GET INVOLVED
DONATE
As a local NGO we need your donation in order to provide high quality IT lessons to our learners in the awarenet programme. Support us!
TEACH
You are a teacher and want to offer your learners high quality IT lessons? Be part of the movement and join our professional network.
LEARN
Access to knowledge, creative projects, IT and Internet skills and improved employment chances. There are many reasons to join awarenet.
VOLUNTEER
You would like to get involved? Welcome on board! Find out how you can join our awarenet team and the weltwärts community.
About us
awarenet is an eLearning platform and social media tool that offers our learners a personal networking space, tools for blogging, online discussions and project work in wiki style incl. multi media. They learn how to present themselves online, how to connect and communicate responsibly in a secure and safe space. Groups meet on a weekly basis and work on various projects about culture, health, music, science, history and social services, whereby online and offline work is combined. Projects lead to major local activities and events such as public concerts, sport days, newspaper articles and social engagements. We further offer to install awarenet servers in existing computer labs and give combined introductory workshops for teachers, in which we train general IT skills and showcase how to integrate awarenet into the curriculum or co-curriculars. The platform is developed in such a way that remote schools without or interrupted Internet access can use it as well as it also functions when offline. The awarenet software is free open-source. The awarenet programme offers many opportunities to learners and teachers as well as partnering NGOs in the educational sector.
The awarenet Open Lab is a project that was established in May of 2017 in cooperation with Rod Amner, a VSA board member and Rhodes lecturer. The goal of the Open Lab is to give free Internet access to the members of the Joza community and educate them in ICT through the method of "learning by doing". The project has so far been very sucessful, as there are more than 450 members registered with us. In addition to just giving access to the Internet for free, we also offer specific courses, focused on computer education. So far we had a course involving Blockly, a variant of the scratch computer language, and a video editing course which has the goal of producing a short movie in which the participants appear as actors and cut the movie themselves in the end. We hope that we can continue the project for a long time, however it is dependent on donations. If you want to support the Open Lab feel free to donate items or visit our betterplace.org site to support us financially.
The awarenet Teachers course is another project that we have been working on. As part of the course, teachers from local primary and high schools are being educated about how they can use ICT to enrich their lessons. This means that we show them how to do reliable research on the Internet, how to design presentations which can be used in addition to writing content on blackboards and how to use email. The aim of the awarenet Teachers course is to improve the quality of the education which the learners receive through helping the teachers to adapt their lessons to the present.
OUR TEAM

Kjetil Torp

Zintle Vambe

Thanduxolo Royi

Martin Zabel

Kela Iheanetu

Latifa Abdoulahi

Simphiwe Gwaza

Richard Were

Clement Simuja
IT and Educational Advisor

Rod Amner
Chairperson

Dr Sarah Hanton
Educational Advisor

Craig Renaud
Legals, Treasurer

Ronald Wertlen
German Partner

DR ANNA WERTLEN
German Partner