Monday, September 27, 2010

ICT in Education

The second day of Innovate 2010 started with a few interesting applications of smartboards and Nintendo Wiis. It is interesting that they are using Python to communicate between the two. I've recently discovered that smartboards are becoming rather popular at schools around Cape Town (we even had one installed in EGS at UCT) but I'm not sure how effective they can be. I'm very keen to see what type of content teachers are developing to use on these teaching toys.

Robert and I presented Project Umonya today to a number of IT teachers from around South Africa. Speaking to them afterwards we discovered that many teachers are frustrated with the SACO format and how it doesn't fit into teaching IT, that the North West would really like a course of their own and that there may in fact be computer labs big enough to host courses at certain IEB schools (namely in Johannesburg)

While speaking to educators and NGOs who facilitate educational programs I've discovered a few resources that people may wish to browse, namely Living Maths, Free High School Textbooks (FHSST) and Fullmarks (website pending). Its amazing what resources are available. Project Umonya is hoping to feed their upcoming resource packs into the FHSST system for a greater distribution.

Tomorrow is the final day of the conference and I am keen to network a bit more and discover a few more useful contacts to help us on our way.

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