TTE-Visual: About TTE-Visual as producer and distributor

Address click here Tel: +31(0)24 3553-777 fax: -180 E-mail us: tte@ttevisual.com	E-mail a friend	Your feed back & questions

After years of experiences:
complete systems for visualisation, ready to do the job

Ethiopia - town market Work visit by Jan Krol, director TTE-Visual.

Some of the children in this market might attend the secondary school closeby,
which obtained the TTE-visuals a few months earlier - 2001. These pupils can now
discover with their own eyes, bit by bit, a world they could hardly imagine, whether it be
New York or a molecular structure - no matter how colourful the explanation given by their teacher.

Using the eyes, the information highway into the brain, has an extra advantage here. By law, all subjects are taught in the English language. With our visuals, relevant images are projected together with key words for explanation. Now pupils can see the meaning of the words, providing appropriate understanding as well as visual clues. A direct help for these students and teachers and a small step for progress.

In developing countries
Lessons from projects with the EU, Worldbank and local authorities.

Each year over 40% of all TTE-Visuals leave the European Community, partly to projects of the EU, UN or local authorities. Our low tech and handy teaching tools are ideal in developing countries. They meet the ‘KISS’-criteria: “Keep It Simple Stupid” if you want to keep things running. This phrase originates from the army but is commonly used by UNESCO-people as I learned in Indonesia: they applied it to our TTE-teaching tools. That is what our simple ‘put on and take off’ transparencies are all about. They bring an unprecedented variety of visuals to the finger tips of a teacher to show students at low cost with only brief instructions. This is especially helpful for schools which have few resources.

TTE’s Visual Encyclopedias so far have reached schools in various ways. In 1994 e.g. the Hungarian Schools for Agriculture received our Science series via a World Bank loan. In South Africa we yearly sent out our direct mails from Johannesburg and by 2000, one out of five schools had purchased directly from us or via local suppliers. But in other Southern African countries like Malawi and Swaziland, the introduction of our teaching tools was done by educational projects, financed by the EU and under guidance of educational experts such as those from the University of Amsterdam and Copenhagen. In Namibia, a Danish Project supplied the lower secondary schools with our series. The higher secondary schools were provided with TTE material via the Dutch people who in 1995 did a research on the acceptance of our teaching tools by the teachers. The answers to the Questionnaire set up by the University of Amsterdam bring forward a favourable impression.
If you are interested in more, click here: The Namibian Investigation

After years of experiences: complete systems for visualisation, ready to do the job

TTE-Visuals are built in complete systems and partly adjusted to give extra support to local teachers. A strong influence e.g. came from the words of Dr. Al-Belushi from Oman at the visionairy conference on Education held in Dubai in 1999. The gathered leaders in education in The Gulf fully agreed with her statement: “The bottle neck to increase the quality of our schools is not money but the schooling and skills of the teachers”. Since then, our visuals are even more supported by short powerful statements which give teachers the clues to bring them alive. This simple system is highly appreciated by teachers in Western Europe as proven by our long investigations to what really works. Also became clear that separate manuals rarely work and the transparencies which cannot be used spontaneously, are used less frequently.

On our website we now provide manuals about installing the projector and screen in the class room, simple steps to show a visual effectively and more practical wisdom. These pages can be down loaded as pdf’s for printing. For more, see: “Working with transparencies”.

Our simple to use teaching tools are ideal to improve education in many countries. But as everyone working in this field knows, there is a lot more to it than this logic. For instance: all inspectors and senior curriculum developers at the Ministery of Dubai wanted to have our series at each school as fast as possible, but the Ministry of Finance has not released the money so far. Extra time and expertise to bring ideas into practice is often needed.

Therefore, since the beginning of 2003, Drs. Margriet Krijtenburg is our new colleague for ‘International Liaison’. She finished University Studies in English and Spanish as well as in European Studies, worked many years abroad at several schools and institutions and has a wide experience in educational exchange.

Margriet Krijtenburg. One of her first actions was obtaining the personal support of the Minister of Education of India, his Excellency Dr. Joshi, for reducing import taxes on educational transparencies from 350% as applied to movie-films, to 6%. This is something Indian suppliers have tried to achieve for the last 5 years.