Lyson Chikunduzi, mathematics lecturer at Zambia’s Copperbelt College of Education, reports that all last year’s college graduates were able to use a computer to present their lessons.
“Our teachers used to write out their examination papers by hand before delivering them to a typist for the preparation of papers. But after the college had developed an ICT programme, every lecturer could produce his own documents.”
This was one of several examples cited by Lyson Chikunduzi when we asked him about the benefits of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) programme at the college.
- “We have scored a number of successes”, he said. “In addition to being able to type, about fifty percent of our staff can now prepare and present their lessons in PowerPoint.”
Lyson Chikunduzi (front, left) and colleagues of the Copperbelt College of Education
Chikunduzi says the entire class of graduating teachers from the college last year was fully able to use computers and prepare lessons digitally.
“We decreed a policy that all student assignments had to be handed in typed form. This encouraged the students to get used to using a comp uter every day.
Using existing training manuals from one of our partners, we also designed a basic computer course.” Lyson Chikunduzi will be one of the speakers at the teachers forum on the 26th of May in Lusaka in Zambia. This is a special event during eLearning Africa, specifically targeted at primary and secondary school teachers in Zambia. The event is organised jointly by IICD and Zambia’s national ICT network e-Brain and supported by ICWE. For more information, please contact Olaf Erz, Country Manager Zambia at IICD: oerz@iicd.org.
“Our target was to see that by their final year each graduate could prepare and present a lesson using PowerPoint. The group that graduated last year achieved that target. They could all prepare and present a lesson, with their fellow students giving them a commentary.”
The Copperbelt College now plans to reach out to students and teachers beyond the campus.
“We are working on a website that has been launched as a pilot to see how students can get information when they are not at the college. We intend to post our learning materials on the website. Students at other teacher colleges in Zambia will have access. We can even communicate with them.”
Chikunduzi is developing a digital system to keep in touch with the graduate teachers, principally to track how ICT is helping schools in other countries.
“We already hear stories from some of our teachers who ended up at a school where there was a computer lab, but no-one with the knowledge of how to use it. The teachers trained at our college are able to manage those unmanned labs, give basic training and write computer training.”
