Top teachers just a click away

Cape Town - With just over a month to go before the start of the matric exams a free new online resource has been made available to help pupils with those tricky maths questions.

Through www.papervideo.co.za pupils can access past years’ maths question papers and exemplar papers. And if they are having difficulty with any of the questions they can click on a link that will open a video of a teacher explaining the solution step by step.

Paper Video co-founder Christopher Mills, 28, from Fish Hoek, said for years he had wanted to make tutoring more accessible to pupils who couldn’t afford it.

The aim was to make the best teachers available to all pupils in South Africa, free of charge. Most pupils used past papers to prepare for their exams, but with answers provided in written format, pupils often got stuck on questions and didn’t understand the theories.

“This way they can have immediate access to a teacher while they are studying.”

The teacher who appears in all the videos is co-founder Paul Maree, who said exemplar papers with videos explaining the solutions would be made available in more subjects and languages in future.

Maree, 29, a former teacher at Westerford High who now teaches at the Centre for Science and Technology in Khayelitsha, is the son of Western Cape Premier Helen Zille.

“What we want is for pupils, at any time of the day, to be able to log on and be taken to a live stream of a teacher teaching.”

He and Mills spent up to 12 hours a day at weekends recording the videos.

The class of 2014 will be first to write exams based on the new curriculum and assessment policy statements (Caps), and Maree said the past papers on the website had been Caps-aligned.

Mills said the plan was to offer DVDs to pupils who couldn’t afford the data costs or didn’t have access to the internet.

The exams start on October 27.

Cape Argus