Integrating information, communication and technology (ICT) with education is the purpose of the iSchool Press Team Programme, which offers the youth of SA digital training courses.
The programme, which is a project of iSchoolAfrica, an education initiative developed by Core Group, currently has over 1 000 young journalists throughout SA creating digital content as part of their extra-mural activity. Each pupil is given a video camera, an iPad, a tripod, a microphone an Apple MacBook with iLife software to edit and a regular brief with a theme to tell a story.
"This project is a development initiative that aims to broaden the access of pupils, faculties and their communities to ICT facilities with the goal of building human capital for sustainable development. The initiative also hopes to integrate ICT into basic education by providing gadgets to schools," says Mineze Grobler, iSchool Press Team coordinator.
She says Thuthuzekani Primary School in Krugersdorp and Phindavele Secondary School in KwaZulu-Natal are among the 15 school press teams which have been set up in six different provinces around SA.
According to iSchoolAfrica, learners get several weeks to compile their videos in teams, edit them and then submit these to the iSchool Press Team office either through loading on Dropbox and sharing the link with the office or via the iSchoolAfrica schools facilitator.
A wide range of themes which are relevant to the youth are publicised via the Web site and directly to schools. These themes include "If I were President for a day", "Bullying in schools", "21 years of democracy" and so on.
"The iSchool Press Team members are required to work collaboratively and to also make many critical decisions about content, structure and style, story-lines and visual materials that will impact the success of their projects.
"Proven outcomes of the press team project indicate that students acquire a range of skills including technical skills, media literacy, editorial skills and personal development skills while working on their assignments," explains Grobler.
Talking about programme highlights, she says the iSchool Press Team in partnership with UNICEF had a tremendously successful campaign at the end of 2015 where the theme of this campaign was "End GBV". This challenged teams to create inspiring ?lms calling on all South Africans to fight the scourge of gender-based violence.
One common limitation of the integration of ICT into schools is that a large majority of the instructional staff in education systems have little or no ICT literacy, however the iSchool Press Team were prepared for this challenge.
"We ensure that our dedicated Press Team teachers also undergo training together with the pupils, the teachers would later also be in charge of recruiting the right candidates to join the team.
"With the global shift of using tablets in schools, technology has become a key driver of educational innovation and we believe that more youth of SA should be given the opportunity to showcase their creativity and voice their opinions on issues important to them," continues Grobler.
Explaining how learners can be part of the programme, she says they have to register either online or through an iSchoolAfrica facilitator. There is no charge for membership. The only cost to the school is in acquiring the ?lming equipment.
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