ICT in Education/Change Projects/2015C Ethiopia Creating Awareness of ICT

Title of the change project : Creating awareness of ICT and Pedagogy

Change agent : Aynalem Abebe

Email : abebeayni@gmail.com/ ayni_cack@yahoo.com

Name of the organization : Madawalabu University

Country : Ethiopia

Started date : February 26

Status (finished/ongoing) : Planned

1. Background of the project (problem):

As technology becomes more and more embedded in our culture, we must provide our learners with relevant and contemporary experiences that allow them to successfully engage with technology and prepare them for life after school. It is widely recognized that learners are motivated and purposefully engaged in the learning process when concepts and skills are underpinned with technology and sound pedagogy. But in most region of Ethiopia this concept is not applied and one of the regions is Bale Robe that’s found in south-central Ethiopia. Bale Robe is a rural city that has a little emphasis of technological infrastructure. The local people are farmers who live there life mainly by cultivating crops. The local people, mostly the elder ones are illiterates. In this city elementary and high schools found but there is little use or we can say almost no use of technology for the teaching/learning process. In fact you only find computers and internet accesses only in banks, in government offices, in colleges, in small Internet cafes and in Madawalabu University i.e. one of the federal higher educational institution.

To justify my idea let me put here my personal experience, as a computer science lecturer every time at the first day of class, I ask the students how many of them know or see and also use computer and more than half class that came from the country side of Ethiopia specially from the Oromia region (this include Bale Robe) answer that they have a little experience and know how about it and 1/4 of them answer they did not even saw a computer before. And now here comes the question how this students cop up with the rest of the class? since in higher education

institutes students came from every corner of the country that include cities like Addis Ababa, Nazret, Hawassa, Mekele etc. that have relatively better technological facilities and may be have their own personal computer, laptops and smart mobile phones and also this create a challenge for the teacher to keep those student from failing in their education. So, since Madawalabu University is located at the center of this remote area and as a federal institution of higher education I believe it can act like an agent for distributing and creating awareness of the use of technology in the teaching/learning process by starting from the bottom by that I mean by creating awareness of ICT in the elementary and high school students.

2. Objectives :

General Objective
 * Creating awareness of ICT and computer literacy in elementary, high school and campus students and creating ICT and pedagogy literate teachers in Bale robe region.

Specific Objective 3. Stakeholders : 4. List of Activities : 6. Budget:
 * Creating ICT literate elementary, high school and campus students.
 * Enhancing the use of technology in learning/teaching process.
 * Creating a competent generation that uses different technologies or tools to transmit the knowledge acquired in the campus environment
 * Creating teachers that have a good awareness of using ICT tools and implementing pedagogical method in the teaching process and
 * Making Madawalabu University the agent of change and for it to work deep in the local society.
 * Elementary students
 * High school Students
 * Campus students and
 * Teachers
 * Preparing short trainings in the campus for students who have poor knowledge background about the use of computer and information technology.
 * Preparing ICT and pedagogical trainings for both teachers that teaches in the campus and in elementary and High schools.
 * Give computer and information technology introductory courses for high school and elementary students.
 * No Budget

5. Expected result ; 6.  Actual result  :
 * Making the student competent in their field of study.
 * Creating teachers that have a know how on implementing ICT and pedagogy.
 * Computer literate elementary and high school students.

7. The Project organization :

Last Updated : February 8,2016.