Submitted by Omashani Naidoo from SchoolNet
Intel has been conducting training for teachers around South Africa using SchoolNet to conduct the training. Here are reports on how the training progressed at two of the schools.

Marotse Primary School

This school lies in Atameleng in the North West province. It received sponsorship of computer hardware and an interactive whiteboard through MTN. This venue also has stable connectivity even when all users are connected simultaneously. Eighteen teachers attended this training.

Most of the teachers were computer literate at the start. The principal and two young teachers stood out particularly as shining stars. It is assumed that these teachers gained their exposure and interest whilst at University, and this has helped them become ICT champions. Intel Teach Getting Started was the perfect choice for this school, although with the limited training days, only a few modules of the course were covered. These included 21st century skills, using a word processor, getting to grips with spreadsheets and creating multimedia. The trainer arranged to visit the school every afternoon until the end of the term to ensure that teachers were skilled enough to maximise the use of the connectivity sponsored by MTN.

Christchurch Christian Preparatory School

This school, based in Midrand,  is part of a special project with Running computers who installed an Intel Classmate solution at the school. Participants accessed the course material from the server of the IT lab. Mr Gavin Theron indicated that twenty teachers would be in attendance, the bulk of them with novice skills and a few with intermediate skills. Training started with the introduction of the course objectives and the outline of the training programme. The trainer discussed the module and the navigation aspects as well as the important points to remember. Participants were encouraged to complete their personalised handbooks so that they could track their learning journeys. Differentiation of cooperative learning, group work and collaboration were discussed at length. Engaging learners in higher order thinking was also discussed and the ‘plan, do, review and share’ cycle was completed.

The facilitator used the shaping and fading methodology to introduce teachers to activities and then let them complete the activities on their own. The trainer was also able to setup an online collaboration tool which can be accessed at www.todaysmeet.com/ccps They further discussed how these collaboration tools including blogs, wikis and social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook could be used by educators and the learners in teaching and learning situations and everyone agreed how important it was to embrace such tools. The teachers were very appreciative of the Intel course training and they gave plenty of positive feedback in the course evaluation. :

The report outlining all the Intel training can be read here.