Thutong: SA's education portal
25 January 2005
The government has launched an education portal - www.thutong.org.za - offering a range of curriculum and learner support material, professional development programmes for teachers, and administration and management resources for schools.
Thutong - "place of learning" in SeTswana - features a searchable database of annotated web-based curriculum resources for various education sectors, grades and subjects.
It also carries news and information on the latest developments in education in SA, and will give users the chance to interact with experts from the education community, as well as with their peers throughout the country and abroad.
The portal's current and planned future resources are designed to encourage and develop professional and lifelong learning.
The portal is a free service to registered users, who must go through a once-off, no-cost registration process.
Teachers
grappling with the challenges of introducing the revised national curriculum into classroom practice in SA can download printable, quality-assured resource material that has been extensively cross-referenced against the new curriculum.
Users are encouraged to rate the resources for quality and usefulness, and to submit and share content they might have developed themselves in the course of their teaching.
According to a launch statement, Thutong's development team "has been particularly mindful of the needs of learners and educators from disadvantaged schools and from rural areas, where connectivity is fortunately improving all the time.
"We encourage users to make full use of the extensive free resources and to print, photocopy, and distribute them for no profit - they just need to acknowledge the source."
Thutong will also serve as a one-stop SA education policy shop, carrying national and provincial policy documents and legislation plus amendments, annotated
versions, commentary by experts, and summaries.
The portal is a partnership venture between the Department of Education and a consortium comprising a wealth of educational and IT expertise: the SA Institute for Distance Education, the Multichoice Africa Foundation, the Gauteng Institute for Educational Development, the CSIR, Mindset Network, Reusable Objects, SchoolNet SA, SABC Education and M-Web.
SouthAfrica.info reporter
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