Boost for ICT education at Tsledom M/A Basic School

Headmasters and teachers at the Tsledom M/A Basic School in the Eastern Region say the lack of ICT labs in their school has hampered effective teaching and learning of the subject.

School authorities say the students in the school had no access to laptops and computers for the learning of ICT.

The situation has deprived the students of access to practical learning of the subject, failing to appreciate its realism.

This has not helped as the school has abstained from writing ICT papers at the BECE level over the years.

Nene Kwesi Detse I, Manoyam Matse (Development Chief) of the Manya Krobo Traditional Area and chairman of AYA-Africa Foundation, an NGO in response to the plight of the school has gone to its rescue with the provision of ten laptops costing some $1,300 each.

The Foundation also donated a generator and solar batteries to provide power for the laptops as well as bags of rice members of the community at a total cost of $20,000.

According to him, technology played a critical role in the digital world hence the need for all to be ICT literate.

The gesture, according to Nene Kwesi Detse I is the Foundation gradually trying to make a difference in terms of helping to expand the school’s capacity to appropriately support student learning in terms of information technology.

“We also starting to sponsor students, we sponsored thirty-five students each month but we realized that there are many families who were displeased because their children did not get sponsorship and we couldn’t realistically sponsor every child in this area so we thought about what would be an appropriate way to serve the entire community and the most natural way was to go through the school and at the school where all the children can benefit and so we landed on information technology as an important gap that we needed to address,” said the Development Chief.

The Foundation further hopes to extend internet connectivity and additional solar packages to the school to facilitate the operations of the computers.

The plight of the school came to the attention of the NGO three years ago during a health outbreak in the community.

According to Nene Detse, the presentation at Tsledom was designed to express the commitment of AYA-Africa Foundation to show care, follow up on its promise to assist the community to become more technologically connected through the provision of laptops and a generator for electricity and solar-powered batteries to show the community it cares, committed and responsive.

Bemoaning the inadequacy of ICT educational infrastructure in the country, the development chief noted that many students were forced to learn ICT on the blackboard.

Headmaster of the Tsledom M/A Basic School, David Kofi Teye expressed his heartfelt gratitude to the NGO while recounting the difficulties faced by ICT teachers in teaching the subject in school,

“We’ve been learning ICT just on the board without any PC to do the practical…so the teachers draw on the chalkboard the children are now going to do the practice with the machines,” he said.

According to him, the situation got so bad that he together with the Dadematse (community leader) of the area contacted officials at the Lower Manya Krobo Municipal Assembly for assistance to get one laptop in the meanwhile to facilitate the teaching of the subject.

Books on the subject, he added, are also not enough.

But with the provision of the laptops, the headmaster was confident that would enable the school to begin participating in the writing of ICT in the BECE within the next two years.

Though Mr. David Kofi Teye was hopeful that the ten laptops would suffice for the teaching of ICT in the school in the time being, he however appealed to benevolent organizations and companies to come on board and support the school with more.

ICT teacher for the school, Richard Kwasi Okai recounted how he had no choice but use his personal laptop or improvise to successfully teach the subject.

The teacher said it was difficult learning with one computer as he had no option but to draw the parts of the computer on the board. According to him, the new computers are going to make the learning of I.C.T easy henceforth.

He added that the absence of the devices discouraged the students who ended up avoiding ICT classes and expressed hope that the introduction of the laptops would encourage them to take the subject seriously.