According to a UNESCO report published in September 2020, ”Education, the Internet and broadband connectivity have a tremendous potential to solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges including the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Nevertheless, today 3.6 billion people still have no access to the Internet and about 258 million children are out of school.” (https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000374309/PDF/374309eng.pdf.multi)
If you live in Gauteng, or probably anywhere in South Africa, you don’t have to look very hard until you find school children who have never accessed the internet. For most of the little Grade 1s at Cosmo City Primary School outside Johannesburg, the first time they did was when they used the Book Village digital library through the Sora app from Overdrive.
And for these children, Library Time is a real treat! We use some of the enriching material available on the internet all the time to liven up our lessons – but most importantly, the internet is a platform that enables the children to connect with the outside world like never before. With the Book Village app, we are extending the reach of one teacher in a classroom of over 60 children, to giving every child their own individual tutor so that they might learn at their own level and pace.
Apart from overcrowding in schools, many children start Grade 1 without having any pre-school education. There are only 50 places in Grade R at Cosmo City Primary for example, yet there are about 200 Grade 1 children. To help catch them up, we’ve designed a pre-reading programme that can be digitised and worked through with an individual online tutor when the children start school. We’ve been through this with the Grade Rs and Grade 1s this year, and they are making fantastic progress. We will include this programme in a future version of the Book Village app.
Finally, from the same UNESCO report, “School connectivity must also be about empowering those who are online by providing them with high quality, meaningful, inclusive and relevant content that is accessible through safe and secure platforms and delivered by innovative methods of instruction.”
And at Book Village, we are doing just that.