Training Zambian teachers
On each visit we ensure that we make time for training Zambian teachers who are always eager to extend their knowledge and skills.
So it turned out to be not the best timed visit to Siavonga. Although term had officially begun children seemed to be slowly trickling back over the first few weeks and teachers were busy planning for exams in November. Nevertheless, they were as keen as ever to attend training and offered very positive feedback.
As our volunteers included primary school teacher Sian, we took advantage of her experience to deliver a course on Basic Excel at Siavonga Primary School. Many of the attendees were from that school, some new to using Excel, but all picked it up quickly and thought it would be useful for their own record-keeping as well as teaching pupils. They loved the visual aids she made.
Sian also taught English Composition to a small class again with a laminated guide.
Teachers are able to download some learning resources from our website Learning resources
Computer-based training took the form of four day courses.
First was IT Security and System Maintenance. Howard stressed the importance of running Avast , Malwarebytes and CCleaner to protect networks from infection from connection to the internet or use of insecure USB drives.
For the larger schools we ran a course on Setting up and Using Synology Diskstation. This piece of equipment allows for sharing of files and access to a wealth of learning resources.
A vital course for all schools was that on Using the offline resource RACHEL across the Curriculum. RACHEL stands for Remote Area Community Hotspot for Education and Learning and is available from http://worldpossible.org/. Teachers particularly enjoyed having time to search RACHEL for topics relevant to their subjects.
Our final course was on Networking and Network Maintenance. This involved as much hands-on experience as possible. Being able to repair ethernet cables will be very helpful in keeping computer systems working.
Over 40 teachers attended from 10 schools, despite the long distances involved for some.