Today, Thursday 11th April, 2013, I visited the Sunward Park High School, Sonskyn Rd, Sunward Park, Boksburg (Johannesburg). The school has recently embarked on a one tablet per child project. My purpose was to simply visit the place to satisfy my own curiosity. The School is an old Model-C school, teachers are generally white or indian and the lerners are about 90% black. It is by no means a rich school. There are about 1250 children - excluding the matric learners. There are three double story blocks of classrooms and a further block which houses administration and a school hall. Classes are usually just under 40 learners. This school has achieved some interesting goals. They have a very active soccer program with an on-site dormitory for 20 or so learners. I understand the team has travelled around Europe and that a number of the learners are already pre-signed to play at various clubs in Europe. I understand that the Teachers were all equipped with Laptops a year or so ago. The Classrooms all seemed to have VGA projectors and there is a smart white board as well as a traditional blackboard in every classroom. Towards the end of last year, a plan was formulated by a businessman to provide a Wifi access point in every classroom and to provide every learner with either a 7" or 10" Android tablet. There was initial Headmistress and staff buy-in followed by parent buy-in to the project. The Wifi units are switched back to a central server via UTP copper cable. The Server provides the content. There is a localised e-mail server. A Firewall connects just the staff to the public Internet. The Businessman arranged with various publishers to obtain all the learners curriculum in an electronic format. For example, McMillian, one of the primary publisher, has provided a three year licence for half the price of paper based books. There is also a lot of other electronic media available, Wikipidia, Learn channels video content, Mindset Learning material and educational media from more than twenty other sources. I first spoke to the business man and the vice head of the school. Hardware costs were: Server R70,000 Wifi R250,000 Other R50,000 Total R320,000 or just under R300 per student. The E-Media costs are R300 per student per year and the 7” Tablet R1000. The cost thus for the first year is R1600 followed by R300 a year for two years. The usual fee cost for a student was given as R2000 a year using traditional methods - so fees have actually come down by half if you look at a two year cycle. There was some initial theft of tablets in the first day or two. Since then, no theft. After a month, only a handful of students had not purchased tablets so these students were "loaned" devices. About one third of students purchase the 7" tablet, the remainder purchased a more expensive 10" tablet. The choice of device is governed more by security and the ability to hide a smaller tablet than of cost. There have been breakages - Tablets dropped or used in lieu of a book to hit a fellow learner over the head. I then visited some classes. In a "Life Science" classroom, the teacher was presenting a class on the water cycle (sea->evaporation->rain->river). He presented from his laptop via the VGA projector and the students were looking at two equivalent presentations via their Tablets. Some of his comments were: End of class tests are easy, I get instant feedback on whether my teaching is being effective and so can react immediately. I spend more time teaching and less time doing administration and marking. I can teach in short bursts to match the learners attention span rather than give a half hour monologue from the front of the class and instead of spoon feeding them, I get them to research the subject. Its easier to handle learners of different ability, the quick I can give more work to and the slow can continue the work in their own time. He also believed that learners were becoming smarter and more interested in what was being taught. I then entered a History lesson where Martin Luther King was being discussed. The learners (a class of boys, one of the most difficult classes due to the presence of a large proportion of the successful football team) were using the Tablets as book-readers. This teacher also was in full support of the Table. She claimed the boys were much easier to keep in control than before (last year). She indicated that some work has still to be written in text books to comply with the educational department rules but students now have much thinner text books - saving money. I then talked to a small gathering of learners outside who seemed to have a spare lesson. They were Matric learners. As they are leaving at the end of this year, they are not a part of the Tablet program - though about 60% of them have Tablets. One, who has a younger sibling, remarked that she is envious of her sister. Homework seems much easier and more interesting now. Also, she still has to carry a full bag of books where as all the non-matric learners just carry Tablets. All of this crowd had Tablets and do use them unofficially at school. The "experiment" has only been running for three months but the results so far look very promising. I would like to visit the same school in a year. Mark Elkins -- . . ___. .__ Posix Systems - (South) Africa /| /| / /__ mje@posix.co.za - Mark J Elkins, Cisco CCIE / |/ |ARK \_/ /__ LKINS Tel: +27 12 807 0590 Cell: +27 82 601 0496