June 12, 2006
Football in the classroom
Now this really is a good idea.
All World Cup football matches are to be shown on thousands of TV plasma screens installed in schools across Ethiopia.
I first wrote about these screens in January 2005 when I came across them in a classroom in SNNPR. More than 50 children were crammed into the room, getting a trigonometry lesson from a teacher speaking through the screen from a TV studio somewhere in Addis Ababa.
There has been some controversy over the introduction of this kind of remote learning in Ethiopia. Many teachers have been nick-named 'DJs' by their pupils - reflecting their reduced roles turning television sets on and off at the right times to catch scheduled lessons. There have also been worries about students struggling to keep up with the English used in many of the lessons.
But there will be no complaints about this. As Fortune reported:
The Education Media Agency (EMA) has approved the screening of the 18th World Cup at 450 schools across the country that have plasma screen televisions.The screens have been prepared for this purpose by the joint efforts of experts from the Ethiopian Radio and Television Enterprise, the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation and Ethiopian Television...
The EMA has 8,000 plasma screens that have been set up in 450 schools across the country. The Ethiopian government purchased plasma televisions as a cost of a quarter of a billion Birr with the intention of conducting uniform courses at schools throughout the country.
Posted by aheavens at June 12, 2006 1:51 PM
Comments
well done.
Posted by: Tom at June 13, 2006 12:01 AM
Dear Andrew,
let's hope, that FIFA has no information about this. They soon would come to Ethiopia to collect license fees, I bet!
Greetings from a German who also was living in Addis for some times
Stephan
Posted by: Stephan at June 13, 2006 1:22 PM