Twelve new workstations were installed in the ICT laboratory over the January break. Every pupil from Basic 4 upwards now has their own machine for the full Computing period.
What has changed
We had twenty-two working machines and class sizes of up to twenty-five, which meant pupils sharing for part of every lesson. Sharing is fine for a discussion; it is not fine when the task is to type, or to build a spreadsheet, or to debug something that will not run.
There are now thirty-four workstations. Every pupil in every Computing class has a machine to themselves, for the whole period.
What we can now teach properly
Touch typing from Basic 4. Ten minutes at the start of every lesson, tracked individually. Most Basic 6 pupils should be at 25 words a minute by the end of the year.
Spreadsheets in Basic 5 and 6. Real ones — a class budget, sports day results with a chart, a sorted attendance register.
Career Technology practicals in Junior High. The Basic 8 and 9 syllabus expects word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software as examined skills. Now every candidate can practise them at their own pace.
The Friday coding club has moved from twelve places to twenty-four, and is open to Basic 5 upwards. We are working in Scratch at the moment, moving to Python for those who want it.
Online safety
Every machine is on a filtered network. Pupils each have their own login from Basic 4, and we teach password practice as a taught topic in the first week of Basic 4 — what makes a password strong, why you do not share it, and what to do if you think someone has it.
Pupils do not have unsupervised internet access at any point in the school day.
Thank you
The upgrade was funded from the school's capital budget with a contribution of GH₵ 9,400.00 from the PTA, which was agreed at the Term 1 meeting. The old machines that still run have gone to the Basic 3 classrooms as a shared corner, so the first contact with a keyboard now happens a year earlier.
