My name is Bright Kigozi, a professional teacher of Computer studies, Accounts and Commerce in Wanyange Girls’ S.S. in Jinja. I came to know about SchoolNet Uganda in 2001 when a workshop of two weeks on Website designing conducted by SchoolNet Uganda was hosted by my school and since participating in that workshop my life has never been the same

Being a teacher in the host school, I got chance to participate in the workshop a long with the other officially invited teachers from my school and other schools.  In the workshop I met many new people all of whom were very interested in IT. This gave me a chance to create a partnership with many of them with whom up to date I am still in contact with.

I learnt the skill of Website designing from the workshop with which I able to design my school a website with students of the ICT club and we hosted our website with a free host www.geocities.com/wanyangegs. This took me a lot of time because I never thought it was satisfactory enough however, I don’t ever regret having taken over 6 months on this website because it helped me to perfect the skills that I had gained in the training. Our website was appreciated by many of my colleagues and this gave me a lot of encouragement to do even better websites. 

To date I have been contacted by many organizations to design for them websites ranging from big schools to corporate companies, NGOs, individuals and I just can’t fail to mention that of SWICO (www.swico.co.ug ), the oldest insurance company in Uganda is among my clients with certainly more then 30 websites online of my design

In 2003, a program for young people in secondary schools for Reproductive Health called the “World Starts With Me” was introduced by SchoolNet Uganda in partnership with World Population Foundation and my school was among the 3 that were selected to pilot it in Uganda. We excelled and the program was a success. It is now being implemented in 100 secondary schools in Uganda and I am happy to be one of the overall coordinator of the program

The program of the “WSWM” changed the way I teach, in my school, students no longer look at me as mere teacher but they look at me as someone who can offer something more than the subject matter in class through open and interactive sessions of a full range of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights skills to help them cope with the challenges of growing up which in turn helps them to better their grades by successfully coping with their changes

With the “World Starts With Me”, I have been able to travel around the whole country coordinating works of the program and outside Uganda and in 2006.
I was given chance to present the program at an International Conference of iEARN (International Education and Resource Network) (www.iearn.org ) in Netherlands.

In 2004, I joined a team at SchoolNet Uganda that was coordinating a program for Basic ICT skills development for teachers across the country in conjunction with the Ministry of Education & Sports and Microsoft Partners In Learning.

I have been able to facilitate quite a number of workshops across the country that we normally conduct during holidays.  More than 500 secondary school teachers across the country have been trained through my hands.  The program is ongoing.

I am grateful to SchoolNet Uganda for the skills I have obtained from their various workshops and I encourage all teachers that have chance to go through any training conducted by SchoolNet Uganda to take it seriously because it can be an opening to even bigger things, they should never lose interest, IT is the way to go.