Education/News/March 2025/Bolivia: a new round of Leamos Wikipedia begins in Bolivia

Bolivia: a new round of Leamos Wikipedia begins in Bolivia

Summary: Wikimedistas de Bolivia began preparations for a new version of the Leamos Wikipedia program in Bolivia this 2025 with the support and feedback from the teachers who attended the program in 2024, who have made recommendations and helped to establish new partnerships with local educational communities by sharing their experiences with their colleagues.

Evaluations and improvements

The training program for 2025 has been designed based on the feedback obtained from the evaluations of the 2024 version of the course. For this purpose, we contacted a group of teachers belonging to Education District 1, in the municipality of La Paz, who passed the course in November.

The teachers shared their impressions about the usefulness of their learning in the classroom and about the teachers' work with the tools they acquired in the Leamos Wikipedia program.

Several teachers agreed that knowing the pillars that support the construction of information in the encyclopedia, especially regarding reliable sources, has allowed them to debunk the myth that “the information in Wikipedia is not true”.

Their learning by analyzing Wikipedia has allowed them to better guide students in their academic queries and, in particular, to have a critical view of the information circulating on the Internet.

Teachers speak:

Teacher Magui Copeticona Laja, from the Simón Bolívar 1 Educational Unit in La Paz-Bolivia, talks about her experience participating in the Let's Read Wikipedia in the Classroom program in 2024.

“If we do not teach young people to use these media, tools and instruments, we would not be doing a correct job. So, we have to work at the same time, so that they (students) can also know how to distinguish, grasp the information, the new technologies and, especially, (among) the many pages there are, and distinguish which are useful and which are not,” said teacher Alison Gutiérrez, from the area of Communication and Language in secondary school, at the Simón Bolívar 1 Educational Unit, in La Paz.

For her part, teacher Zelmi Fernández, also from the Communication and Language area of the Bolivia Educational Unit, in La Paz, explained that in the educational process with students it is inevitable that they do their searches and consultations on the Internet, so in order to guide them in the critical reading of information it is also essential that they, as teachers, are familiar with these methodologies.

“We are in another century where we must begin to familiarize ourselves and, above all, update ourselves as teachers with technology (...). In this era it is inevitable that young men and women look for information on the Internet and the important thing will always be to guide the work and teach them which pages to visit, which pages have correct information and not just grab any page to read or present a work,” said Professor Fernandez.

What's next?

We are planning to publish the best lesson plans of 2024, soon to be available in English. We believe this publication will be inspirational both for teachers who completed the program and whose plans are included in the text, as well as for others working in education who are interested in community-based education projects and digital skills.