Inside South Africa's First Fully Digital Government School

An anonymous reader writes "State education in South Africa has been described as 'in crisis'. A recent report (pdf) says that even the top 20% of private schools only achieve the same results as the average in other middle income countries like Chile. In maths and science, teachers often can't answer and don't understand the questions they have to set their pupils. One government school in Johannesburg, however, has taken an enormously bold step and gone 'fully digital' in a move that others may follow. Since January, all pupils have been required to buy a tablet computer instead of textbooks — which, astonishingly, saves families around R500 ($50) in the first year and R1500 ($150) in subsequent years, a huge amount of money for many families there. The teachers are confident that that learning outcomes are better as well — and if the end of year tests in a month's time are positive, other schools may follow suit."

Comments

"Saved" them money?

[oic0]

Were they not able to sell or trade used books before? I know in college they change books like every year to squeeze more money out of you, but I figured in south africa they might assume the people cant quite afford it and use the same book year after year.

Re:"Saved" them money?

[nurb432]

When i was in primary school you rented them. ( both in actual hard dollars, and in taxes )

In my college, like your experience, a lot of times they would change the book 'just enough' so the next class wouldn't get to use them and had to buy their own copies new. ( that is what you get when your professors write the books that are used in class )

Re:"Saved" them money?

[evilviper]

If you think changing the book is to squeeze money out of you, and not... you know, because you've finished learning from it and need something else to learn, then you're in trouble. Using the same book year after year is probably one of the reasons the learning outcomes are so terrible

Back in college, I enrolled in the intro to C++ course in the summer semester, bought the book, and attended the first few classes, but had to drop it when I realized my course load was too heavy. I re-enrolled in the fall, no problem, only to find the C++ book had been updated to a new edition, which was almost exactly the same, but had changed the layout just enough that page numbers were completely out-of-whack, chapter numbers didn't quite match either, and there were a few small wording changes in some of the assignments that significantly changed them.

I wasn't too interested in buying another $60+ book, that I was previously told would be good for all three semesters of C++. As a result, those handful of us with the old books spent half the class tracking down what examples everyone else was looking at, and hours figuring out where to find the assignments we needed to complete, which were sometimes slightly different. Of course the teacher wasn't interested in the changes and just didn't want to be bothered. In the end, about half the people with the old books ended up buying new ones halfway through the class. And those of us who kept the old couldn't manage anything more than a C in that class.

It's many years of incidents like that which left me with very little respect for textbook publishers, college education, and teachers in general. Anything which undermines that horrible system, while actually providing a reasonable education, is aces in my book.

Re:"Saved" them money?

[morbingoodkid]

No!

First lets put this into perspective. The ANC led goverment have closed down about 2000 schools since 1994. That is saying something. Schools are mostly self funded. There is some money from the goverment but a significant number of students are paid from the schools own funds (School funds) paid by parents. So in areas where parents can afford it the education is simply much better than in areas where the parents cannot afford it. Please understand this, education is very important for South African parents. But teachers (not all teachers) are simply not producing the goods.

Regarding the actual text book situation. Our goverment took it appon themselves to change the syllabus year on year. cut funding to schools. So instead of students only paying for text books that get damaged students have to every year buy new text books and old books cannot be sold to the next year as the syllabus have changed. Their is no method for redistributing text books. and honestly text books are more expensive than what they should be.

So yes the tablet/laptop thing makes sense in saving parent money.

This things upsets me very much there is only one way to reduce poverty and generally lift the living standard of people and that is through education. There is nothing else that works. So why is the SA government not doubling the school subsidies why have they not setup a committee of the best teachers and written the necessary textbooks with the Goverment making textbooks copyright public domain and subcontracting the cheapest manufacturers. There is many ways that this can be solved but lets be honest fixing education is not a priority of the ANC.

CA has lessons learned

[Zeorge]

The students quickly used the tablet for entertainment vice studying. Something like a Kindle paper white on the other hand would be better. Too slow to be used for anything other than reading and making notes.

Question 1

[DiamondGeezer]

Q1: Your schoolchildren are not achieving as much as they should because your teachers don't have the knowledge to answer the advanced questions of your brightest students.

Do you
a) immediately mandate a digital policy in order to save money on books or
b) get better teachers

Answers to the South African Dept of Education.

Hint: one of these answers might be racist.

Re:Question 1

[beelsebob]

I believe the point is that the latter is impossible, and will remain impossible until the general level of education rises. Of course, then you're stuck in a catch 22. The former helps to increase the level of education, and saves people money, it therefore can not be a bad thing.

Re:Question 1

[Gavagai80]

How are you going to get better teachers in a country where 85% of the population grew up as second class citizens on reservations with little education just 20 years ago? It's going to take a few generations at least.

Whose opinion again?

[Anonymous Coward]

The teachers are confident that that learning outcomes are better as well...

Wait, the opinion of these people:

In maths and science, teachers often can't answer and don't understand the questions they have to set their pupils.

So, they have incompetent teachers and they think replacing textbooks with tablets is going to fix that.

The one thing that the school insists on, however, is that each lesson starts with a five minute test completed on the tablet screen which is based on the last lesson.

Back in my day, we had a quiz every class and we got the results the next class. Then the teacher would go over any material that the class didn't learn - or we would go over the answers in class and another student graded. This was all uphill - both ways - in the snow! And the only "tablets" we had were our Flintstones vitamins!

It became a competition and most of our grades went up.

This was all paper and pencil - you know the shit brown recycled paper that we used to get in public schools.

I tell ya, technology is not a panacea for education - although, it sure helps the bottom line for the tech manufacturers.

Re:Invest on teachers

[adam237]

Yes, but the thing about this story is that it isn't a replacement for teacher training. It's one school in Johannesburg which already has good teachers by local standards, acting autonomously to try and improve itself. The education department is watching to see if what they do has an effect, and will then look at other needier schools - so in reply to the commentators that it's SA trying to buy its way out of a bigger problem with inappropriate tech, that's not true in this this case (I'm the author of the piece - that was my suspicion at first).

An enormously bold move...

[Xenna]

I just took my 7 year old out of a school that made a similar 'enormously bold move', yeah, and I'm an old time Slashdot nerd.

In the case of my son's school the idea was to replace all the practice material for all the important subjects by similar material on a (custom made) tablet. No writing skills were necessary anymore. Making math exercises is now a matter of guessing, the tablet will immediately respond with correct or false and the kid can go back and fix things.

I love technology and all but I'm seriously worried about what such a 'bold move' will do to my kid's future cognitive abilities. The long term effects of this are unknown. So we took him to another school where they teach according to the (properly debugged) Montessori model.

The kicker is that pilots for this system are going on on 10% of Dutch schools and none of the other parents of the 200 or so affected children seemed to be bothered by this.We'll probably know the results of this experiment in another 5 years.