Through funding assistance from the Goethe Institut the programme is being rolled out to township and rural schools in a bid to create opportunities to enhance ICT skills among the youth and generate interest in their own history and culture. The School’s project was run at four township and rural schools where there were computer laboratories, two schools during the 2nd semester 2011 and two schools during the 1st semester 2012. The pilot project was run with a practical task-based section and an online e-learning component. This report looks at the second half of the project, recently completed.
Task-based section
In a change from the first half of the project, both mentors worked with a group of 10 students, from one school at a time. They introduced the programme, showed students how the website works, provided training on interviewing and story-writing and provided mentorship to the students with regards to their story writing. Working with the teacher responsible for this project, the mentor also set weekly themes for story collection (e.g. the story of my family, the area I grew up in, etc.) and helped mark the stories.
Online e-learning section
Students loaded their own stories and images onto the Ulwazi website and learnt to assign appropriate categories to them. They also completed an online test at the end of the eight weeks, with questions set that required the student to use the Ulwazi wiki to answer. There were also a number of questions on the ICT skills that students picked up through the programme.