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

[tom229]

California tried to give everyone iPads: very expensive multi-purpose tablets. It was a terrible decision.

Something like this could work but the device would have to be specially designed for the purpose. Something with an e-ink display would be ideal.

Re:everytime this is tired

[Anonymous Coward]

Because tech solutions are pork barrel and non-tech solutions (ex. hiring teachers) are not.

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.

Re:everytime this is tired

[Trailer Trash]

What we need is to develop open text books with a creative commons license. Doesn't work for everything - sure - but let's face it: math, algebra, works of Shakespeare, these are things that never change (and Shakespeare isn't copyrighted, anyway, although I'm sure you can find copies of the works that are "protected"). Basic science changes slowly - talking about stuff that kids learn in school here. Really, there's no reason anybody should be making money from elementary school textbooks at this point in history.

Re:everytime this is tired

[Tx]

Just because it's been done wrong in the past doesn't mean it can't be done right in the future, although it doesn't bode well that this particular project appears to have been rushed, and significant questions not answered in detail. However there's nothing wrong with the theory; access to textbooks, collaboration and communications tools, monitoring of students progress while they perform activities (and as the article mentions, monitoring of teachers as well), the list of potential benefits to using tablets or laptops as a central educational tool is long. At some point, someone is going to get it right and actually realize many of the potential advantages.

Re:everytime this is tired

[NotDrWho]

Why do we keep throwing tech at a non tech problem just for the sake of throwing tech at it?

In my experience, this sort of thing usually has a lot to do with bribes paid to the school board and/or administrators by some contractor. And by "bribe," I mean whatever euphemism they're going by in any given situation: "Campaign Contribution", "Educational Conference" (in an expensive tropical resort), "Donation", "Gift", etc.

Re:everytime this is tired

[bluefoxlucid]

The correct technology for education is thousands of years old.

The ancients--the greeks and romans--didn't use a lot of writing. It was expensive and bulky. Wax tablets were huge, papyrus was costly. You'd hardly have books; if you saw a scroll or codex, it was probably for the first and last time. If you saw a codex twice, there wasn't an index to reference; you had to know what was in it, flip to a random page, and say, "Oh, no, the material I need to reference is before this", then flip backwards.

Mnemonics techniques were a primary driver in the lives of the ancients. Their lives revolved around what they knew; what they knew revolved around what they could remember. They didn't have the luxury of remembering a topic existed and throwing a keyword into Google; they didn't even have the luxury of expansive libraries in every town. Libraries were places of pilgrimage: There may be one or two copies of a book in the world, and so you had to go to the library of a certain town to read it. The first and most important things the ancients learned was how to remember.

In modern days, we don't even teach study techniques. SQ3R and SQW3R, the most basic techniques, are powerful; so powerful that modern methods are just SQ3R and SQW3R with different names (PQRST is Preview, Question, Read, Self-recite, Test rather than Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review). Teachers incite small students to "take notes" and "study", without explaining what "study" entails; worse, the entire point of studying is to remember, yet memorization is considered a bad strategy in learning. The focus on "understanding" without first "knowing" knee-caps any effort to bring mnemonics into schools.

We're hell-bent on new technology and new methods, on progressive movements over regressive. While Japan turns second-grade students into human calculators with the Soroban--an ancient mechanical computer known as an abacus--the rest of the world feeds us blunt paper mathematics and teaches us to use TI-83 calculators and Excel spreadsheets as soon as we get to Algebra. Educators have not been so bold as to scrub all visual imagery from early education; yet they are resistant to using visualization, song, and rhyme beyond the most early years, and absolutely refuse to teach students to bolster their own memories with such techniques. The ways of the past are thrown by the wayside in favor of new ideas.

What poor, starving children most require, in third-world countries and in the ghettos of developed nations alike, is an education system; we cannot solve the education problem by throwing laptops at bush Africa or gangland America. We don't need specialized education systems, tools, and techniques for the poor or the retarded, either; those highly-beneficial methods which allow even the brain damaged to learn often make learning easier for any student. When such methods are found beneficial in both, the subgroup which is incapable--by class status or by mental development--of learning in the broader classroom atmosphere shrinks, and some of the disadvantaged can place directly in general population; this works wonders for social and psychological development. The last thing they need is expensive hardware and software pretending to help.

I really want to run on the education platform one day.

Re:everytime this is tired

[Solandri]

It was the Los Angeles Unified School District which tried to give everyone iPads, not California. And the program was halted before it was completely rolled out because of problems with kids hacking the restrictive software controls (if you can call deleting the user and restarting the device "hacking").

Also, what the LAUSD tried was different from what South Africa is trying. LAUSD was trying to incorporate tablets into the teaching program. There is very little evidence that this has any beneficial effect on how well students learn the material.

It sounds like SA is trying to use tablets to replace textbooks. That actually has merit from the standpoint of portability and accessibility to a wide range of educational material in a tiny amount of space. I would question how cost-effective it is though. A typical textbook costs about $100 and will last 10-20 years. If a typical tablet costs $500, it would have to last 50-100 years to be as cost-effective as books. If you're able to get textbooks which aren't controlled by the textbook publishing cartel, the price drops to a few dollars, and the tablet would have to last thousands of years to be as cost-effective. (OTOH if they're able to use a cheap $50 e-ink reader, then it could succeed.)

Re:everytime this is tired

[meta-monkey]

You could mix and match chapters. A teacher could roll his own text book, the same way we can roll our own Linux distros. I'm pretty sure this is already a thing. If you can collaboratively spawn Wikipedia and Linux, I don't see why collaboratively creating a third grade math book should be that difficult.

Of course, that would only work in a sane country. In the United States, we make our teachers get Master's degrees, whereby they pay thoughtful attention to different learning methods and how to make things click for different students who exhibit different types of understanding. Then we take those freshly minted grads, passionate about reaching young minds, and hand them Common Core and every other state-mandated curriculum and force them to recite from the book like robots. Any deviation from the script is punished, your students are data points measured entirely by what they score on standardized tests. All the while we pay you a pittance, cut your benefits, expand your hours and generally crush anything like passion or a soul you ever had until you burn out and quit.

But hey, the administrators are making six figs, and all your students are gonna get a iPads, so, score!

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.

Re:This is the solution how?

[meustrus]

South Africa is not America, and computer illiteracy won't stop poor black kids from learning how to use what sounds like basically an e-reader. And in this case, it sounds like they got the content right:

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.

Re:This is the solution how?

[Tx]

Content is key whether it is online or in a book. Handing out hardware doesn’t solve the content problem.

Good thing they're not just handing out hardware then.

FTA: "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."

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!

well, i failed. i actually read the article

[turkeydance]

these tablets are traveling Time Clocks for Teachers.

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.