Help our Heroes ~ Empowering teachers to integrate technology

In 2019, Limina and the Western Cape Education Department collaborated to develop a Language Across the Curriculum open online course for teachers as part of UNESCO's Open Education for a Better World project. Children in South Africa's schools speak up to 11 official languages and with the influx of immigrant workers, many additional languages are spoken. While children may receive home language education up to Grade 3 in one of South Africa's official languages, in most schools English is the language of learning and teaching from Grade 4 onwards. However, up to 65% of the country's children never or only sometimes hear English at home, meaning they only hear English at school. They are expected to learn all their subjects in a language they rarely hear at home and which their parents or adult care-givers cannot help them. The problem is that very few subject teachers are equipped to teach language skills to learners from Grade 4 and older. Recognising this tremendous challenge, the WCED and Limina decided to create a free / open online professional development course that teachers can access and use to teach language skills in their different subject areas. Using design-thinking, the course was iteratively developed in close collaboration with the subject leaders of the province and built by Limina's learning design team. It is currently included in the provincial 5 year Reading strategy for roll-out to all teachers across the Western Cape. The presentation to the World Literacy Summit shared our work and progress in building the course.  The next iteration of the course looks specifically at Reading skills in each subject area. As soon as we have a sponsor, we can start working on that.

At Limina we create online courses to support teachers' professional development in each subject area. Each course is developed in close collaboration with the education department and piloted with subject advisors who critique and advise on improvements. The Integrating EdTechs in Languages course was piloted with Language Subject Advisors from the Western Cape Education Department in February 2020. They repeatedly commented that they would not change anything about the course and that every single aspect was extremely useful to every language teacher. As can be seen in the video, all our courses make use of free tools and resources that teachers can use on multiple devices and across different platforms. Where possible we include tools that can be used in online and offline contexts, and in low bandwidth regions as well. The Integrating EdTechs in Languages course consists of 10 modules and teachers take approximately 30-40 hours to complete it.