How can I make sure EIAWB won’t become white elephants in classrooms?

Training,
Follow-up Training, and
Training again …. We need to keep going on with training the educators @ schools about the EIAWB and its functionality inside the classroom.

At this stage I am concern about the use of the EIAWB … @ some schools. Could it be that there are too many EIAWB for too few EIAWB “expert”facilitators to get the equipment not to “stand still and act as white elephants” ? Could it be due to a lack of training and exposure ? Is the “time and space” to do training continuous ? Can we allow the EAIWB to become just another piece of electronic equipment gather dust ?

Expose educators to almost ALL the functions of the EIAWB and the excellent role it can play to enhance the classroom lessons and curriculum ….. if not … the ineractive “WHITE” board will become an inactive “white” board !!

An EIAWB

Tecnology can become white elephants, because of: lack of interest; lack of enthusiasm; lack of motivation; lack of knowledge and skills; lack of training needed; lack of inspiraion; technology becoming outdated; etc. Now it is our duty to get rid of the ‘lack of’ and our educators will become more interested, enthusiastic, motivated, skillful, well trained and inspired educators that will be able to look at the oldest piece of technology with new ideas.

@Albie:
We’ve got a few schools where they’ve got electronic boards in every classroom. The teachers are all using the boards all the time and they are competing to be more creative than the others.
What is striking at these schools is that the principals are amazing leaders. They even learn how to use the boards themselves and helping teachers when they get stuck.
Maybe your problem is as Kobus said before: “The principal is the weakest link in the chain”.

Point 1: A part of the problem is apathy and not lack of training. I think facilitators of the Khanya project have training themselves to death. At this stage I don’t think educators need more training. They need to follow their own advice when they teach. Practice! practice! practice.

Point 2: I have never liked a top-down approach, which is why I dislike hierarchical structures…but thats me. My point is that bossing people around to do something does not help. Creating an enabling environment does. Instead of waiting for the government to do, the police to do, the principal to….maybe I (the teacher or whomever) should take the initiative to do…something, even if it is small. This may lead to a crab mentality but we are hoping for some bee/ant mentality.

It is also about leading where you currently are (educator) instead of leading from a position on high (director or something).

Point 3.: The technology must work! That seems to be a big stumbling block. What happens if it doesn’t? We have too many tech issues and yet very few hands are available to sort out these problems and it takes too long to sort them out. Just one question? What happens to the laptop when the server/network is down? Age-old problem in Khanya? Who will do this? Me, I or them? Do we wait? I have stressed the point of lack of tech assistance to death. Facilitators don’t apologise for doing technical work. The gap is being filled.

Point 4: Poor implementation is also a problem. Whose job is it to QA, not only directly when the stuff has been implemented but when it is used a month, two months, 6 months down the line? Do the implementers really ask whether an implementation works or as Kobus at some stage mentioned are we “box-droppers”? Maybe better implementation will also help in preventing white elephant mentality.

I fully agree that the teachers must become convinced of the value of the technology…but how do you do that? We spoke to many teachers during our technology audit who complaint about many things. They were quite suprised when we pointed to some of the solutions sitting under their noses in the form of technology. So I would say, start with their problems, work with the teachers towards solutions and technology should obviously feature in there. In this way we will create the value.