Day 3 – The Stall
Today Karien arrived to experience SciFest09 and help out at the stall and workshops. Our team has settled in nicely at the stall
and we’re in a great groove. Every member of the team has grown into their own style and angle of presenting the project and different
combinations at the stall keeps things fresh and dynamic.
We have to actively engage passers-by and we don’t have an obvious “attraction”. At first this seemed like it might be a problem but
every member of the team has come up with their own “pick-up line” to get people hooked. Rather than being detrimental it has actually
proved a good team-building exercise.
Highlights:
- Deputy Vice-Chancellor of UKZN, Prof. Peter Zacharias stopped by to discuss teacher/curriculum development
- a really lengthy discussion of quality issues with the media
- Carolina showed us some of the UNAWE content which looks great
Day 3 – The Workshop
The workshops are run by two primary presenters and we’ve been rotating through all the permutations and having a daily debrief to
discuss challenges and flow and we’re converging quickly on a few strategies that are working well so far. By the end of SciFest we
should have encountered a few more curveballs to help us test our strategies.
Highlights:
- 4 Curriculum advisors participated
- Diverse groups are going very well
Day 4 – The Stall
Steve Vosloo has joined us at SciFest09. He’s helping out at the stall and doing some informal research on mobile usage.
Highlights:
- The DVC of UKZN returned to discuss some concrete ways of moving forward and we’ve got some great ideas – stay tuned
- Khosi had teachers who’d been to her workshop in the morning explaining our project to other teachers at our stand
- Met a teacher from Kimberley Girls’ High who related their textbook writing initiative
- Interviewed by Rhodes University journalism students
Day 4 – The Workshop
The workshops are going very well and we’ve even integrated our SciFriend into supporting teachers and trying to help out with the site.
We ended the day with a great team dinner, observance of Earth Hour and lots of laughing – we just picked up Nandos take-aways, some drinks and took over the High Corner Guest House where most of the team is staying. A great time was had by all and, sadly, we had to say goodbye to Lisa and Cynthia.
We want to keep going after scifest. I have met many interesting people at scifest. Many educators highlighted the challenges they face with regard to ICT. With a developing product and growing repository of resources available on Siyavula I hope educators all over the country will be able to use this resource to their advantage.
Lets get communities of practice going.