Vodacom unveiled the third of its nine provincial ICT resource centres in Sunnyside, Tshwane, yesterday, in partnership with the Department of Basic Education.
The centre is equipped with 50 computer terminals, Internet connectivity, educational aids and training facilities, and is expected to provide up to 1 400 teachers with access to higher quality ICT instruction tools.
The ICT resource centres are situated throughout the country - one in each of the provinces - and fall under the Vodacom Mobile Education Programme, introduced in October last year. The programme aims to reach 1 555 schools and 60 000 learners nationwide, and provide 3 830 teachers with ICT training.
Head of innovation and partnering at Vodacom, Portia Maurice, said: “Improving the quality of education is mission-critical for the future of SA and skilled teachers are a key element of the education value chain.”
The schools, buildings and teachers have all been identified by the Gauteng Department of Education, while the technology and content is supplied by Vodacom and its partners: Microsoft, Cisco, and Mindset Learn. The department also identified 20 schools in the area for specific teacher training in maths and science.
“All the centres are connected via a virtual private network (VPN), which serves as a pipeline for information that connects and delivers content to participating schools and teachers,” said Dlamini. He added that the VPN provides a platform for creating a community of teachers who could communicate and share ideas and resources.
'Born before technology'
Gauteng MEC of education, Barbara Creecy, said the opening of the centre marked the realisation of a long-standing dream. “The dream that the use of modern ICTs will improve maths and science instruction in the classroom and level the playing field for students from economically disadvantaged areas.”
She noted that all the schools in the programme had been specifically targeted as underperforming, and that the department had already introduced training and Saturday school programmes in these schools to improve matric pass rates and performance.
“Just improving the number of matric passes is not enough, however,” said Creecy. “We need to increase the maths and science passes and the quality of these passes, so young people can go on to university and study courses that meet the needs of the economy and society in general.”
Creecy also reached out to educators who felt they had been “born before technology”. “This gives us an opportunity to experiment and learn how to use ICT in the classroom, and I encourage teachers to get on board and grab this opportunity with both hands.”
Vodacom will supply content hosting and free Web connectivity for the next three years, including the establishment of a controlled gateway to the Internet for each province. This will allow for easy communication among teachers, it says.
Programme partners Microsoft, Cisco and Mindset are providing the software, certification, training and educational content, all of which are hosted on www.digitalclassroom.co.za.
The other eight ICT Resource Centres are located in Emalahleni (Mpumalanga); Worcester (Western Cape); Pinetown, (KwaZulu-Natal); Lady Frere (Eastern Cape); Upington, (Northern Cape); Makhado (Limpopo); Ganyesa, (North West); and Mangaung (Free State).
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