Honour for Teachers ‘Who Make the World Get Better’

Jun 04

Honour for Teachers ‘Who Make the World Get Better’

AllAfrica - Ikechukwu Chukwu has been a teacher for seven years, but that was not his original plan because he did not train to be one. Having read Bio-Chemistry at the University of Calabar, Cross River State; he was searching “for greener pastures”, he says, when he, literally, ‘contacted ICT’ following his employment in the Administrative Department of an IT firm in Port Harcourt .

A series of trainings followed and in five years, he became a Systems Analyst. He was later employed as a Systems Analyst by the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Education Department and deployed to the Government Science and Technical College , Garki, Abuja. Today, he teaches Computer Studies in the school.

Deputy Head Teacher Ronald Ddungu trained as a Mathematics teacher and teaches the subject in senior classes One to Six (Age 13 to 19) at Gayaza High School in Kampala , ‘Uganda’ . He has taught for 16 years, but began to use ICT only three years ago. “I learnt by observing and applying. I was fascinated by people who wrote and put things on the internet and inspired to do the same. Now I have my own website that I am putting together”, he says. His contact with the International Education and Research Network of Teachers, based in the United States , gave him the opportunity to participate in a Teachers Forum, a one-month on-line course, where participants were taught how to use projects to teach.

Ousmane Diouf has taught for 30 years and has been fortunate to be exposed to ICT for the past 18 years. He teaches Mathematics and Physics and is also an Administrator at a High school that goes by the acronym, CRIWL in Bambey, Senegal. He has therefore used ICT to develop a number of projects.

At an Innovative Teachers Forum Awards ceremony, organised in Ghana by Microsoft for teachers, who had excelled in the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning around Africa; Ddungu won the award for ‘Innovation in Community’; Chukwu, Innovation in Collaboration; Diouf, Innovation in Content and Marie-May Iman, the Peer Review award.

Microsoft’s General Manager, Worldwide Education, Alan Yates says, “Teachers are very important to education. It is very clear that education is the key to progress around the world. Of course we believe that technology really helps education. The purpose of this event is to get all of these together. To show up teachers who are using technology to help the world get better.”

To the teachers, he says, “Microsoft works with over 100 countries in Partners in Learning (PiL). We work with over 50 countries in terms of the Innovative Teachers Network and we’ve worked with over a million teachers around the globe. You are among the chosen few of a million teachers around the planet, who are working with technology with their children. We celebrate you for doing a great job with your students and children. Microsoft appreciates what you are doing. Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts and congratulations.” The awards followed the Pan African Teachers Forum, attended by 87 teachers from 13 different countries - Senegal , Burkina Faso , Gabon , Nigeria (seven), Ghana , Mozambique , Kenya , Namibia , South Africa , Uganda , Mauritius , Seychelles and Madagascar. Citizenship Programme Manager, Microsoft Anglophone West Africa, Jummai Umar-Ajijola, says these are the Partners in Learning countries in Africa . “In Ghana , for example, the competition started from the ward and the best of the country emerged, which joined the best in Nigerian, which we put together as the Anglo-Phone West Africa Team.”

The Forum, according to the Manager Programmes, School Technology Innovation Centre in Johannesburg , Angela Schaerer; “is all about teachers being given the opportunity to share their different experiences in teaching, showing best practices and learning from each other. The award is about acknowledging the great work that the teachers are doing, in very difficult contexts sometimes. We look at the different ICTs that they use and the impact that that has had on the teaching and learning experience.”

Each sub-region across the continent had to organise its own Regional Innovative Teachers Forum event. They chose the teachers that had created the most innovative lessons and all of those teachers came to the Pan-African event. Although the teachers met in Ghana for only a few days, she says, “It is an on-going

Forum and an opportunity for teachers to grow in many ways. There is an on-line community where teachers can upload their lessons and download other lessons. Participants are Basic Education teachers, although Microsoft also works with students in Colleges of Education since they are the ones who teach in primary and secondary schools after graduation. “All of Microsoft’s programmes are working towards ensuring that students leave school with the skills they need to enter the workforce and become employable and contribute to the economic growth of their countries”, she says. It is open to any teacher, either in public or private school that is doing something innovative.

