A new interactive education and communication software awareNet

The software awareNet – developed by eKhaya ICT – is modern, interactive education and communication software featuring an intelligent platform that provides semiautomatic monitoring to protect its users. It allows the scholars to communicate with each other in a safe environment, as well as allowing them to create profiles of themselves and projects (content) online portraying their situation or in fact on any topic they like. It gives the learners the opportunity to contact other learners in the near proximity or internationally to exchange experiences and knowledge, and to realise their own mutual projects. It is expected that the learning value of such motivating activities will be tremendous and will lead to the learner’s performance improving considerably as well as the teachers being on site more reliably and continuously.

Further Information about awareNet >>

Read more about the Village Scribe Association’s assignment and the international communication and education network >>

Project Description    Our Assignment    awareNet

A satellite picture showing most of the 20 schools in South Africa that participate in the ECSPIRT Project so far and that use awareNet.

A few learners at Zwelenqaba SSS

in their computer lab.

The ECSPIRT Training Programme

To set up a sustainable training structure is not trivial. One has to ensure that everyone involved in the training wins, and avoid the trap of demotivating people because funds eventually run out. Hence, payment for the teachers is restricted to bonuses and involves making the learners independent. After an initial phase of additional teacher work and training, the computer lab can effectively be run by the self-organised learners. Instead of focusing the reward on money, the value of the activity itself is promoted, which makes it much more sustainable and this will hopefully have short- and long-term benefits for all the learners in the programme.

In the initial phase, Ron Wertlen of eKhaya ICT spent six afternoons at the school with the learners. Further training by eKhaya ICT (approx. three days per month until February 2009) has being co-funded by SELF and Rhodes University. Current training and assistance done by eKhaya ICT is sponsored by eKhaya ICT and Rhodes University.

From within the first student group the leading/ top students will be identified and will receive special training in the following phase. They will be taught by the teachers to supervise and teach the CAT course and also how to use the awareNet software. The champion group will also be most active in helping design the awareNet software. During this second phase regular groups will also receive training so that the champions can watch the teachers and learn how to train from them. We will encourage an approach of individual tutoring within mostly practical sessions, where learners are trained as they use the computers.

We believe that this training plan will be very effective as it motivates the learners to work with the computers independently of the teachers, and to take training and organisation of computer usage into their own hands. This will help to increase the computer lab usage as it will not require teachers to be present all the time. Further, it will also motivate the learners and increase their self-confidence, and they will have a nice addition to their CV, which will no doubt help them get jobs when they leave school.