South Africa Begins Ambitious Tablets In Schools Pilot Project

An anonymous reader writes "Guateng province — which is home to Johannesburg and Pretoria and is the richest state in sub-Saharan Africa — has just kicked off a pilot project to replace textbooks with tablets in seven government schools. If successful, the project will be extended to all 44 000 schools in the area. It's all been put together in a hurry — the local minister for education announced it in a media interview less than a year ago and details have never been made fully public, but he's hoping it will be an end to 'Irish Coffee' education in which rich white students float to the top." From the article: The classroom of the future being piloted is modelled on the system that’s been in use at Sunward Park High School in Boksburg for the two years. That former “model C” was the first state school in South Africa to go textbook free, and has pioneered the use of tablets in public education here. ... As with Sunward Park, the schools in this new pilot will be using a centralised portal developed by Bramley’s MIB Software for managing tablets and aggregating educational content into a single portal. MIB’s backend pulls in CAPS aligned digital textbooks from the likes of Via Afrika as well as extra resources from around the web. Content from Wikipedia, the BBC, the complete works of Shakespeare and Khan Academy is all cached locally for teachers to reference during lessons and pupils to use for self-directed study and research.

Comments

everytime this is tired

[ganjadude]

it fails. Why do we keep throwing tech at a non tech problem just for the sake of throwing tech at it? Cali is in the process of taking back all the tablets they passed out after major issues. Sometimes real paper books are the answer.

Re:everytime this is tired

[TWX]

It fails in part because the textbook creators are so wrapped up in protecting their intellectual property that using the device to pull up the textbook becomes a nightmare. the only way this can work is for the textbook to be pulled down to the device, like any other e-book, and accessed without any kind of network or wirless connectivity to bounce 'rights' checking against. You're right that these being multipurpose devices usually hurts too, as students can easily procrastinate their actual work by finding an inordinate amount of things to entertain themselves with.

We need real devices that are as durable as the ficticious PADD from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Basically the tablet-equivalent of a Panasonic Toughbook, with software specifically tailored to the needs of students. I'm thinking it should be two devices essentially hinged in the middle, like a traditional book cover, so that more content can be displayed or homework can be done on one side with the content displayed on the other. But that's just me.

Oh, and that requires proper software to be written for it too, and requires those textbook creators to cooperate.

Not a Bad Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Tech in school is generally a bad idea, I feel (children don't need tablets to learn) but this is an example of it done right. South African schools can use those tablets to build a massive library of free reference resources and public domain literature and share that with the students. It's more a pop-up computer lab, if anything.

This is the solution how?

[DumbSwede]

And how would this in any way address the “Irish Coffee” problem?

If anything I could see this exacerbating the problem. Rich white kids are probably more computer literate than poorer black peers – going full on digital will amplify the difference.

Do it if it improves education in general (a big if). I know that tablets and online education are the future, but one that never quite arrives in the correct form. Content is key whether it is online or in a book. Handing out hardware doesn’t solve the content problem.

Cool! Just one thing missing...

[dskoll]

... all that's needed is for Eskom (the South African electrical utility) to actually supply reliable power to recharge all those tablets!

Good Luck

[Anonymous Coward]

he's hoping it will be an end to 'Irish Coffee' education in which rich white students float to the top

Rich students have so many advantages over poor students that nothing you can do in the schools is ever going to fully compensate for it - not that they shouldn't try. From infancy wealthier kids are (on average of course) spoken to more, with a more varied and stimulating vocabulary, and with more encouraging words. They are generally exposed to more stimulating activities, and read to more regularly. By the time they hit Pre-K they already have significant cognitive advantages. The achievement gap needs to be tackled at its root causes if you really want to try to close it.