Donors - Xolani Senior Secondary School

The Heart of Sifunda Kunye

Technology is at the heart of Sifunda Kunye, our mission being to introduce and support new technology to assist children in their pursuit of a quality education.

St Andrew’s College in Grahamstown has been a strong supporter and partner for Sifunda Kunye, offering technology support from their Information Technology Department. Two of their staff members work on Sifunda projects and assist with networking installation, testing and maintenance.

When beginning the project in a new school, the first step is to create the infrastructure that is able to support a computer lab and multiple users. The bandwidth is often insufficient in which case connection improvements are necessary. Once the infrastructure is in place, the computer lab is ready to be installed with the hardware. The size of the lab is based on the needs of the school and the number of students but an average of 30 computers are installed. Sifunda Kunye hires a local IT specialist to work on-site at the school on a full time basis to maintain the hardware and software and manage the technology needs of the project. All systems are networked and students have user identification so they can store their work and teachers can keep track of their progress.

The biggest challenge that students have entering high school is mastering of the English language. Students from this rural area are not proficient in the English language but need to be able to take examinations which are all in the English language. The software that is currently being used by Sifunda Kunye is CAMI English and is a tremendous learning tool to assist students in their English proficiency.

CAMI Software

A brief description of CAMI; CAMI’s Mission

CAMI Developes and markets high-performance, high-productivity educational software used by school and families at home. CAMI’s software develops a dynamic teaching methodology for educators to empower learners to become sustainable contributors to future world growth.

The software was put into practice since June 2011, and since then we have noticed a change in the students attitudes towards learning.

Thanks to Sifunda Kunye, the students now have a great opportunity to practise learning Mathematics and English on computers using this wonderful software.

For more information on CAMI, you can visit their direct website by clicking the CAMI Logo, or visit www.camiweb.com.

Latest News

The camp went really really great! it was a writing camp for grades 8 and 9 from 5 Sifunda Kunye partner schools. Each school had 10 learners with with the exception of Toise that had 12. In total we had 52 children. We also had 2 facilitators from Sifunda Kunye (Mihlali and Luxolo Fobosi). The SKLP team was assisted by 4 volunteers who have been working with young children for over three years in other outreach programs. The camp’s theme focused on heritage – we are young people what does heritage mean to us and how can we preserve it?

The camp started from Friday the 18th from 14H00 through to Sunday the 20th of September at 14H00. It was a writing camp where children wrote freely, with a purpose and from their hearts. On Saturday evening, we calmed ourselves and had a little bit of fun time watching the Alexander Wang: Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day movie, which children loved very much. Sunday it was a bitter sweet day as we wrapped up our camp and had children showcase the work that they did in their breakaway groups. They recited poems, sangs songs, shared their stories and acted out each others stories. This time we also said goodbye to our first graduates of the camp whom started with us last year in grade 8.

We are now going to be compiling and working on the journal of poetry that children have written in the two camps we had this year.