This year's Refresher workshop for ICT Teachers organized by MTINFOTECH was successfully held on Saturday 9th June 2018. Over 200 teachers from all regions of the country attended the workshop. Every year, a survey is conducted and specific areas where the teachers find challenges are identified to be discussed. During the initial survey, lots of topics were identified as listed on the workshop invitation letter, but since the workshop was to last only one day and members had to travel back in time, focus was drawn to Web design, Databases, Spreadsheets and the rest of the time was given to members to share ideas concerning establishing a national Association for ICT Teachers in Uganda.
Highlights from the sessions
Web Design Session
A presentation about the current status of the topic at O Level was made and members were encouraged to try out a number of web authoring software as per the recommendations in the 2016 UNEB examiners report. The members identified a number of suitable web authoring software for UCE. Since most of the members were familiar to Ms. Publisher 2007 and it was readily available in all schools, it was used to practically design a website during the workshop emphasising the technique of designing only one home page and duplicating it and modifying the content of the rest of the pages. Here is a simple step by step tutorial of the procedures followed during the workshop: Extract-Publisher-2017-WEBDESIGN-Tutorial.pdf (51 downloads)
Members were also shown how to activate web authoring features in Publisher 2010 “ 2016 where they are hidden by default but are still supported. This can be done by opening a pre-existing Publisher Website File (You can save some of the Publisher 2007 templates and save them into Publisher 2010, 2013 or 2016 as Publisher Templates. One was included on the workshop CD “ see below) and / or by activating the Web Ribbon under Publisher options as shown below.
Here's another tutorial by Kentucky University on using Publisher 2013 for basic Website Design.
Database Session
The facilitator put much emphasis on the need for creating database objects from first principles instead of relying on templates and wizards. A considerate amount of time was spent on form design and selecting data sources, creating joins and relationships. One of the highlights that members found new was the concept of formatting currencies in database tables to for example adding a currency symbol such as "UGX before the values. Members were discouraged from making global changes via the control panel “ since these would affect all databases on the computer “ and are not very portable to other computers. Instead, it was recommended to use Custom Formats under Field Properties in design view of a table or form. For example, typing "UGX "# in the format box of a number of currency field as shown below would add UGX before the values in the table datasheet view.:
Read these tutorials One. Two. and Three for more details on how you can set the Format property to predefined number formats or custom number formats for the Number and Currency data types. You can also hit F1 and search the Access Help for the article on 'Format Property “ Number and Currency Data Types'.
Spreadsheets Session
This session focused on features highlighted in the discussion question. These included sorting data ensuring related data is not mixed up and performing calculations like percentage increase, RANK, COUNTIF and VLOOKUP. Members were shown how to grade marks using VLOOKUP and told that HLOOKUP works in the same way but for data laid out horizontally as in contrast to VLOOKUP which works for horizontal data. The spreadsheet screenshot below illustrates the difference.
