What a stroke of luck that I was on Twitter when Mike Butcher, Editor in Chief of TechCrunch was organizing a Techfugees Live event in early January!

Techfugees has been incredibly inspiring to my refugee students and we are proud to be a part of the effort by showing just how quickly refugee students learn a new language, content and technology.  In the photos above we are watching the Techfugees Live event on February 13, 2016.

We were so inspired that we started coding with the “Hour of Code” before my students had all the literacy skills that are recommended for it.

We created this video to help inspire other refugees or any students who are working hard to close their literacy gaps:  Newcomers Coding

About Techfugees:

Moved by the plight of refugees in Europe, a number of technology industry people have formed a voluntary team to create the series of non-profit “Techfugees” conferences, hackathons, and work with a global network of collaborators.

In it’s first 48 hours our Facebook Group and Twitter account exploded. Today there are now over 2,000 members of Techfugees, demonstrating a huge desire amongst the tech community to get involved with this issue.

Their events are entirely non-profit, designed to bring together tech engineers, entrepreneurs and startups together with NGOs and other agencies in order to address the crisis in ways where the technology world can bring its considerable firepower.

Many many thanks to Mike Butcher, Mathew Gardiner and everyone at Techfugees who are using Tech for Good and who believe in our learners.