Featured L4C Participant:Rima Al Eryani

WikiEducator is a tool to accomplish my goals.

Hi my name is Rima. I'm from Yemen and I live in Saudi Arabia.

Being away from my family and my friends, especially my mother who's my best friend, was at the beginning difficult for me although this is not the first time to be away from my country. I did my university studies in Jordan for four years. I lived in the university's dormitory and was feeling alone and was home sick, but I was busy with my studies so that wasn't so hard. But this time I found myself in a situation where I had nothing to do. When I was still in Yemen, I used to work as a volunteer computer teacher and study other times. The only solution for me was to study. My husband suggested to register for a PhD in Romania, where he is registering for a Masters degree. However, they do not offer distance courses for PhD studies. I think I prefer to first register for a Masters online degree or try one of the private universities in Riyadh rather than going to Romania. Anyway that will take time, so I decided to improve my English language online. I studied English before, but I didn't practice and not practising made me forget the language.

I searched for free learning English websites and I found a course on Wiziq where I heard about WikiEducator from Nellie. From the first time I saw Nellie, I had the feeling that she is a good person so I attended all the sessions which were about WikiEducator, trying to understand it. I was asking myself: Is it for learners? Is it for educators? I didn't understand it until I began to make my user page and registered in the workshop. At that time I understand that it's for both learners and educators. From that time, all my talk to my husband and my children was about WikiEducator. Usually when my children come back from school they begin talking about everything that happen to them during the day. Even my husband, he talks about his day during the lunch. When I begin using WikiEducator it is me who begins talking about WikiEducator. So they feel that I am working too and I am doing a useful work during my day too. WikiEducator changes my life during a situation where I couldn't change my circumstances. I'm working on a project for WikiEducator Computer Education for elementary schools. When I was thinking about a project, I remembered when I was teaching computer in a school in Yemen. I taught for almost three years and although the school was a private school and the computer lab was available, computer books weren't added to the fee so I had to make my own curriculum for the students. This is why I thought about computer education project.

The first time I visited the countries page in WikiEducator, my country and other Middle eastern countries weren't added so I decided to add my country and some other countries. During that I had the idea that wikieducator should be known in the middle east, so I decided to try my best to spread WikiEducator to be one of the solution to empower education in Middle East. Maybe I am a dreamer, especially that the situation in the Middle East and specifically my country isn't that easy.

WikiEducator for me is a tool to accomplish goals. I want to make communication between students and teachers. Open education resource for everybody give a personality for every teacher in the net and let the teacher get out of their routines and let them get experience from different teachers from all around the world.

This is my story with WikiEducator which will never finish.