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ORT SA IN A NUTSHELL – What we do to fulfill our mission: Making People Employable

ORT SA IN A NUTSHELL – What we do to fulfill our mission: Making People Employable

by | Jul 24, 2019 | Uncategorized

Welcome to ORT SA!

People who work for ORT SA share many things in common. They are passionate, innovative, professional…they hold onto ORT’s values but mostly are driven with ORT SA’s mission of making people employable and creating employment opportunities

We do that through our ORT SA STEM Academy: working with schools, through STEM education, IT, coding and leadership training, with the understanding that in order to equip the generation of today with the skills for tomorrow we need to start as early as possible.

We do so through our ORT SA Skills and Enterprise Development Academy with our post schooling programmes in IT, skills development and entrepreneurship with the understanding that to become employable one needs the skills, life skills but also work experience. This is why we partnered with the YES Campaign and also offer learnerships  with different SETAs

Small businesses are a vital pillar which the country’s economy relies on, and ORT Jet ( a division of ORT SA) has assisted thousands of businesses with providing the tools and support to entrepreneurs and small business to become financially sustainable.

The ORT SA Eric and Sheila Samson IT Academy was established to bridge the digital divide of knowledge, skills and awareness towards IT career options. And becoming a Cisco Networking Academy has allowed ORT SA to offer hundreds of unemployed youth with IT tools and skills.

Our new Career Hub was created to expose people and youth to career options; to what the “jobs of the future” are all about, to let them explore their strengths, passion and future paths as well as providing experience and skills transfer to make sure they are ready and equipped for the workplace.

ORT SA prides itself with its affiliation to World ORT and its legacy of almost 140 years fulfilling its vision of ‘Educating for Life’ and impacting communities through education.

We help businesses with their BBBEE and fulfilling their CSI strategy or vision.

We help government with its efforts to improve education and skills development and we help businesses to improve their profitability and financial sustainability

Join ORT SA as a member, a Youth Club member, volunteer, donor, corporate partner or a beneficiary and be part of an organisation that uses the power of education to make a change in the world.

Ariellah Rosenberg

ORT SA CEO

LESSONS FROM AMESA 2019 (Association of Mathematics Education in SA)

by | Jul 16, 2019 | Uncategorized

ORT SA senior mathematics facilitator, Julius Olubodun attended the 25th Annual National Congress of the Association for Mathematics Education of South Africa (AMESA), which was held at the Edgewood Campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pinetown from the 1st – 5th July 2019. The theme of the congress was “Developing Deep Mathematical Thinking through Mathematics Teaching”

ORT SA is an institutional member of AMESA and is actively involved in academic programmes of AMESA both provincially (called region) and nationally.

During the 2019 gathering of the congress, Mr. Olubodun conducted a 2-hour workshop for FET mathematics teachers and officials from the Department of Basic Education titled, ‘Constructing Trigonometric Reasoning’.

The feedback from participants was very encouraging. “ Trigonometric concepts become so visual through the activities and classroom practices that were demonstrated in this workshop” and “The weaker learners in my classroom have always been left behind when I teach through textbook approach, but the lesson I learnt from this session will help me to address the learning barriers of all learners in my classroom including the weak ones”.

Mr. Olubodun said he took away many lessons from the congress, including those from Professor Judit Moschkovich, mathematics educationalist at the University of California Santa Cruz whose research uses sociocultural approaches to study mathematical thinking and learning, mathematical discourse, and mathematics learners who are bilingual and/or learning English. “This will come in handy for me when helping learners in multilingual classrooms in our project,” said Olubodun. “Multiculturalism affects the learning and teaching of mathematics in South Africa.”

“Professor Zurab Janelidze of Mathematics at Stellenbosch University whose scientific work lies in the field of Category Theory with emphasis on “Reflection” as a basis of mathematical enrichment of students encouraged me to teach ‘thinking’ in my classrooms,” he said.

