Day 1: Spectrum Primary School – teacher training

After leaving the UK 12pm Sunday afternoon, I finally arrived at Spectrum Primary School for 9am ready to start work.

I met Lucy Haagen, Sam Nenngwekhulu (Principal) and 8 eager teachers who came in on their day off (public holiday).

The school had some experience of using the devices so we were on the next steps…

The first thing we asked was

• What do they feel are the successes of the M-Ubuntu project so far?

 

• What are their frustrations about the project so far?
  • Time, loading and preparing the devices
  • Memory of the devices was not very good
  • Availability of the devices – only 40 available to a school of 900

One solution we showed them, was how you can use memory cards (we brought over 20micro SD cards). By using these you don’t have to sync each device to a computer, you just can just copy/bluetooth the files to the SD card from the computer to the phone and away you go – time saving and using less phone memory – bingo.

We also discussed the ideas we had for lessons this week for Grade 4, 5, 6 & 7 students - they all seemed pleased with the plan.

Final note!

I can’t wait for the week ahead and work with these guys as they are a really enthusiastic bunch!

We even hooked up with other colleagues from Tribal who were at Bedford Academy giving an m-learning training session. That was really ‘awesome’ seeing (well hearing as one of us didn’t have a video camera :))two schools meet over Skype to share their experiences!