Role play as a teaching strategy

During the week of 12-14 of August,  the ICT4RED Phase 3 teachers gathered to investigate Role Play as a teaching strategy in their classrooms. This time round we could not do the training at the various schools as most of the schools were to remote and we opted for schools that we could reach. The schools were clustered together and as per usual, great fun was had by all!

Role play, our third teaching strategy, aims to address issues that may arise when implementing mobile devices in the classroom. It is a great strategy to unpack possible problems and we have added the condition that the role play has to include innovative solutions. The teachers were randomly given scenarios that they had to brainstorm and find solutions to. They then had to "act it out" while one of the group members video the role play.

The process

In putting together the role play, we followed a process that resulted in the teachers anticipating issues and finding solutions. The scenarios were designed to help teachers and schools cope with change management when implementing tablets into the classroom e.g. 

• Should learners be able to take the tablets home as they may lose or damage it?
• How do you manage resources like mobikits within a school scenario?
• Parent's fear of their childrens' safety when taking devices home.
• Teacher's struggling to deal with the demands of implementing devices into their classrooms 

Assessment

We used peer assessment to evaluate if the teachers succeeded in unpacking their scenarios. They swapped devices and used a scoring sheet to find a "winning team". This resulted in an animated discussions of how fair peer assessment really is and in one instance we had to do a role play to defuse a potential riot situation! 

Some problems

There is never a dull moment to be had in Cofimvaba.. On the first day of training, our generator did not want to work and we proved that we could use tablets in not only a non connected environment, but also without any electricity! As most of the training were held at primary school venues, we struggled to get our slightly larger bodies to fit into the tiny desk spaces! We also had trouble blue-toothing all the videos to each other as it is a time consuming process and you can only do one video at a time. 

But despite some minor challenges, great fun was had by all and role play as a teaching and learning strategy got the thumbs up from all the teachers. We are looking forward to seeing how it will be implemented in our teachers' classrooms!

We want to thank the whole #ict4red team present who helped to bluetooth, install apps and offer encouragement. ICT4RED rocks!

All the photos from our Role play module can be found here:

• http://goo.gl/1KZNaN