by Rieke Heitmueller. On Friday, the 25th of April 2014, it was time for our annual awarenet Open Day. It took place at C.M Vellem Primary School for two hours in the afternoon and is inspired by the international Girls in ICT Day. This initiative is backed by ITU (International Telecommunication Union) Member States as an opportunity for girls and young women to get inspired about ICT.
We invited IT teachers and students from local and neighbouring schools (Samuel Ntsiko Primary School, S.D Adventist School and Archie Mbolekwa Public School) to get an introduction of the awarenet programme. The idea of the awarenet Open Day is to promote our programme and to encourage the teachers to use awarenet during their lessons and to work together using awarenet, which then hopefully results in more female and male learners to have better access and a better understanding of ICTs. The students and teachers were introduced to the awarenet platform, the most important features and projects by Rieke Heitmueller, Antje Hering and Terri-Lynn Penney.
While the students’ explored awarenet and wrote blogs about the awarenet Open Day and their experiences in ICT, the teachers also got an introduction to KaLite, an offline version of Khan Academy, which is now integrated into awarenet.
As the awarenet Open Day was drawing to a close, the students were still busy writing blogs, poems and looking photos from past awarenet events and did not want to leave. They loved it, so we are going to follow up and we will try to organise awarenet sessions for them in the Joza Youth Hub if they do not have their own computer lab. We will move into the Hub in June, so the wait won’t be too long.