/ 15 January 2009

Grabouw school’s classmate success

0He can only painstakingly write his name and until recently was unable to read, but since his grade four class got computer notebooks

0He can only painstakingly write his name and until recently was unable to read, but since his grade four class got computer notebooks
11-year-old Jonathan*, who is a special needs student, is able to follow a story on the screen, listening to an audio recording through headphones.

In fact Jonathan often helps his able-minded classmate seated next to him to navigate his way around the software on the Intel Classmate PC notebooks.

His teacher* at Grabouw’s Kathleen Murray Primary school says she is “very excited” about the progress Jonathan and her other learners have made since the notebooks were donated to the school by the Intel®Education World Ahead Programme in May last year.

She said the learners’ reading and numerical literacy has “markedly” improved.

The Kathleen Murray Primary school celebrated the donation of 80 Classmate notebooks – as well as the completion of six new classrooms that were added to the school, which houses more than 1 300 learners – in December at a function attended by Western Cape Education Minister Yusuf Gabru.

The Classmate donation was part of a rollout of 5 000 Wi-Fi-connected notebooks, with their backup server, rechargers and software, which Intel aims to donate to schools in South Africa at the rate of 500 notebooks per quarter delivered per selected province by 2011.

Additionally, Intel has dedicated itself to train teachers on how to best use the technology and apply it in an educational setting, providing a complete package for schools.

Kathleen Murray principal Amanda du Plooy said all 33 teachers at the school had attended workshops on how to use the laptops.

Speaking at the school’s “Thanksgiving” function, Intel South Africa public sector business development manager Hannes Steyn said 350 Classmate notebooks were donated to four schools in the Western Cape in the first quarter of 2008. Two hundred more desktop PCs were donated to Western Cape schools that indicated they would prefer desktops to notebooks.

Steyn said the notebooks came loaded with Windows XP Home edition and a teacher management suite. Because the notebooks are connected via Wi-Fi, the teacher uses his or her own notebook to manage what learners are doing on their Classmates.

The teacher can monitor every learner’s progress and take him or her through the relevant exercises contained in the school software stack, which includes maths, science, life orientation and life sciences.

While many schools, including Kathleen Murray Primary, have Khanya computer laboratories, the Classmates will not replace the desktop lab but will act as an educational tool to supplement the learning process in a range of subjects.

However, the Classmates are particularly useful for rural schools, which do not have the facilities to host a full computer lab, because they give learners the opportunity to work with computer technology.

He said assessment of the efficacy of the Classmate notebooks is part of the World Ahead programme and he will be back this year to conduct assessments.

Du Plooy said the decision to use the notebooks among the five grade four classes was taken because it will help them to navigate the “big jump” when they move to covering eight learning areas, after covering three learning areas in grade three.

Du Plooy said there has been a marked improvement in the learners’ reading abilities, as they can listen to audio tapes on their headphones as they read the story.

Gabru said he is grateful to private partners, such as Intel and Telkom, which contribute towards providing a better education.

Although he commended the school for its achievements, Gabru said “fundamental challenges” remain. These include the high drop-out rates of learners in grade nine and 10, as well as the low levels of literacy and numeracy, particularly the latest results in November which showed that only 36% of grade three leaners passed the literacy test, while 35% passed their numeracy tests.

“The standard of education needs to be increased dramatically,” he said.

The real test of an education system, he said, is seeing how many learners “from poor, working class families” are able to go to university.

Currently, only about 6% of all learners who enter grade one achieve a university exemption at grade 12.

He said Kathleen Murray Primary has shown that it has the necessary determination and will to make a success of educating its learners.

Speaking after the function, Du Plooy said the only downside to the new notebooks is that they needed to be recharged after four hours of use, which puts a heavy load on the school’s electricity bill.

She said the bill had jumped from about R4 000 a month to a whopping R10 000 a month.

However, she said she is trying to get the municipality or Eskom to subsidise the school’s electricity costs. –