“Dr Vasuthavan Govender’s presentation on ‘Profiling of Mathematics Olympiad Learners’ provides direction for me to make use of profiling in order to make ORT SA’s intervention more impactful to individual learners,” he added.

“Dr Govender emphasises data collection, not only of learner’s marks, but examining in depth what each child’s skills are in certain areas and those that s/he may lack.  This means drilling down to each and every learners’ capabilities and using that data for improving teaching in the classroom. It may be time consuming but if you want your learners to get their best results, individual profiling in depth is necessary,” explained Mr Olubodun.

 

Julius Olubodun and Professor Moschkovich

 

WHAT IF OUR ANCESTORS WERE INVITED TO A TECH SHOW?

by | Jun 19, 2019 | Uncategorized

WHAT IF OUR ANCESTORS WERE INVITED TO A TECH SHOW?

By Ariellah Rosenberg, Chief Executive Officer, ORT South Africa

If we were to organise an exhibition of current technologies and invite our ancestors and descendants from the past to attend, what would their reaction be?

Our forefathers walked in the desert for 40 years to reach their desired destination. Imagine! After all the suffering, starving and struggling in the harsh climate and tough terrain to find out that with ‘flying technologies’ they could have made the journey within an hour! Moreover, with global positioning satellite (GPS) technology, it would have been so much easier to navigate their way. And oh! How crazy they’d think we are, counting our steps, with IoT devices, and sending information to a ‘cloud’…not to ask for direction from G-d but to…monitor our health!

Imagine Florence Nightingale, known for founding the modern discipline of nursing, and a key figure in introducing new professional training standards for nursing, visiting a robot display to reveal moving machines replacing the service of human care. Japan’s aging population (30% of its population is older than 65), faces a crisis of shortage of human resource in eldercare. To resolve this predicament, robots have been placed in nursing homes. Robots that move, cry and cuddle are replacing the human work force, from lifting people from bed to entertaining them, with much success. The elderly absolutely love them!

All those involved in getting our internet to where it is today! Who would have imagined that with all the impact of the internet on our culture, commerce, communication and technology that it will also generate the biggest crime, globally? According to the latest information, cybercrime will cost the world more than six trillion dollars annually by 2021. It will be more profitable than the combined global trade of all illegal drugs!

However, if we had Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein entering some of the current classrooms, they’d most probably see no difference from their own classroom, a hundred or so years ago. They will also notice that not much has changed with teaching and assessments, using a curriculum that is mostly outdated with techniques and pedagogies that prepared children for the industrial jobs of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Companies invest in enormous amounts of research to explore the use and impact of new technologies in the global economy (McKinsey, World Economic Forum and so many other papers and reports have been published on the topic.) But what about education? Isn’t it time that we explore transforming education to keep up with the pace of change and to prepare our future generation for the world of work?

We now know more than we knew in the past on how children learn and we know that new technologies are transforming jobs as we know them. But we continue to skill our children for jobs that soon will vanish.

It is time that industries, corporations, governments and educationalists work together to transform education through updated policies, curriculum and implementation of technologies as tools to assist with the digital transformation. It is time that we start implementing the use of technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science and IoT in emulating successful methodologies and incorporating them in our classrooms.

The return on our investment will be higher than any business will ever generate. And who knows, – the fruits of these investments could

be showcased one day in an exhibition featuring future technologies produced by our own future generation.

@Ariellah @ORT_SA

 

 

 

 

IMAGINATION DRIVES THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS TECH – by Arthur Goldstuck

IMAGINATION DRIVES THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS TECH – by Arthur Goldstuck

by | Apr 4, 2019 | Uncategorized

When the original Blade Runner movie was screened in 1982, it went almost unnoticed. But the Ridley Scott adaptation of a Philip K Dick novel quickly became a cult favourite, and then acknowledged as a seminal vision of our future urban landscape.

That being the case, why are we not yet living in that future? This was the fairly standard question asked at the Cisco Live conference in Barcelona this week, but the answer was somewhat surprising.

