SkillsTrain, Europe's leading home study IT provider, has announced that they are re-launching the Project Africa service in February 2011, which aims to help South African school children experience IT technologies.
SkillsTrain's Project Africa is a charitable initiative that aims to teach IT skills to the school children of South Africa, providing the opportunity for disadvantaged children aged 11 and over to learn valuable computing skills by participating in interactive lessons and thereby gain valuable IT skills that will stick with them for life.
Although many British children take computers for granted, the situation can be very different for some children in South Africa. In the UK children often use the Internet from a very young age. Recent statistics show 30.1 million people access the Internet every day in the UK. Whereas in South Africa, 5.3 million people have access to the Internet, which equals just one tenth of the entire population.
SkillsTrain's Project Africa provides high quality Live Internet Training by teachers from its UK head office, directly into South African classes, in a bid to improve the IT skills of the school children. Every operation done on the UK computer can be seen remotely in South Africa. The UK based teacher's voice can be heard. A complete lesson can be conducted in this way, with participation by the school children, whose work on their computers can be seen by teachers here in the UK.
The first live internet link-up was in 2008, from Luton to Mount Currie in the KwaZulu-Natal Province of South Africa, which enabled two classes of 13 - 15 year olds in St. Patrick's College in Kokstad to be taught IT techniques remotely. Now SkillsTrain is keen to continue teaching South African children IT skills and to increase the number of children that they help.
SkillsTrain's Myra Smallman, who is behind the initiative, says:
"When I visited South Africa with my son's rugby team I was shocked at how little there is for children to do and how few opportunities they have to even go near a computer. SkillsTrain offered to change that. Using a white board and live internet link, we are able to project our software into their classroom so that they could be taught how they could present a recent project using Excel, PowerPoint and Word, programmes that are familiar to most British children."
To find out more about Project Africa http://www.skillstrain-online.com/projectafrica/
More information about Skillstrain can be found at http://www.skillstrainuk.com
For additional information contact: Tom Jinks at jinkst@ringpowersolutions.co.uk
SkillsTrain is the acknowledged leader in providing affordable, high quality IT training - we are the UK's largest specialist home study and distance learning provider of IT courses.
For further information please visit: http://www.skillstrainuk.com
