Challenges
This “Grouped Rural School” model does not count on any administrative or technical help within their structure for their IT needs. Therefore, all computer and ICT equipment is managed by the individual teachers themselves, so it is very common to have to face all types of problems (viruses, defective software installation, high cost of software licenses, low speed Internet access, etc.).This educational scenario implies that the school functions as a distributed unit, with different types of profiles: course tutors, travelling teachers, administration, students, parents, who find great difficulties to count on reliable, scalable and easy access to computing services to share information, resources, communicate, and provide a virtual learning environment for all the students.
Teachers who work in these schools find great difficulties to contact and work cooperatively with the rest of their colleagues, due to the distance among them. Moreover, when it comes to “travelling teachers”, they have also the difficulty of having to work each day in several schools, getting there by car and back. Therefore, it is complicated for them to prepare their classes, and they have to store their files in different computers from different schools where they teach, or use USB pen drives. IT equipment is available in each school of the CRA, although this means having only a few computers (3 or so) in each school, a projector and sometimes a touch-sensitive screen. This makes difficult to have students working on the computer on their own. Internet connection is available in each school, although speed is quite poor, due to inadequate infrastructures in rural areas, not reaching 1 Mb in most cases. Interaction among children from the different schools of the CRA is very little, except when they have activities together (field trips, for example).
Parents participate mainly in their village school activities, but have little or no interaction with the rest of parents and teachers other then those who are in the same village. The possibility of parents talking to a certain teacher, other than the tutor is difficult, because it depends on the timetable of the travelling teachers each day.