Photo: ferrantraite (Getty)
As much as we enjoy talking about strange and absurd news stories all around the world, we also enjoy hearing about feel good stories — stories that are a nice change from the garbage that is usually out there. And teacher Richard Appiah Akoto is behind today’s feel good story.
The 33-year-old is a information and communication teacher at at Betenase M/A Junior High School in Sekyedomase, and Akota has gone viral after photos on Facebook showed himteaching his students the features of a Microsoft Word processing window…on a blackboard.
Let’s first take a look at the photos below:
Here’s a closer look:
Pretty incredible.
The photos gained prominence after a popular Ghanaian comedian (who is also a teacher) shared it with his 140,000 Facebook fans and later picked up by international websites and tech enthusiasts on the continent. After Enonchong tweeted about him she reached out to Microsoft on Twitter. This has culminated in a promise by Microsoft to “equip [Akoto] with a device from one of our partners, and access to our MCE program & free professional development resources on.” Akoto, however adds that the school needs about 50 computers in order for his classes to really fulfill its promise.
Although he has a personal laptop, he does not use it because the features differ from what is in the official syllabus which require him to teach his students among other things parts of a system unit and monitor, the steps in connecting them and how to boot a computer with a desktop as their reference. ”[So] if you bring a charged laptop to class and just press the power button, then all of a sudden, everything will be on”, that does not work, he says.
“Definitely those in Accra [Ghana’s capital] will pass the exam because you cannot compare someone who is in front of a computer, who knows what he is doing with the mouse to someone who has not had a feel of a computer mouse before”, says Akoto.
So while the majority of us want to dropkick our computer when we have to wait more than 30 seconds for a video to begin, just know that Akoto (and others around the world) are changing the world with very limited resources.
