her school. Now nearly a day passes without a visit to the Ak Bota orphanage, where she has been help-ing children with disabilities and oth-ers she finds along the way. It is ex-actly for this type of change in behav-ior and attitude in young people that the Tengizchevroil-funded project strives, which is administered by IREX with the support of the Atyrau Oblast Akimat, Atyrau Oblast and City De-partments of Education, and Slanov Atyrau Oblast Scientific Library.
Gaukhar has been working at the orphanage, teaching needlework and beads, orga-nizing concerts, and simply having fun with the children. "I got used to working with the kids and have even fallen in love with them,” Gaukhar said. "People who cannot get around on their own for whatever reason can’t be blamed for their condition—I’d just like to help them. Recently, I started visiting Arman, a disabled boy at home, who has only one leg which doesn’t work. His mom bought him a computer, and I’m teaching him to use it. We spend two hours a session, and the time flies.”
Gaukhar is just getting started as an active citi-zen of Atyrau. She is put-ting a team of volunteers together to go teach computer skills to more children with disabilities as a part of her next community project. "The more of us who work on this, the more people we’re going to help.”
From November 4-11, Gaukhar and 19 others, who were the best and most commit-ted Tech Age Teens participants from Atyrau and the surrounding village schools, completed intensive ICT and project-planning courses at the Slanov Library. From 8:30 am to 6:00 pm daily, trainers from Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and the United States, along with the best two teachers from this year’s teachers pool in Atyrau, Kazakhstan, challenged the eighth through eleventh graders to refine their community projects and integrate the internet and video tools into their implementation. All 20 students finished the training with a concrete work plan, new Web 2.0 tools, an online pres-ence, and a video public service announcement, all centered around a project that addresses a social need in the community through volunteerism.
From the 40 students who were most active since May, when the pro-ject began instruction in after-school clubs, Tech Age Teens manage-ment selected the 20 finalists based on the quality of the proposed project and identification of a social problem. The finalists spent the first two days of the finalists training with this rough project idea, and Myahriban Karyagdyyeva from IREX Ukraine and Zhannat Saparova from School #20 pushed the students to rethink their plans. Instruc-tors and students pushed each other and themselves with critical thinking exercises to refine the definition of the social problem they aimed to address, whom they could help, and how. On the first day, the students’ assumptions and ideas were challenged, and they de-signed research questions. The next day, the students were on the streets asking the target groups, such as orphans and the elderly, questions they may have overlooked, such as "What are your needs? Would my proposed project approach meet your needs? What more could we do to help?” In addition, the students were lined up with NGOs and government organizations specializing in their issues, such as an NGO focusing on helping people with disabilities, where they asked the experts to help explain the challenges. It helped the Tech Age Teens understand their own limitations; some learned that their projects had more potential than they imagined, and others realized they need to come up with a completely different approach.
"I conducted two interviews, one at Elektra Energy and another at the recruiting company Fircroft,” reported Anara Maksut from Lomonos-ova School, who is working on a project to help young people choose their professions. "At first it was scary, and I was nervous. But the peo-ple I met were nice and happy to help. I ended up learning a lot that will help my project—and it made me want to become a journalist.”
"I conducted interviews with the heads of the AIDS Center,” reported Anastasia Gizatullina, a ninth grader from School 20, who is conducting a project to dispel myths about HIV-infected people. "It was great. I not only collected information and brochures, but also won their support. I’m attending their roundtable on World AIDS Day on December 1.”
Zohrab Abdullayev from IREX Turkmenistan and Shinar Taufixhanova from Abai School taught ICT tools for strengthening the projects, such as Web 2.0 tools, exploration and expansion of Wikipe-dia’s Kazakh language pages, online searches, and how to use a digital video camera. Students created websites for their projects on Google Pages and learned other helpful Google tools, such as Translate. They opened Twitter accounts for communicating with others working in the same field, Picasa for telling a story with photos, and Ulead Vide-oStudio for editing video stories. By understand-ing, searching, and creat-ing a social network on the popular My World (Мой мир), students found people with simi-lar social intentions. Bobek Axmurova, an 11th grader from Abai School, wants to conduct an online discussion and find volunteers through her online campaign.
As the week progressed, the students passed through interactive exercises, much of it in group work and presentations, to develop a project map, outreach strategy, and budget. In further critical thinking deepening, they worked out solutions to problems they pre-dicted that could arise for their projects. It was the first time most participants had cre-ated a budget. Tech Age Teens is supporting financially some of the activities of the fi-nalists’ projects, and the students prepared proposals to convince program manage-ment for support.
A large part of the final three days was devoted to learning techniques for and develop-ing short films to serve as public service announcements for projects. Mark Belinsky, who was visiting from his NGO in the United States, taught the students to see the world through a camera lens and provided examples for ways videos can tell a story with ef-fective filming, planning, angles, lighting, sound, and hard work. Students had filmed the interviews they conducted earlier in the week, and Belinsky used their footage to show the group some mistakes that were made and how the shots could have been improved. Finally, he helped them plan their videos, which were intended to share a message about the importance of their community project need. The students plotted scenarios for their videos, and within the confines of the library, were required to film—and often fill in as actors for each other—with their new skills. The final products, all between 25 seconds and seven minutes in length (online at http://www.youtube.com), prepared the Tech Age Teens to return home where they will create more seri-ous messages for their projects in December.
With no time to spare, the videos were completed for the closing ceremony, on November 11, where parents, teachers, and school directors joined TCO representatives and IREX to hear about the Tech Age Teens finalists’ social projects and watch the videos.
With Tengizchevroil and IREX already planning Tech Age Teens 2011, the enthusiasm and success behind Tech Age Teens 2010 has estab-lished a pilot group and momentum to spread the desire for greater volunteerism and ICT use among young people looking to make a positive difference in and around Atyrau.
"Thank you so much,” shared the parent of ninth-grader Valeria Moreva from School 20. "Everyday Lera (short for Valeria) came home so excited, as she told me about what she’d learned and done.”