Equipment Management and eLearning...

At Impact Network, equipment plays a vital role in the lesson delivery in schools. The use of tablets and projectors has been incorporated as one of the core elements of the eSchool 360 model across Impact Network schools.

Many eLearning lessons include the use of tablets and projected resources that provide extra visual and auditory support for learners, which helps them to understand lesson content.  eLearning increases pupil motivation and engagement; the videos and interactive material supplement the teacher’s explanations and aim to create a deeper understanding of topics. It is for this reason that all Impact Network teachers are required to use tablets or projectors when delivering designated lessons.

The operations team plays a very vital role in ensuring that equipment in schools is kept secured and in good condition at all times. Having a huge number of tablet resources in schools comes with challenges such as technical faults like aging batteries and charging port failure, damages like broken screens, and more. The operations coordinators conduct weekly visits to all schools to check that all the expected equipment is there, to conduct troubleshooting and to remove all damaged and non-functional equipment so that they can be sent for repair.

When the schools are closed during each term break, the operations team also remove all the tablets and related equipment from the schools.  Then, working from the head office, tablets are cleaned – removing unwanted apps, documents and files from the tablets in order to keep them functioning at their optimal level. Another important activity that is done is the addition of learner and teacher resources like videos, music, and soft copies of textbooks that the academics team assigns.

This past week, the operations team spent several days working on all the equipment and then packed it to be sent back to schools for term 2.  We have a great operations team that takes pride in providing this and many other services to our teachers and pupils!

-Steven Chirwa, our Head of Operations