APRIL 2008 SPES ACTIVE-LEARNING EVENTS
The NGO SPES of Vocational Teacher Trainers organized on 3rd April – an OPEN DAY on “Quick learning basic literacy and digital literacy systems” at the IVTB Lecture Theatre at Phoenix, for Educators who cater for illiterate children and adults with special learning needs.
Live demos were presented to our Guests of Honour: Mr. Selven Lutchmanan, Executive Officer from the Prime Minister’s Office and Mr Dansinghani, Chief Technical Officer from Ministry of Education and Human Resources, and also to the 30 Trainees, from diversified professions such as Prison Officers Private NGOs Educators, who followed SPES Foundation training Course on “La Planète des Alphas” multimedia quick-learning literacy system.
These courses were MQA approved and partially HRDC funded under the “Foreign Expertise Scheme”. This specialized training was conducted by Ms Marie de Terwangne, who flew from Brussels on two occasions to deliver this reading and writing, in French, fun-learning methodology based on a kinaesthetic phonetical lettering system, that has a most effective multimedia support and can also integrate the e-CLASS programmes we designed. Some souvenir photos of the SPES OPEN DAY that depict our educational objectives:
On the 17th April 2008, on the occasion of the SADC April Conferences held in Mauritius, we had the pleasure of having amongst us, Gideon M. PHIRI, Robson CHAKWANA and Kgomotso MOHLALA, our brothers & sister from Botswana, Malawi,and South Africa respectively, to whom we presented Live educational demos. These took place during a hasty informal luncheon, we organized specially on our SPES Hi-Tec Design Unit, so they could view some of our SPES e-CLASS vocational multimedia programmes we diffused, thanks to WorldSpace Satellite AfriStar close collaboration.
During our friendly lunch we explained how our Island is ideally geographically positioned and hence has an informatized WorldSpace Satellite uplink station at Cassis. This has enabled SPES to carry out for the past few years extensive Research and Testing on our educational / vocational interactive diffusions to African countries, as well as to UNESCO / Paris.
Seeing that our vocational diffusions have also been very successful at national level and to the Rodrigues Island, and the fact that our Guests appreciated Live Demos, our vocational team of SPES New Training Vocational Skills Teacher Trainers/Assessors, sincerely hope that WorldSpace Satellite e-CLASS becomes “The CLASSroom of the Future” for our African region. To be noted that SPES uses ecological solar mobile panels suitable to operate laptop computers, indoors or outdoors, in villages and in remote areas deprived of electricity and internet.
While sipping Mauritian vanilla tea at desert time our SADC and SEPAC (Small Enterprise Promotion Advisory Council) friends listened with great interest to the WorldSpace Satellite Radio programmes, suitable for rural broadcasting, many being on youth farm, agriculture, micro-enterprise & conservation, education and also on health problems such as nutrition, HIV, malaria etc.
For all the SADC friends we were not able to meet during this busy week of Conferences, NGO SPES is placing on our April wesite update the following message, which we also published in several newspapers:
International Book Day (23 April 2008)
In view of the rising price of rice the SPES Canteen Trainers are producing healthy economical potato e-recipes, in the form of e-CLASS – Combined Live Audio and Slide Show diffusions via WorldSpace Satellite AfriStar.
The main objectives are to encourage primary school children to practice computer literacy reading and learn how to plant and to cook nutritious Mauritian grown vegetables. This way they can assemble a cookery e-book and also make printouts of the virtual recipes step-by-step illustrations.