The Ministry of Education and Sports with funding from the Rural Communications Development Fund organised a five day workshop for tooling and retooling teachers of Computer studies and ICT. Two teachers were invited per school from 13 Districts in the ASSHU Mbale Region. KAWA Uganda, a national teacher Professional Development group was selected by the Ministry to tool and Retool teachers.
Daniel Kakinda, the Director of Pedagogy and Training led the whole team. He explained that retooling is where people have some tools and may be they need to be changed. But within the workshop it was identified that there were particular tools which were totally missing and some of the participants were getting tools. For instance, there were participants who had qualifications in ICT but did not have pedagogical skills. This category was being tooled with pedagogical skills. There were others who had pedagogical skills like teachers of Physics/Maths, Geography/History and English/literature but did not have ICT skills. This category was being tooled with ICT tools hence the tooling process of the workshop
He also made mention of the partners in the workshop and their roles. He mentioned the MoES as being a big partner in terms of responsibilities. KAWA's responsibility was to conduct the training on behalf of the Partners.
He further explained the broad aims of the workshop. He noted that most teachers were teaching ICT/Computer studies without using the recommended methods in the syllabus by NCDC. It was also identified that teachers could not distinguish between assessment of learning and assessment for learning. Most teachers use summative assessment as opposed to formative assessment. Other major challenges which were noted were failure of the teachers to integrate ICT in the curriculum, teaching abstract concepts and not using project based learning as a recommended method. Therefore, the main purpose of the workshop was to enhance the capacity of the ICT/Computer studies teach
He mentioned that there were some skills gaps which had been identified and the workshop was addressing them. The following were the skills gaps identified and addressed by the workshop:
- Pedagogical gaps
- ICT gaps
- Interpretation of the curriculum
- Integration of ICT in different subjects
- Lack of school websites
- Failure to relate classroom work to the job market
He further explained that the workshop was not handling topics separately as blocks such as a block of desktop publishing, a block of website development and so forth. Since they are linked, they were looked at together integrating project based learning method within all of them. Besides, formative and summative assessments were also integrated within all those areas. Pedagogically, the workshop facilitators integrated different methodologies which were to enable them close the skills gaps identified above by the end of the workshop