Technology in education-COVID Response programming and equity in a developing country context

• In Event: Leaving no child Behind-Ensuring access, equity and inclusion in education programming in East Africa

Proposal

Innovative teaching, learning and leadership consultant George Couros is quoted to have said ‘Technology will not replace great teachers. But technology in the hands of great teachers can be transformational’. This is a pointer to the impact that the use of technology in education programming can have on teaching and learning outcomes.
Uganda had the longest school closures in the world-coming to almost 2 years. Being a teacher training and continuous professional development (CPD) organization, we were requested by the Ministry of Education and Sports to implement an intervention that would ensure continuity of learning for teachers and head teachers, whose face to face continuous professional development capacity building was hampered by the long school closures.
The intervention included:
a) Use of system stakeholders to conduct a CPD needs assessment on what was relevant to the teachers and stakeholders at the time of school closures
b) Use of the Ministry of Education co-design team to design radio scripts
c) Use of education system stakeholders to voice these scripts in recording studios
d) Bi-weekly airplay of radio recordings and having system stakeholders sit in and respond to any clarification questions that may arise
e) Coaching calls to district education leaders to better understand the week’s content and hence support head teachers in understanding the content
f) Head teachers creating communities of practice at school by conducting virtual discussion rooms with their teachers
This presentation will therefore be a sharing of our longitudinal study findings, conducted by an external evaluator on what worked and what didn’t, as well as the unintended impact that the intervention had on the education space in Uganda, thereby increasing on the access to education continuous professional development services by teachers, head teachers, and community members.

Author

• Modern Musiimenta Karema, Stir Education