Teachers Talking about ICTs

Discussion points arising from Pam’s Case Study

Julius: I have kept parts of the Uganda that do not have power out of my training programme, requiring that they first sort out their power supply before I can include them in the programme. That will not be tha case anymore, I now know that I can teach computers even in areas where there isn’t any power.

Question: Do you need special skills to deliver such materials?

Julius & Pam’s answer: No, you just need creativity. Pam: When you haven’t got a lot, you will find ways to make it work. We can all do it.

Ken: Could these people being trained read and write?

Pam: Yese, they are teachers so they could read and write in English. However the idea was for these teachers to then share it also with their local community, to pass it on in the local language.

The expectation wasn’t that all of the community should learn about computers. Pam sees these teachers in a similar fashion as travel agents in the UK (or other bandwidth rich areas); it is now possible to book flights online, however many people don’t feel comfortable doing that. They will still go to the travel agent who can operate the computer-based booking system for them.

Derrick: As a trainer, you will not always be faced with a conducive environment; you will need to motivate your learners to be interested  how do you motivate people who cannot read or write?

Ken: What works well is to engage learners with fun exercises. Once he showed how to change the background picture on the computer, and his learners wanted to keep doing that for the remainder of the day 

Chris: agreeing with Pam, we may not have to train everyone on applications (e.g. Office), but need to open up their minds to what computers can do.

Pam: When she was asked to train these rural teachers in computers, she asked herself ‘Why on earth computers?’. The teachers were clear in their answer: ‘we need to know computers’; ICTs are now coming on the curriculum, and teachers know that they will need to ‘know computers’.

Milner: How were you able to sustain the interaction in the online group? Pam: ‘People only do things when they are interested in it’. When she started out, she didn’t know about ICT4D, and learned from other peer groups in places like the GKD discussion list.

Chris: The materials developed and the No Computer Computer Course (NC3) are fabulous. The idea of doing a computer course without computers is great, instead of hiring computers from a third party which will kill the budget. It also relates to the discussion around requiring training material that spans from those that know nothing to those that know a lot, keeping the message consistent, but making it accessible to all levels.

Marianne: How does your experience relate to the clusters we came up with in yesterday’s exercise? Pam: In general terms, they are the same, except perhaps that actual steps that we took are smaller. Sometimes people don’t realise how small the steps are or how small they need to be. Comparison to links in a chain; you need people that at each link are able to look both ways.

Chris: we are developing a course: IT for non-IT professionals. Related is when you teach IT appreciation for illiterates, i.e. not to teach them how to type, but rather help them understand what IT can do for them. We must fully understand our target (e.g. ‘this one would enjoy this kind of material; that one would enjoy that kind of material’).

Clare: I noticed that there was a practical component to Pam’s course design, the hands-on sessions. So there were actually computers, not just the NC3 component. The NC3 component is useful to set the framework and is probably the component that the teachers will be passing on to their students and their community members.

Dedan: I had a case where I was training in HTML and on How do I make a website; it was the technical side but I also needed to make clear: How does one benefit from making a website beautiful?

In another case, a student didn’t understand what the benefit was of using Italics, using Bold, using bullet points etc in here formatting. I got stuck.

 what might have caused this situation for Dedan?

Yese: Even if you have the needs of the learner, you might still encounter the above situation. It shows that only identifying the needs of the learner might not be enough.

Ken: You have to let a person understand before hand what they will be able to do; e.g. prepare a page that has italics and that shows the added value of it, and a page that doesn’t have it.

Derrick: Specify an actual application of how they will be able to use it.

Julius: Just making them put something in bold isn’t enough, it’s your responsibility to let them know Why.

Marianne: you need to relate what you are teaching back to their practical reality, find something that is very exciting to them.

Alex: the Structure of the course module is also very important. If you need them to learn something essential before something fun, it would be good to do the fun thing (e.g. internet) after the essential. Otherwise they will want to only do the fun part.

Marianne – many questions to Pam: to be answered in Could they be put in FAQ format? Success factors etc.

Background info to Case Study

(see also link to Cawd Moodle on Shared Resources page)

PamMacLean, Fantsuam

Teachers Talking about ICTs ("TT" for short) is designed specifically for teachers in rural areas in Nigeria. Increasingly these teachers are expected by central government to be computer literate and to teach about computers - yet their schools typically have few resources, no electricity and little hope of getting any computers in the foreseeable future.

We designed an introductory course for them with three modules:

• "Hands on computers" - a basic confidence building practical course so they could explain to their pupils about computers from first hand experience.
• "NC3" the "No-Computer Computer Course" which builds from the known (things that rural children have a chance to see in the daily lives) to the unknown (things related to computers, what they do and how they do it). NC3 also provides some classroom resources, and helps the course participants to develop lesson plans, including practical classroom activities to illustrate features of ICT function and use..
• TT-Online - an opportunity to experience being part to a community of interest. This is done through joining an online support group which was set up for their benefit to welcome them to the Internet and help them find what they needed online. This is an ongoing support group, so that the course participants can continue to exchange messages with the support group members after the course via cyber cafes etc should the opportunity arise.

Pam

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