Donate your spare laptops for our digital literacy program
Do you have an unused laptop you no longer need?
Westgate Refugee Support is seeking donations of laptops to assist with teaching the children of refugees from Myanmar who are living in Malaysia.
The situation
Families that have fled Myanmar are often “stuck” in Malaysia for a decade or more while they try and get refugee status and resettlement to another country. The refugee communities operate informal schools for their children as they are not able to access the Malaysian education system.
With participation in life increasingly dependent on having the skills to learn, live and work in situations where communication and access to information requires understanding and using digital technologies it is important that the students know how to use computers and interact with the online world so they are not excluded from opportunities that other people have.
It is also important to protect the children from the risk of exploitation that occurs online. As refugees and displaced people, the students are particularly vulnerable to exploitation.
What WRS is doing
In our Digital Futures program Angela Xu, a qualified teacher and WRS member, is training teachers at the schools the refugee children attend to teach computer skills and digital literacy. The curriculum is based on the UNESCO Digital Literacy Framework and involves online lessons and Angela also visiting Malaysia to instruct and co-teach with trainee teachers.
By building the capability of teachers at the schools WRS partners with to teach computer skills and digital literacy these skills will be established within the school’s curriculum along core subjects such as reading, writing, maths etc.
How your laptop will be used
The laptops that are donated will be used by students in the computer skills and digital literacy classes. So that students can learn computer skills and develop their digital literacy we need to provide enough laptops for an entire class of students to use. Different classes will then be rostered to the computer classroom that is set up in each school.
What to do if you have a laptop you want to donate
Send us a message here telling us what laptop you have and preferably providing a phone number to contact you on.
We will make contact with you to organise a time to pick up the laptop. We will also provide you with instructions for permanently deleting files on the hard drive in your pre-loved computer (we will also check all laptops to make sure all files are permanently deleted and if they are not delete them ourselves).
Please note we can only accept laptops that are new, or within a few years old.
Because of limitations on our network we can only pick up computers in the Melbourne metropolitan area.