“We should have humanoid, lifelike robots among us. Instead, we have Sophia the robot, who is not exactly lifelike and quite creepy,” said Jeremy Bevan, Cisco vice president of marketing for Europe Middle East, Africa and Russia, during the opening keynote address. “We should be seduced by digital billboards everywhere. Maybe we do have that in Times Square and some shopping malls. Maybe soon, as in Blade Runner, we’ll have giant ads that say you can start a new life on a different planet.”

Yet, said Bevan, in some ways we have gone far beyond the Blade Runner vision. For example, talking to our computers is now standard. Going into a phone booth to make a video call is downright old-fashioned, as the technology for video calls is now available wherever we are.

“Films are a reflection of how things are today and how they might progress; what could be possible. The connection between what we do and what is possible, is imagination. It is the most important thing we have to make our lives better, from the smallest things in our personal lives to the way we transform businesses. All the way through to things that can solve some of the world’s biggest challenges. Technology is truly an enabler of our imagination.”

Rather than offering movie visions to prove his point, however, he presented the case study of the largest port in Europe, that of Rotterdam, which handles 130 000 ships a year. Already, the complexities of combining shipping logistics with weather and other data is a massively complex channel. Using Internet of Things technology and data services supplied by Cisco and IBM, the Port can now predict precise conditions hours in advance.

In the next six years, Rotterdam expects to welcome its first autonomous ships – self-steering and self-navigating vessels. By 2030, it plans for a combination of the Internet of Things, data analytics and cloud computing to make it possible for completely automated handling of these ships, from docking to unloading and loading, without direct human intervention.

Considering that around 85% of globally traded goods travels by ship, the project will point the way to more efficient and more cost-effective international trade. It is also a vision that goes beyond Blade Runner, in imagining a more sustainable and environmentally cleaner future. Ultimately, says Bevan, it will enhance human quality of life.

“You might think the stories we share are about technology to solve big problems, but it’s also about people’s lives that are transformed,” said Bevan, insisting that such projects underpin Cisco’s vision of “technology for good”.

If he is right, our descendants may never need those Blade Runner ads for finding a better life off-planet.

  • Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram on @art2gee
  • Arthur Goldstuck is ORT SA’s IT Ambassador and was a guest speaker at the recent launch of the ORT SA CareerHub: the educational journey to your career destination.

 

 

 

 

LOOKING FOR A CAREER & HAVE NO IDEA? ORT SA CareerHub LAUNCH

LOOKING FOR A CAREER & HAVE NO IDEA? ORT SA CareerHub LAUNCH

by | Mar 20, 2019 | Uncategorized

“Last year, we promised a series of Career Guidance talks and we have actually done more than that. We have, in fact, developed the ORT SA CareerHub,” says Ariellah Rosenberg, ORT SA’s CEO, who is the visionary behind the idea.

Through a series of talks and workshops, the CareerHub will help high school students, university students, parents, teachers and even those who feel ‘stuck’ in their path, to “Explore, Expose and Experience”  their way through the quagmire of choosing a career.

“The choices can be daunting ,” says Rosenberg, “You’re 18 years old, finished school and most probably, experiencing the ‘end of childhood’ as you knew it. You are faced with a life-time decision, or so you feel, about your career path. All of us have been in a similar situation… ‘the road not taken’… ‘jobs of the future’… so much pressure for relatively young souls that have being part of the schooling system for more than a decade. A system where almost everything is dictated, including your dress code, the time you wake up and the curriculum. Now, you have to decide yourself which path to take. If to learn: what to learn, where and when? “

The ORT SA CareerHub will be focused on Exploring the individual’s skills, attributes and strengths when seeking a career path, Exposing participants to the jobs of the future and giving them the Experience with practical workshops.

The CareerHub is launching on 2 April 2019 with ORT SA’s IT Ambassador, the internationally renowned writer, analyst and technology commentator, Arthur Goldstuck and ORT SA IT Ambassador, speaking about ‘jobs of the future’.