An important point, though, is that process is not just about teachers submitting an innovative lesson. It is a culmination of a lot of hard work for most of the teachers. Many of these teachers have been through the PiL Teacher Training, spent a lot of time in the computer lab and got to the point where they could showcase what they had been doing. Umar-Ajijola adds: “A lot of the teachers’ work was done with the collaboration of their pupils, with their participation, comments and reflections; to show that the technology tools used are making impact and that the children understand what they are being taught.” The participants variously described the Forum as a worthwhile experience and that they were going forth armed with more innovative ways of using ICT in the classroom.

For the competition, the contestants are to ensure that they set out appropriate tasks using relevant ICT with active participation in their lessons, collaborative learning between the learners, sometimes outside of the classroom and beyond the school; and maybe between learners of different countries.

The awards are in four categories covering Content (key to learning), Collaboration, Community (whether it is the school, other schools, local) and Peer Review, where the teachers were made to rate their own works and the winner in this category emerged. Chukwu’s project, ‘Diverse Cultures, One People’ was taken from a lesson in Social Studies, ‘Culture’. He explains that, “We used ICT to enliven that topic and also use it as a collaborative project among communities within and outside. The students were involved in the practical demonstration of what they learnt in the lesson, like fashion parade to depict the different clothing styles, as well as dances, all from different parts of the country. They put all these together in a power point presentation, which they shared with their partner schools in Kenya and the United Kingdom . He is happy that the use of ICT growing in public schools in Nigeria . “Teachers are getting laptops because they can pay over a period of time, schools are being equipped with computer labs, with about 20 computers per school. Everything we do now is geared towards inculcating ICT into education because education cannot move forward without ICT. We are talking about the 21st century students-centred approach to learning.”

Ddungu’s project, ‘Education for Sustainability’, moves away from rote to activity-based learning. “It has three components. The first component is where the Senior one class students were taken to the community to teach Mathematics to Primary One pupils. As they prepared for the project, they learnt tolerance, how to share and collaborate, as well as skills that they need to live. The second component involved organising an on-line workshop where we invited schools to collaborate with us. It was a Mathematics project too with the senior girls of our school. But it had a one-day face-to-face workshop. We are very excited to have people communicating with us online from all over Uganda and beyond. We were also happy to have about 600 students attending the workshop where we used technology - projectors, power point, smart boards - in the discussions.

“The third component is Environmental Education, where students developed teaching materials to be used by teachers and students to learn about the environment as it is the curriculum. We started by planting trees in our school and then we went into this garden where we developed teaching materials. We had Physics and Mathematics lessons on that field”, Ddungu explains.

Diouf does not see why Africans, especially the youth, should strive to go to Europe in search of better life and get killed in the process. His project, ‘CRIWL Electronic Alarm System aims to show how it is possible, after the theory on Electricity in the Physics class, to go deeper into the alarm system as a utilitarian application that permits reprocess or recycling of electronic rejects unloaded in poor countries by rich ones.

With about 10 projects to his credit, he says, they can be anything they want to be. In fact, they can become very rich by employing any of them. He therefore intends to share these, not only among schools in the 11 provinces in Senegal , but across West and Central Africa , the region he will be representing at the world finals of the competition, the International Innovative Teachers Forum, scheduled to hold in Thailand in November. Chukwu describes the award as “A boost and an encouragement that I need to build upon for the world finals coming up in November. It also challenges me to translate whatever I have achieved in the course of this project into the classroom by involving the students in ICT-rich lessons to enhance their learning.” Ddungu says, “When people appreciate the little you have done, you are encouraged to even work harder. Now that we are going to represent Africa at the world level, we will develop these projects further. So I will be out with my students working on these projects and documenting all we do.”

Muara Teweh!