To enhance efficiency in the teaching and learning processes, support services have been considered as a key factor.. Managing Director, Schools Development and Support International Limited, Mr Isiani Nwachukwu, in this interview with MARY OGAR, spoke on the benefits of adopting technology solutions in knowledge transfer efforts: Excerpts:HOW can students benefit from the classroom model'When we talk about the classroom model, it is what the teacher needs in a particular class looking at the curriculum. It is not a one-size fit all capsule in a sense. This is because the curriculum of a particular class, for example, the nursery class, is different from what the primary class needs and from what the secondary class needs and vice versa.The first time a child comes to a school, what he needs to know is how to identify letters and numbers. Anything you do from the nursery class to the university, all we are looking at are either letters or numbers. But you have to identify it before writing it.In conducting examinations today, especially in this part of the world, you have to put everything down in black and white. Maybe in the future, examinations can go electronic, but today, writing still takes pre-eminence over other means of assessment.Let's take a hypothetical situation. As a scholar, if your handwriting is not decent, your examiner will not understand you, and in that process, you lose a valuable friend as far as that exam is concerned. But when you have a decent handwriting, you get a friend as an examiner. Immediately he opens your paper, he tries to get the point you are trying to make and scores you appropriately. However, if your handwriting is not decent and the examiner cannot understand you, then it becomes a problem for him to assess you accordingly.As a company, what we have done is to fill this yawning gap by making handwriting a culture that can be sustained rather than as a mere subject being taught in the lower classes. We have designed different kinds of boards to aid the student so that as he or she progresses, the culture of good handwriting can be sustained to a large extent.I give you another example: If you look at the number of students taking mathematics during most examination these days, you discover that only a few of them take the graph option. Many of these students are all shying away. But the graph option, ironically, is more practical than anything. However, students are all running away because there is a failure in the facility provision. In most classrooms, there is no efficiency in transferring this knowledge to the students because the teachers don't have graph boards to better illustrate whatever points he wants to make. At best, what is available, most of the time, are just whiteboards or chalk boards. So the teacher finds it difficult to transfer this knowledge of graph to the students. But in a case where the teacher has a graph board, the transmission of this knowledge becomes rather seamless.Besides the classroom model, there is also what we call the concept of full classroom, where the classroom has the full complement of everything that is needed for a particular class based on the curriculum. For instance, the teacher can have different pin-ups on the board to illustrate a particular topic for the whole of the term as well as other teaching aids in strategic locations in the classroom to enhance better memory retention and assimilation on the part of the students.For example, if a teacher wants to teach the students Pythagoras theory, he can choose to scribble the formula on the board for as long as he teaches that particular topic. That way, he can be sure the topic will register in the subconscious of the students. So, in the classroom model, the needs of both the teachers and the students are all taken into account.What is Schools Development Support all about'Schools Development & Support International Limited is a technology-solution firm with full engineering base, set up in 2010. It is the offshoot of Rotary Ventures, which took off some 12 years back. What gave birth to SDS was the need to refocus our business. By virtue of serving the schools, we now had to make our brand name reflect that to our prospective clientele and target market.To what extent has your company been able to achieve its vision'At the risk of sounding immodest, I can say we have been able to achieve our vision to a large extent, as far as providing value-added services to our clientele. One way we have been able to do that is through the application of science and technology to improve efficiency in the classroom using what I call our classroom model.
Click here to read full news..
