New learners were recruited to awarenet this school term through a collaboration with Inkululeko! We now have core groups coming to our Learning Lab every afternoon of the week. The learners all study at Ntsika high school and hail from the Inkululeko program which we now work closely with thanks to funding from the Episcopal Church and the HCI Foundation.
New groups of grade 8s, grade 9s and grade 10s are coming once a week to be taught more about how to use computers in a smart way for educational purposes. Most of our new learners have very little or no previous experience with computers so our goal is to follow them until grade 12 when they will have reached a level of ICT knowledge which can equip them for further studies and job opportunities.
In the first sessions we did with the new groups we started with trying to get to know each other better through personal introductions. We first created a Google account for the new learners as we try introduce the online opportunities of Google Suit. These will allow them to use software like Gmail, Google Docs, Drive and Spreadsheet which we use regularly in our session.
The next session all the new learners did a computer test we designed in order to assess their current computer skills and also to use a benchmark to measure further progress. The test will make it easier for us to know what areas we have to focus on and which learners need particular help. In the near future we will do exactly the same test with them and hopefully be able to see that the new learners have improved a lot through the help of our program!
Last week we did our core group sessions with our new learners at the new Social Innovation Hub at the Rhodes University Community Engagement premises. The learners were really excited about this spacious, state-of-art lab with its fast internet and brand-new computers. They had great fun at the lab watching and reviewing online educational learning videos.