If you are a teacher from South Africa, Lesotho, Uganda or Kenya we would like to tell you about a writing opportunity and a short, free, online digital storytelling course that is coming up with SchoolNetSA and Saide as part of the development of the amazing African Storybook website The course runs from July 21st – August 23rd 2014.
What is the African Storybook Project?
The African Storybook Project (ASP) is a project that is currently creating and encouraging the use of a multilingual, digital library of stories for the first few years of reading. The website was launched recently at a multilingual symposium in Pretoria and can be located at http://africanstorybook.org/
The project, created with funding from Comic Relief in Britain, aims to address the serious literacy challenges on the African continent. In preparation for the launch of the ASP website earlier this month, the African Storybook team was hard at work quality assuring over 120 unique, illustrated stories, with over 650 versions in 15 different languages. The stories are provided in digital formats, openly licensed, with a process and tools for translating and versioning these stories for local African languages and contexts. The website enables users to upload and share versions of the stories in their local languages, providing numbers of stories in a range of languages way beyond the scope of conventional publishing. Tessa Welch of Saide is the project leader in this exciting venture.
In this way the project aims to provide African children with sufficient familiar language stories for enjoyable reading practice to create a firm basis for literacy development. The initial pilot has been taking place in South Africa, Kenya, Lesotho and Uganda. You can read more about this exciting venture on the African Storybook website.
Story Acquisition via a free online digital storytelling course
The project is looking for a continuing supply of stories in a range of African languages. If you are a teacher or educator interested in trying your hand at writing a story for the younger grades please consider participating in the free online five week course Digital Writing for the African Storybook project which starts in July 2014 at the start of Term 3 for public schools in South Africa. . Please click on the SchoolNet blog’s Free online courses page to sign up for this course. Our hope is that if you are a teacher that signs up we could encourage you, after the course, to then get your class writing stories for this project using the ideas picked up during the course. All stories that educators would like to submit for possible selection will be due at the end of the third term.
For further details please feel free to contact fiona (at) schoolnet.org.za or loratot (at) saide.org.za