Booking essential: ora@ortsa.org.za

The next in the series will be on 16th April 2019 at 6pm: Lorraine Silverman on  Career Assessments.

 

 

 

SA develops coding, robotics curricula for Grade R-9- article

SA develops coding, robotics curricula for Grade R-9- article

by | Mar 14, 2019 | Uncategorized

“We are thrilled to be recognised by the Minister for assisting with the development of a Coding & Robotics Curriculum for South African schools,” said ORT SA CEO, Ariellah Rosenberg.

Article by Admire Moyo, ITWeb’s business editor. Johannesburg, 13 Mar 2019

Basic education minister Angie Motshekga.

The South African government is developing curricula for coding and robotics for grades R to 9.

So said minister of basic  Angie Motshekga. “To  a sustainable industrialisation and keep pace with the world, South Africa is developing coding as well as robotics curricula to be included in GET [general education and training] from Grade R-9,” said Motshekga.

She said the curricula will  learners with an understanding of coding and robotics, and will develop their skills and competencies to prepare them for the fourth industrial revolution.

“The curricula will ensure our schooling system produces learners with the foundations for future work, and equip them with skills for the changing world,” the minister said.

According to Motshekga, the coding curriculum will develop learners’ ability to solve problems, think critically, and work collaboratively and creatively; function in a digital and information-driven world; apply digital and ICT skills; and transfer these skills to solve everyday problems.

She added that learners will also become a new generation of creative, innovative thinkers that can use coding to express their ideas, and adopt a culture of being self-directed, life-long learners.

“We are grateful to the University of South Africa (UNISA) that has generously agreed to partner with the DBE [Department of Basic Education] by making available their 24 ICT laboratories throughout the country for the training of 72 000 teachers in coding.”

The minister added the DBE is also working with civil society, academic institutions and businesses, such as Africa Teen Geeks.

She pointed out that with the support of Africa Teen Geeks, UNISA, North West University, ORT South Africa and Globenet, the DBE developed a framework for coding Grade R-9.

Google, Teen Geeks and other businesses through Africa are supporting the DBE to develop a coding platform that utilises artificial intelligence and machine learning to customise teaching and learning.

Student aptitude

Motshekga said customised teaching is the direct opposite of the one-size-fits-all methodology or philosophy.

“It considers individual student aptitude, learning speed, background, response and other variables. It processes the data in real-time and provides feedback to the teacher, so that the teacher can recognise flagging student attention or poor response immediately, and take corrective actions. This will improve student participation and, in the process, the overall results.”

She explained that machine learning will be able to explain the concepts as well as set goals for individual students.

On the other hand, she added, teachers will be able to track whether the students are able to digest the concepts.

“Based on that feedback, educators can change or modify the methodology, curriculum or topics accordingly. And, the result is more accurate and targeted for individuals. In simple terms, machine learning does the analytics based on individual student data, and makes the decision-making process automatic and uniform.”

She said this coding platform will need to be available in all 11 languages, ensuring rural and township children will be introduced to coding and robotics in their mother tongue, in line with government’s mission to provide an inclusive education accessible to all.

According to Motshekga, the robotics curriculum will have a strong foundation in engineering in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and will enable learners to build and operate robots through programming code.

Building computers

She noted the robotics curriculum will not require any infrastructure or devices, but will need maker spaces to provide hands-on, creative ways to encourage students to design, experiment, build and invent; for example, through cardboard construction activities.

“The projects will become more challenging as the grades progress. In Grade 9, the learners will be taught how to build a computer from scratch. This will not only develop STEM skills, but also contribute to effectively developing children’s creativity, critical thinking, design thinking and digital skills.

“This will ensure SA develops learners who are makers and inventors who will contribute to building an innovative culture in South Africa.”

Motshekga pointed out that teachers are going to be key in teaching this new subject, and the plan is to train at least three teachers in each of the 16 000 primary schools to teach coding.

“The implementation of coding in the system will start with a pilot in 1 000 schools in 2020 in five provinces for Grade 7 to 9,” she concluded.