Icts in Rural South Africa

Ziyanda Mbobo

                                                                        612m1315

                                                                        Supervisor: James Smith

Exploring policy implementation guidelines for ICTs in education in rural school in South Africa

Due date 15th April 2016

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The purpose of this essay was to show how a developing country like South Africa could implement policies about Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in rural education system and how these policies had a positive influence of the students. This paper attempts to show the positive benefits of ICTs in rural South African schools, while drawing a comparison between Syrian schools which also have the same characteristics as South African rural schools. The various perspective of ICTs were discussed in detail as it was evident that these attitudes regarding ICTs effected teachers ability to not only teach computers in their schools but also be confident while doing it. It was evident that while the implementation of ICTs in rural schools proved costly and time consuming there were significant long term benefits. In addition, this paper attempts to show that although the implementation of ICTs is beneficial to some degree. There were barriers that needed to be considered during the process of implementation. These barriers include lack of resources such as hardware and software, unconfident teachers, lack of training and the fact that some of these rural schools were far to reach.

Content Page

Introduction...........................................................................................................................3

Transformation of ICTs in rural schools.............................................................................. 3

Availability of ICTs in rural areas........................................................................................ 4

Perceptions of ICTs.............................................................................................................. 5

Benefits of ICTs in education.............................................................................................. 6

Conclusion............................................................................................................................ 6

Reference List........................................................................................................................7

Introductions

ICTs in education are distinct because they provide students in the rural areas with the opportunity to engage in the information age according to, Bingimals (2009:53). According to ICT Centre (2016), “Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), education is basically our society's efforts to teach its current and emerging citizens valuable knowledge and skills around computing and communications devices, software that operates them, applications that run on them and systems that are built with them". Teachers play a vital role is the establishment of ICT practises in schools. According to Jimmi Copriady (2014:701), “Teachers’ positive views towards the applications of ICT or rejecting them all together are affected by their attitudes, (Albirini, 2006) as well as other significant factors such as their information about and experience with ICT (Badri et al,. 2013) their experiences in how to utilize these technologies in classroom environment (Keramati, 2011), information and experiences regarding the kinds of applications based on ICT, age, self-confidence (Molnár & Benedek 2013; Reading & Doyle, 2013).”