mainstreaming ICTs into education in Northern Ghana and Dadamac's training. January 12, 2011
I am delighted to hear from you and to learn of your work trying to mainstream ICTs into education in Northern Ghana. You are right that this work is very dear to my heart and overlaps the training I have done with rural teachers.
Visibility for Savana Signatures
You ask me to help you with greater visibility, so I have copied your email below (although I don't usually share letters without prior permission) - but it is the quickest way I can think of to help you.
I have visited your website Savana Signatues www.savsign.org and am impressed by what I see there.
I would love to input to your project - but you need to know that I have no financial backing so we will need rub minds on the best way forward. For a start we could at least look at our shared interests.
Sharing ideas and resources
Maybe some of the ideas and resources that I developed for use with the teachers in rural Nigeria and rural Kenya would be helpful to you. I would be happy to share them with you. They were designed specifically for use with teachers in poorly resourced schools - and were created on the approach of building from the known to the unknown. We wanted the teachers to go away with an enjoyment of using computers and a vision for how they could be used, plus lesson plans that they could use in school.
When I started presenting the programme we started from what people knew about typewriters - because in rural Nigeria even if teachers have not seen a computer there is a reasonable chance they will have come across someone who has a small business typing letters for people. We started by comparing typewrite with a computer used as a word processor.
Using phones as a starting point
After mobile phones began to become familiar we used them as our starting point. I notice that in the photo (top right hand side) on your website the teacher/instructor also seems to have a phone in his hand. Perhaps we are already sharing the same starting point for training - using a phone to introduce the basic features of a computer.. i.e. The phones have
- keyboard for input
- screen for output
- memory (for storing numbers etc)
- you can edit the stored information (e.g. if someone changes their number - you do not need to put it all in again from the beginning
- you can send text messages (like word processing and emailing, but shorter and simpler)
- you can use it for calculations (but computers can do more complicated calculations)
- ..... and so on .. depending what kind of phones the teachers have access to.
I like your two website pictures that show, on the LHS, training with computers and then, on the RHS, what I guess is informal training outside in the shade of the tree - that is also very familiar from my work at Fantsuam.
I don't do "stuff" I do information
As I explained to you I cannot help you with equipment or anything like that - like you see in many programmes. You would need to go elsewhere for that kind of support. The resources I have are my knowledge and networks - ie information rather than "physical stuff".
Let's continue this discussion
If you like, we could continue this discussion openly, exploring what works and does not work, and we could invite other contacts to join us.
Please tell me more about yourself and how you got involved in ICT in education. Are you actually involved in any of the teaching or training yourself or do you have some other role? If I know more about you it will help me to know what kind of appropriate and realistic help I can give you. I have developed various teaching resources and approaches which might be useful to you and your project - or may not suit your needs. Let us discuss.
I look forward to hearing from you again.
Pamela