Atos Origin Consultant Demonstrates Free Learning Tools to Zambian Teachers
Jan 26 2010, Zambia [ZM], Education
- Source:
- Lesley White [lwhite(at)iicd.org]
- Country:
- Zambia [ZM]
- Sector:
- Education
Atos Origin consultant Berno van Soest introduced teachers in Zambia to digital tools they can use to enrich their curriculum. This was part of his visit to the IICD-supported ENEDCO project in January 2010. Among the tools was a browser to view Wiki content such as Wikipedia offline and software that can be used to easily create quizzes for students.
Van Soest gave a one-day workshop at the Mpelembe Secondary School in Kitwe. This school is part of the ENEDCO project that improves content in seven schools in Zambia's Copperbelt region to help make teaching more effective.
A group of thirty teachers from all ENEDCO-related schools attended the workshop. Van Soest held a hands-on session on Okawix. A tool for browsing offline versions of Wiki content such as the encycopedia Wikipedia. This was met with a lot of enthusiasm by the teachers, who often have connectivity problems in their schools.
Educational quizzes
Based on requests by ENEDCO, Van Soest also showed other promising tools that can potentially be used to enrich teaching material. He showed programmes such as Stu's Quiz Boxes, a programme where teachers can easily make quizzes for educational purposes. One of the other programmes he showed was a new version of Scratch, the free program by MIT, that teaches students computer programming in a simple and playful way by creating animations, interactive stories, et cetera.
"It was a very alert audience," says Van Soest, who also wrote a blog (in Dutch) about his experiences in Zambia. "The teachers were very enthusiastic about the off line components. They told me about the connectivity problems they encounter and therefore were happy that these programmes require none or almost no connectivity."
Installation in three other ENEDCO-schools
Apart from the workshop, Berno van Soest also visited three other ENEDCO-schools. Here he installed Okawix on 'thin client' stations provided by IICD's corporate partners Motorola and NComputing. Thin clients allow a network of up to ten PCs to run on one computer, thus saving energy and maintenance costs.
This was Van Soest's second time in Zambia as a consultant for IICD-supported projects. "It was nice to be back, this is completely different from what I do on a daily basis," says the Atos Origin consultant. "I wish I could do it more often."
Official partners
Atos Origin is one of IICD's official corporate partners. The company provides IT consultants to enhance IICD-supported projects in Africa. In the past, it also has supported IICD in the Netherlands by developing an online learning tool to help local partners use the online Monitoring and Evaluation system.