Teachers Talking

This site is for the creation of content to support the Teachers Talking group. It is a constantly evolving set of resources; please feel free to contribute by submitting and editing content on this site.

Starting Points

There are a number of starting points, other than reading more about Teachers Talking:

Teachers Talking Course - Nigeria - 29th November to 4th December 2004

Back in August 2003, during a needs analysis in Ago-Are, teachers were saying that they wanted to know about ICTs. Teacher's interest in ICTs is largely because the government has decided that all teachers who want promotion beyond a certain point must be computer literate. Of course, it is not just Ago-Are teachers who are saying that they want to "know computer". Teachers around Kafanchan, where Fantsuam is based, are also wanting training. Fantsuam Foundation in Kafanchan are organising the first "Teachers Talking" course in Nigeria.

This is a course about ICTs and is intended to give teachers some inspiration and vision, as well as theoretical and practical knowledge. One short week can be little more than a whistle-stop tour of what ICTs are all about. The teachers on the course can be likened to tourists on a coach tour, being raced around the main sights. The course organisers hope that "the tourists" will at least go home with positive memories and useful “traveller’s tales” to share with their pupils, colleagues and communities.

Teachers Talking Funding

The first Teachers Talking course was enabled in the following way:

  • People who planned and presented the course did so as volunteers.
  • All teachers paid in order to attend. This was a subsidised but non-trivial fee. (Such that some teachers who wanted to attend could not raise the fee)
  • The difference between the true costs and course fees was made up through a subsidy.
  • The subsidy did not come from any external international funding agency, nor did it come from government.
  • Fantsuam Foundation (FF) provided the subsidy through the profits of its microcredit bank. Over 4,000 clients (almost all of them women) have benefitted from the micro-creditbank. It is their faithfulness in meeting repayments that has enabled the bank to reach a situation of profit, where it is able to subsidise ICT (Information and Communications Technology) training of various kinds at FF to benefit the community.
  • The micro-credit bank cannot be expected to generate sufficient funds to run follow-up courses.
Sponsors are required to enable additional courses

Any assistance with sponsorship, large or small would be gratefully received. Feel free to contact Pamela McLean privately to discuss how you can help.

What is Teachers Talking?

Teachers Talking is a group of people from various backgrounds and with various expertise who have come together to examine how Information and Communication Technology can assist in education in the developing world. The goal is to provide resources to enable charities, such as CAWD, to run training courses for educators and community leaders in some of the least developed areas of the world. The initial Fantsuam Foundation project takes place in Nigeria in late November 2004.

By training these key figures in community education it is hoped that they can guide us in how best to utilise ICT in their environments. However, this is a very difficult challenge as they will typically be:

  • Total beginners with respect to ICT, in fact they may never have seen a computer before
  • They will typically be using English as a second language, only really using it for teaching
  • Probably work in a school with few books or other resources and no electricity or running water
  • Used to rote learning - for their pupils and in their own studies.
However, it is not all bad news. Even in the remotest of locations it is not uncommon for the concept of sending messages by email to have surfaced, typically by people using an intermediary to send a special message to a distant relative. Very few in rural locations will have been inside a cyber cafe to send an email themselves.

The goal is to build on this simple introduction and use that technology to:

  • Build confidence in their new relationship with ICTs
  • Enable the passing on of useful information about ICTs to students, colleagues and communities
  • Enable effective speaking (with accuracy) about the potential of ICTs in education within their own communities
  • Create positivity about what can be done despite their limited resources
It is perhaps this last point that is the most important. All too often it is assumed that what works for the developed world will also work for the undeveloped world. It is important that we do not do this and ensure our visitors are not left with the feeling that it has all been a tease - just flaunting things that they cannot have. To this end the Teachers Talking group aims to:
  • Create an online community that interested parties from across the globe are ready to drop in on whenever they get the chance to spend time at a cyber cafe. It should be a place to share experiences and develop one's ideas further.
  • Provide resources (that are useable when no computer is available) that will supply evidence of what they have learnt and which could also serve as a memory jogger and/or a resource for the classroom
More information is available on the About Teachers Talking page.

Contributing to this site

A Wiki is a web site that allows visitors to edit pages in their browser. It is really simple to use, the best thing to do is to just try it, go to the sandbox and click the Edit button at the top of the screen. The page will load in a edit box where you can edit the content. If you want to do anything special, like add a hyperlink or make some text bold simply click the XWiki Syntax link (below the edit box) to see how it is done.

Sandbox - You can have a play here as there is nothing of any importance present