Training Day: 8

I quickly dashed off to Athlone, to give a teacher his laptop back (which he asked me to repair). I don't mind actually helping the teachers out with their laptops...anything that would encourage them to use the devices with more confidence. I then proceeded to Langa, where the participants were quite late. This is a definite annoyance at some schools; they seem to operate on a time which differs from mine. And I understand teachers are slow to get to the training, given it starts right after school ends. But there's nothing we can do to avoid this, since no one but no one wants to be there after 15h30 anyway.

We eventually started off with MS Word - as a brief recap of the previous module. There was I think one teacher who was quite skilled, and she outperformed anyone else. But the rest were, although not entirely new to the program, what one would call 'beginners'. I focused on the formatting abilities of Word once more; things like increasing text size, changing fonts, B/I/U, inserting images, and the like. These are for me the very basic, yet fundamental, functions in Word. Our participants did seem to enjoy it, especially near the end when I asked them to demonstrate what they've learned without any help. And this basically took up the hour. We had to reschedule next week's sessions for this school; I'll visit them next Tuesday. Until then!

Before I forget: an interesting factor that I noticed yesterday was that all teachers/participants were women. And then I thought: the majority of our participants across the 6 schools are women as well (most of them Xhosa). I wonder what this may say about gender, digital immigrants, culture, and professional learning. Are there more female teachers than male (which in this case would solve the intrigue)? Are female teachers more inclined to be digital immigrants/unskilled in ICT? Whatever the case, this dynamic is definitely worth exploring in the future. Let's hope someone tackles it!