As the sun rose on Muhuru Bay, Kenya, on February 1, 2010, thirty excited young women arrived for their first day of classes at the Women’s Institute for Secondary Education and Research, or WISER, the region's first all girls boarding school. WISER was founded in 2006 by Sherryl Broverman, a biology professor at Duke, Rose Odhiambo of Egerton University in Kenya, and Duke alum Andy Cunningham. The WISER mission is to improve educational, economic, and health outcomes for girls in Muhuru Bay. "We are believers of the saying, 'You educate a girl, you educate the whole community'," says WISER principal Dorcas Oyugi.

Two months after the inaugural class was welcomed, during the first break of the school year, WISER's five teachers and two administrators caught a transatlantic flight to Durham, North Carolina for a week-long training program at Duke University, highlighted by a series of technology workshops led by the Duke Computer Science Department, the Information Science and Information Studies (ISIS) program, and the Center for Instructional Technology (CIT).

Last year, the CS Department donated fifteen laptops to WISER, which the teachers and students are eager to begin using. Early on a Monday morning in April, the WISER teachers joined Duke faculty and staff in Bostock library around a table laden with laptops to learn how to integrate technology into the WISER curriculum. The training sessions were led by Professor Richard Lucic of the CS Department and ISIS program director Victoria Szabo, and featured the expertise of Duke faculty and the CIT staff, all of whom volunteered their time to participate in the workshops.

Over a five-day period, the group discussed educational tools that can be used to enhance learning in the WISER classrooms. "It was fabulous to see how devoted these teachers were to educating the girls of Muhuru Bay," says Lucic. The teachers also experimented with on-line resources, such as Skype and Second Life, which offer the potential for students and faculty at Duke to interact with students and teachers at WISER in the future.

"The training was absolutely invaluable," says Oyugi. "It opened our eyes" to the wealth of resources available to teachers, says Kennedy Mikula, math and physics instructor at WISER. The WISER staff departed on Friday, off to further training at other US schools, but eager to share their new skills with the thirty girls waiting for them back at Muhuru Bay.

"Thanks so much to the entire Duke community for such an amazing welcome and for their continued support for the WISER school," says Mikula. "We are so grateful." The feeling is mutual, says Lucic. "We look forward to continuing our collaboration with this remarkable group of educators," he says.

To learn more, see the WISER site and the Duke Research feature story.