WORKING TOWARDS ICT INTEGRATION AT KERRIA PRIMARY SCHOOL

WCED SMART CLASSROOM CONCEPT

We at Kerria Primary believe that this is the future of education. We would like to expose our learners to the concept of ICT integration into the classroom. The WCED is in the process of rolling out Smart Classrooms in schools. Our school has, at this stage not been identified or have not been informed when we will be put on the list for installation and implementation. It could take five years or even more and therefore we are trying to be pro-active in the sense that we are attempting to get the buy-in from other sources to assist us. We would not like our learners to always stay behind the rest of the world in the introduction of new ways for learning and teaching to take place.

We currently have a learner enrolment of 1125 learners ranging from Grade R to Grade 7. We accomodate learners from the suburb of Protea Park and the informal settlement of Witsand as well as from other suburbs in Atlantis and from surrounding farms.

In terms of ICT infrastructure we have a 10 year old Khanya lab with 25 learner desktop computers and a recent donation of a mobile lab with 20 laptops from Vodacom. Our school only has 3 data projectors and 3 whiteboards. We also have two mobile devices to enable nteractivity on the whiteboards. This is definitely not enough to serve our 32 classes in the different grades.

That is why our goal is to start working towards acquiring the necessary hardware and curriculum aligned software for this ICT integration process to get under way. In the words of DDG Mr Brian Schreuder: "ICT integration should be an add-in and not an add-on".

I am currently busy preparing for a presentation I need to do at an educational summit in October. The presentation will look at the issue of ICT Integration and the benefits our school will get out of it in terms of learner performance and learner achievement, especially in the fields of literacy and numeracy. The main goal is to enable our learners to eventually become competitive in the global village.

The idea is to turn our school, which is situated in an impoverished area, into a "smart school" by equipping each classroom with the basic ICT technology to give all teachers and learners access to as much resources as can be found on the internet and on e-portals such as the WCED e-portal.

This would mean having access to equipment such as laptops, data projectors, interactive whiteboards and software. Funding is obviously a major challenge.

If anyone would like to comment or contribute advice on the above topic or even consider collaborating with our school in this venture, please feel free to do so.