Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Calabar mobilises






The e-Learning team of Dorothy Thompson, Implementation Officer, Robert Philips, Education Specialist, and Dr Doreen Faulkner, CXC Examinations Consultant, were guests at a staff meeting at Calabar High School on March 10, 2009.


Teachers described the successes and the challenges they have experienced since the acquisition of equipment and courseware, and committed to greater and more effective use of all the resources.

Principal, Captain Thaxter, enlisted the involvement of all teachers, in generating meaningful Powerpoint presentations, and in creating e-mail addresses for themselves.



The school was commended for securing the assets, and for participating in training events, and item writing.

The use of the document camera and a discussion about the opportunities for effective use capped the afternoon's proceedings.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Quality : Design for traceability-audit and accountability

The assets provided under the e-Learning project have only been made available through legislation-- the Telecommunications Act and through subsequent negotiation. The purpose for the provision has to be clear and justifiable at every juncture.


Good management systems would naturally ensure that procedures, decisions and actions which violate the intentions of the provision would be discouraged. The leadership of the e-Learning Jamaica Company has taken steps in designing processes to support the traceability and auditability of the provision, security, use and maintenance of assets.


Here are two examples below.


The first picture shows what you see when an e-Learning Jamaica computer is booted. If you have one in your possession and it is unauthorised or a teacher or student is not using it for instructional purposes , this may , minimally amount to unethical practice , or it could be viewed in similar ways to that unfortunate situation where several computers were removed from a school and criminal proceedings have now followed.

All the materials have been labelled and numbered, before delivery to schools, and these will be subject to audit. No doubt, leaders of educational institutions are aware of contemporary quality assurance and ethical standards and would want to be seen to be upholding these.

Audit entities include

  • e-Learning Board Audit Committee,
  • Ministry of Mining and Telecommunications-Internal Audit,
  • Universal Access Fund Internal Audit,
  • Auditor General's Department,
  • External Auditors-e-Learning Jamaica,
  • Public Accounts Committee of Parliament.

So there are lots of resource for inspection and detection of weak processes

The message is clear. Control, Regularise and Apply the resources to the task.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

School 2.0




We got our introduction to School 2.0 in a webinar promoted by ISTE on January 15, 2009.
The US is desperately trying to extract value from technology for improvement of educational performance and School 2.0 is a set of leadership and technology resources developed to pursue this end.
Search on School 2.0 and on ISTE webinars for full information.