Dear Teachers,
A friend of mine in the UK was looking at the BBC News site a few days ago, and found they had a story and video about young people teaching older people (the "Digitally Excluded") how to get started with computers and the internet. The story is called "How to teach a Technophobe".
He observes that ,for those people with dependable broadband( the situation might be diferent in 3rd world countries ), the video is very useful, showing a girl teaching an older woman about computers...The video is bandwidth hungry for even those with broadband in Kenya. The link is http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7832331.stm. The links i have given are not active having published this post. However,I will also attach the downloaded PDF version to all teachers trained in the IWT for them to acess it,as a way of going round such a problem.
The new 'Internet Buddy Guide', is published for free by the UK Post Office on their website as a downloadable PDF file. It has pictures, text and step-by-step instructions for someone to act in the role of 'buddy' and teach someone the complete basics of computers and the internet, in the same teaching style a friend would. It’s written for the student and buddy (teacher) to read together.
There only seems to be a direct download link, not a web-page. So, please right-click this link, 'save' to hard disk and open it...ftp://ftp.royalmail.com/Downloads/public/ctf/po/Internet_Buddy_Guide_final.pdf
The guide could be useful for the Self Directed Learners group. Teachers trained on usage of technology in classroom especially the ToT’s in the IWT / TWB-C, and various other ICT in education projects in Africa. I would be interested in your comments. I know there are some wonderful resources for teaching ICT here in the TWB website, Perhaps Kelly and Konrad and Sharon Peters could help in assessing this training material.
In my friends view ,the buddy guide is very understandable and could serve as a guide/example for writing similar 'buddy teaching' guides on other subjects, such as math’s and the sciences. This would not only remove the phobia for these subjects ,but would go a long way in making teachers in Africa be buddies to students hence minimizing conflicts arising from teacher frustration when students don’t appear to be learning . The style just captures/formalizes what you would teach a friend, in a clear step-by-step way.
You need to be a member of Education Beyond Borders to add comments!
Join Education Beyond Borders