On the 16th September, Quinton Davis and I traveled to Gauteng Province to visit a Landulwazi Comprehensive School in Tokoza township where we had the opportunity to train the Teach South Africa Ambassadors. From the Teach South Africa website:
The vision of TEACH South Africa is two-fold. In the short-term, our goal is to recruit, train and support the most talented recent university graduates to commit to teaching for a minimum of two years in some of South Africa’s most disadvantaged schools. In the long-term, TEACH Ambassadors will form an alumni movement, informed by their experience in the classroom, which will fight for educational equality for learners all over South Africa by using their influence in whatever sector they decide work in.
Landulwazi school looked a little worse for wear, as many township schools do, but deep in the heart of the school were two fully functioning computer laboratories. To their credit, the full complement of computers in the laboratory we used were in perfect working order, something schools in much more affluent areas struggle to achieve.
We had 24 participants in our workshop. Given that we only had 3 hours to do the training we decided to spend a full hour on the concepts of the website so that we left them with a good foundation and then set up accounts, a workgroup and end with covering as much editing as possible. We left them with the draft manuals and a promise to send them the final ones when they were ready.
The group showed a lot of promise, enthusiasm and asked many insightful questions. A personal highlight was when one teacher discovered the WYSIWYG MathML editor and turned to another and said “This is much better than MathType!”. I hope that Connexions and Siyavula are able to provide support to these teachers-in-training to help them do the best possible job in difficult circumstances.
As a follow-up we recently heard that a teacher had relayed to Teach SA that she had “taken herself back to the site and has managed to get back in without asking anyone for help. She has been able to access and download material. She also said how much your explanation, with the rings on the floor, has helped her.”. We’re extremely proud to be supporting teachers and glad that we seem to be on the right track with our approach to technical training as we’ve received a number of similar responses. We’ll continue to refine it, being careful not to lose the elements that work.