Education Minister Naledi Pandor has launched the newly designed Thutong education portal. Thutong was first developed in 2003 to provide an entry point for South African school communities to access the internet, but has been overhauled in response to requests from users.
Utilising the latest technology, the redesigned site is easy to use and offers a wider range of quality content, including a high level of interactivity through newsletters, forums and blogs.
The portal aims to create vibrant collaborative and online communities that can share information to improve education. The redesigned portal has four primary sections: curriculum, professional development, school administration and management.
In each section there are resources, tools and services relevant to educators, school administrators or managers. For instance, the management section’s primary focus is on supporting the implementation of the new Advanced Certificate in Education for school principals.
However, the curriculum section is the core section of Thutong, with resources organised in “learning spaces”. Each learning space will contain a cluster of resources and services that “fit” together.
For instance, the learning space for technology up to grade nine tells a visitor that there are 67 teaching resources on the site, lists lesson plans for grades eight and nine and gives information on water science for schools. Each learning space has an expert who will quality-assure and mediate the content.
Pandor said the difference between the portal and searching for resources on the internet was that on the portal, resources were specifically selected and carefully catalogued or tagged correlating with topics in the curriculum. This meant that they were easy to find and were at the correct level.
“This will allow teachers and education specialists to upload resources such as lesson plans, learner activities and assessment tools to the portal to share with other teachers,” she said.
Thutong also provides a directory of quality-assured textbooks and educational software, curriculum-support tools for lesson planning, assessment tools, study guides and an examination centre.
For more information go to www.thutong.org.za