Telecommunication company contributes to needy schools
Tsaone Basimanebotlhe | Thursday October 2, 2014 09:00
The managing director of Pan Business Systems, Mompati Ngwako, said they believed the teaching assist software that had been developed by Kyocera was a vital and necessary product in the school kit available to schools in Botswana.
“The software provided a multiple choice platform to set the question paper and answer key followed by the electronic marking and grading of the answer papers using a Kyocera Multifunctional printer.”
“A lot of time will be saved in the exercise of marking and grading of the answer papers. The exercise being electronic, errors will be reduced or avoided in the marking and upgrading,” Ngwako said.
He said the grading would assist in highlighting the students’ weakest and strongest subjects. The teacher would then easily know which areas to focus on. He added that this would assist teachers to spend more time with learners that required more attention rather than setting and marking. PanSolutions also installed another phone in the school to assist with communication.
“I encourage teachers, parents and students to work hard so that good results will be produced at the end. We are very worried by performance of students in this recent years,” added Ngwako.
Meanwhile, Education Hub coordinator, Billy Loeto, said the government has saved a lot of money through the Adopt-A-School programme.
“Our schools that are adopted by different companies are performing well compared to before. We managed to save P350 million through this programme. We appreciate the efforts of companies that play a role in students’ education. PanSolutions has spent over P200,000 installing equipment Boswa Primary School needed,” Loeto said. He said if the machine would mark 101 tests within five minutes, the workload on teachers would be reduced.
Loeto appealed to teachers and students to take care of all equipment installed by PanSolutions.
The school head Julia Lubinda said she was pleased that PanSolutions had heard their cry since teachers’ workload had affected their school’s performance negatively.
“Our school performance had dropped in 2013 by three percent. Last year our performance improved from 76% to 80%. These machines will benefit our school a lot in the future. If we could have signed this adoption early this year, then our results were going to be the best,” Lubinda said.
She added that her school had been performing well recently because they had benchmarked against other schools.
The telephone system includes PABX that will have a switchboard that allows for calls to be received in different areas of the school like the school head’s office, deputy head’s office and staff room.
Maintenance of the telecommunication system will be through normal call outs covered by the company.
The market value of the Teaching Assistant Software, its installation and related training costs, the maintenance costs of the copier along with that of the telephone management are estimated at P200,000.