Minister of Education Naledi Pandor officially launched the South African Education internet portal while visiting schools in George, her department said on Monday.
Describing it as the starting point for teachers and pupils seeking information to use in their classrooms and projects, Pandor said the portal has been developed to support the school curriculum in the general and further education phases.
The portal, baptised Thutong (seTswane for ”place of learning”), is a non-profit project designed to provide extensive resources to its registered users, with particular priority given to the needs of those from disadvantaged schools and rural areas.
Thutong basically works as a search engine for educators and pupils. After signing in, they can find electronic and online resources to use in classes or for projects.
Testing the site
The bright green site is easy to access and registration is simple. But the search for online information seems a bit more complicated.
Visitors can choose between a keyword search, a curriculum search or a topic search.
An attempt by the Mail & Guardian Online to find information on Auschwitz — it is 60 years ago this week that the concentration camp was liberated, an ideal subject for a history project — in each of these three categories lasted 15 minutes and had no result.
Although some other topics, such as apartheid, gave a list of results under, for example, the topic search, the actual information behind the links could not be accessed.
This might, of course, have been due to the novelty of the site or a busy server in the first hours after the launch.
The site also offers the possibility to read through all the government policy documents on education and the opportunity to submit resources.
Written in English, the site gives no choice of other official South African languages.
What the minister said
”The portal provides access to a vast and ever-increasing range of quality curriculum and learner support materials, as well as to professional development programmes for teachers, administration and management resources and tools for schools, education policy documents, and general news and information related to the latest developments in South African education,” Pandor said in her written address.
She said thousands of printable, quality-assured teaching and learning resource materials, which were cross-referenced to the South African curriculum, are available through the portal.
All the material supported the outcomes-based curriculum statements, she said.
The Department of Education said that all schools will have access to the internet within the near future.
”I believe that our learners and teachers will draw immense benefit from the portal in their teaching and learning activities,” she said.
On the net:
Thutong