Teacher Training

ICT at an Early Age

Doris Anusi, currently working for the Society for Promotion of Education and Development (SPED), visited this year’s ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN. At the moment she is busy trying to source funding for a new project idea that resulted from the 2nd eLearning Africa conference in Kenya in 2007. There she met Gerald Ingersoll from New Brunswick Community College, Canada, with whom she explored areas of future collaboration. At OEB, Doris outlined the approach to the eLearning Africa newsletter team.

Early childcare education is neglected by Nigerian education policies, according to Doris Anusi. Doris, currently working for the Society for Promotion of Education and Development (SPED), attended the 2nd eLearning Africa conference in 2007 in Nairobi, where she realised how far behind Nigeria was lagging in terms of information and communication technologies in education.

“During the conference session and the social interaction in the coffee breaks, I realised that nobody talked about Nigeria!”, Doris explains about her astonishment during the Nairobi meeting. “Then I met Gerald Ingersoll from the New Brunswick Community College, Canada. We talked about our work and realised that there might be opportunities to collaborate in the future,” Doris says. He encouraged her to develop a project strategy that uses ICT effectively in the area of early childcare and education (ECE) in Nigeria.

Nigeria’s Universal Basic Education (UBE) targets stipulate that 50 percent of the teachers should learn computer skills. The national government regards ECE primarily the responsibility of parents and other care givers, Doris says. Its responsibilities are limited, rare in practice and often non-existent. Moreover, the skills and experience of many teachers are in doubt as many of them are not professionally qualified.

This is exactly where the project will have an advantage. The initiative aims at building capacities in early childcare and education through teacher training. eLearning will be the method of choice to deliver quality education to teachers in Early Child Care Centres. Two teachers will be trained per centre – one senior and one junior teacher – who, in a second step, will each have to train three new teachers through peer-learning. The training will focus on using developmental and interactional teaching methodologies such as the participatory approach to children, adjusting to the individual needs of the child according to the personality as well as assessing the developmental stage and needs. At the end of the first year, an eLearning Child Care Network in Lagos shall support 160 teachers from 20 child care centres, benefiting the learning environment of over 2400 children in the area.

The New Brunswick Community College agreed to offer the online courses. The 10 early child care centres in the communities of Surulere and Amuwo-Odofin, Lagos, have already been picked. The teachers are eagerly waiting for the project to start. Doris is still sourcing the funding for the eLearning equipment but she is also looking for quality learning content to empower ICT literacy in the teachers. Doris can be contacted at dorisanusi@yahoo.com.

SPED, a non-profit organisation based in Lagos, Nigeria, sets  children’s education as its priority. A special focus of last year’s actions was decayed public school classrooms that could be renovated with the help of donations.

www.sped.itgo.com/

December 17, 2008

Newsportal: Teacher Training