By James | Project Leader
From a donation of two laptops to a single school in 2010 to 392 computers in early 2015, The Turing Trust has seen remarkable growth in our computer reuse scheme. Many students across Ghana are studying IT without ever having seen a computer. This creates an ongoing demand for our services while the ever-changing UK electronics market causes ever-more rapid upgrades, creating an ongoing supply of donations. What we hope to achieve with this project is increased efficiency and sustainability in our logistics system, better connecting supply and demand and enabling us to reach more schools.
After wiping all computers to ensure there is no trace of information about the previous user, we install a new operating system and several offline educational recourses including syllabi, textbooks, first aid manuals, and the Rachel system.
The Turing Trust trains all teachers before donation of computers to schools. In this way we hope to maximize their impact. With the development of our training scheme we have been able to ensure that all schools have teachers well trained in how to maintain and use our educational software to its full potential. They are taught how best to use this equipment alongside the national curriculum, ensuring that our software can complement their regular classes. In our training sessions held at Accra, Kumasi and Tamale we were able to give the teachers confidence in IT that they can pass on to their students. Close interaction with the teachers helped us to understand their current capabilities and weaknesses in teaching IT. We have received very positive feedback from these training sessions. This has motivated us to continue to develop our training techniques and expand our teaching programmes.
Most recently, The Turing Trust were able to train 18 ICT teachers from the Upper East, Upper West and Northern regions in basic computer maintenance and safety to enable them to maintain the computers we have supplied.
Based on feedback from the participants and the online questionnaire survey, we discovered the necessity of repeating this training through the other seven regions. All 50 schools across the country who participated in this survey lacked essential maintenance skills, leaving computers vulnerable to easily avoidable breakdowns.
The team at The Turing Trust again says thank you very much for your continued support.
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