In association with the British Council and the Department of Basic Education, we are running an awarenet project at VG High School to generate language learning materials for rural and disadvantaged schools in South Africa.
A LifePlayer is a portable, wind up and solar powered radio and MP3 player, designed for use in underdeveloped countries and situations where access to information and infrastructure such as electricity is often lacking. The LifePlayer allows people to access information from around the world through radio broadcasts. The British Council has sponsored the donation of 900 LifePlayers to rural schools in South Africa, where access to learning resources and particularly electrical appliances and the internet is very limited if available at all.
The British Council LifePlayers have a number of English language learning resources pre-loaded on them. However, this content has been made in the United Kingdom and is not directed at either a South African audience or the South African additional language curriculum.
Learners at VGHS have prepared set texts from the intermediate phase additional language curricula and these have been recorded as short podcasts, which can be distributed with the LifePlayers around South Africa. awarenet learners under the supersivion of Dr Sarah Hanton have had to learn about how to use their voices to tell a story, how to make their own sound effects and how to perform for radio broadcast.
The project is currently presented at SciFest 2013 in Grahamstown. You can find us in the monument, 3rd floor. Here is a little sneak preview of what you can expect: Frog and Crow get the Wrong Message. Have a listen, we think, it’s amazing!