A R250 000 school PC lab in Soweto is still not in use, 18 months after being installed.
The 25-computer lab was installed in February 2004 as one of the 1 100 PC labs rolled-out by the Gauteng Department of Education as part of the R500 million GautengOnline project.
However, the lab, at the JS Mpanza primary school, was never used as the premises did not have electricity and teachers at the school were not trained.
Last week an electrical connection was made at the school PC laboratory.
Several government officials visited the school and promised to help following a story published by ITWeb in August. However, says principal Dolly Sithole, none of the promises were kept, except for the electricity that was installed last week.
Her priority now is to gain access to the computers in the lab, but she does not have the password to the system and her staff has not received training, she says.
She named an official who had promised to get back to her. It later emerged that the person has since resigned from their post.
Johannesburg North District 10 coordinator James Tshwane, under whose management PC-implementation at JS Mpanza falls, says he was appointed to the post in October and does not have the details of the problem yet. However, GautengOnline was about to embark on a survey beginning in Soweto to find out how the PC-labs were working and assess needs, he says.
Some also schools have power as well as security problems, says GautengOnline project manager Dick Raynor. As a result, the issue of security will be reconsidered and a tender for provision will be issued in the coming months.
Resistance to change
Raynor assigns part of the blame for the difficulties being experienced to the teachers. The use of computers as learning tools requires that educators change their methodology, he says, shifting from being the source of information to a framework where they too are learners.
"It is a difficult change to bring about, as it screams against all the preconceptions teachers have," he says.
Blaming the teachers
Randomly choosing schools to install PC labs also means that some schools that have poor management structures in place, have PC labs, says Raynor. Such schools are experiencing difficulties in adapting to the use of computers as education tools, he says.
Another priority issue is teacher training, he says. GautengOnline will continue to train teachers so that labs installed are used effectively. However, there were problems with the training project too, in that some teachers failed to show up for the scheduled training, says Raynor.
He uses research to argue that it takes at least five years for a well-resourced school to fully adopt a technology and integrate it into the mainstream of learning. Thus, it is understandable that some of the schools are experiencing difficulty especially in view of the apartheid legacy and lack of resources in townships, he says.
Teachers have dealt with a lot of change in recent years: "Our hope is that they may swallow this change too," he says.
Patchy aftercare service
Another aspect of GautengOnline was the provision of a call centre facility where faults with PC labs could be reported by calling 0800 123456. Raynor acknowledges that communication between the customer care centre and the schools remains one of the key challenges.
Teachers, though not expected to operate as school network managers, need to be able to state clearly what is wrong with the system, he says. The training they receive should provide them with the skill to do that.
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