Wekhonye Primary School establishes ICT club
3rd October 2016
Wekonye Primary School ICT Club members
The first Wekhonye Primary School ICT club has launched this month. The club aims to improve student literacy levels and encourages students to interact with the tablets further looking at a wide range of topics that are delivered in the classroom through this self-learning platform.
Membership to the ICT club is voluntary and the pupils are free to explore their topics of choice. They are also encouraged to discuss, in small groups and help each other out during the sessions. In the first day of establishing this club, it was marred by a challenge when a huge number of pupils wanted to be part of it whereas the 27 tablets that we had could not be enough. We had to lock out a big number of pupils out of the club. Over the coming weeks, we expect there to be over 100 pupils wanting to participate in the club in the afternoon.
“I don’t even know which criterion I should use to select members of the ICT club, as you can see the number (of pupils wanting to participate in the club) is too high. Our pupils have not only started to like Maths, but they have also started to like school. The rates of classroom absenteeism have dropped since the start of this program” says the deputy head teacher.
The above words from the deputy head teacher show that these youngsters are thirsty to learn. To progress with the ICT club, we shall encourage the pupils to establish a number of clubs so that when they miss out in one club, they could be able to be members of another club like maths club, media Making club or even writing club.
Elsewhere in the programme, we have encountered passionate teachers who are ready to learn about digital education. Their persuasive nature is simply impressive. “Do you have resources that I could use in my mathematics session? My pupils find it hard to grasp concepts in geometry,” says Mr Anyova, a class 5 maths teacher. Mike was happy to take him through some of the materials available on Khan Academy. He found the materials to be relevant in teaching. He will be using the materials in the next session. One of our main aims is to not only empower pupils but to also build the capacities of the teachers in this school and encourage them to use technology in teaching. That is one of the ways that will make this project sustainable.
Mr Anyova (wearing a navy blue sweater) exploring some of the materials he could use to teach geometry.
Our team continued to engage with students out in the field, and while talking to some the pupils to find out more about how Digital Communities Initiative has impacted their life, candid stories. One of the pupils had this to say, “Anytime you come into our classroom, we do not want you to leave, we do not mind eating into break time. We want to keep on learning mathematics and using the tablets.”
Until next time
The DCI team
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