Educators responded with enthusiasm to the new learning they were able to garner and were thrilled at the idea of being able to collaborate online.

CHSA educators were trained in conceptulising the Connexions terminology, locating and downloading resources and participating in work groups.

The team has been invited back to train at their teacher development program during the June school vacation,during which time we would also need to conduct a follow-up workshop with the high school educators whom we introduced to Siyavula last year, and train a new group of intermediate phase teachers at the school.

The vision of TEACH South Africa is two-fold. In the short-term, our goal is to recruit, train and support the most talented recent university graduates to commit to teaching for a minimum of two years in some of South Africa’s most disadvantaged schools. In the long-term, TEACH Ambassadors will form an alumni movement, informed by their experience in the classroom, which will fight for educational equality for learners all over South Africa by using their influence in whatever sector they decide work in.

Landulwazi school looked a little worse for wear, as many township schools do, but deep in the heart of the school were two fully functioning computer laboratories. To their credit, the full complement of computers in the laboratory we used were in perfect working order, something schools in much more affluent areas struggle to achieve.

We had 24 participants in our workshop. Given that we only had 3 hours to do the training we decided to spend a full hour on the concepts of the website so that we left them with a good foundation and then set up accounts, a workgroup and end with covering as much editing as possible. We left them with the draft manuals and a promise to send them the final ones when they were ready.

The group showed a lot of promise, enthusiasm and asked many insightful questions. A personal highlight was when one teacher discovered the WYSIWYG MathML editor and turned to another and said “This is much better than MathType!”. I hope that Connexions and Siyavula are able to provide support to these teachers-in-training to help them do the best possible job in difficult circumstances.

As a follow-up we recently heard that a teacher had relayed to Teach SA that she had “taken herself back to the site and has managed to get back in without asking anyone for help. She has been able to access and download material. She also said how much your explanation, with the rings on the floor, has helped her.”. We’re extremely proud to be supporting teachers and glad that we seem to be on the right track with our approach to technical training as we’ve received a number of similar responses. We’ll continue to refine it, being careful not to lose the elements that work.

The meeting was a great success with some of the Siyavula team’s highlights being:

• 7 workgroups being formed on the site after discussion around the workgroup’s objectives
• teachers creating their own lenses spontaneously
• teachers importing Word documents into their workgroups
• teachers actually being happy with the full XML editing
• a workgroup editing a document collaboratively in real-time
• teachers supporting the group to allow facilitators to deal with problems
• teachers talking about the possibility of them writing something which could eventually be used by the whole country
• enough pressure for the creation of a school management lens
• and quite a bit more ….

This workshop was slightly different to the one we held in Cape Town. Many of the teachers knew each other beforehand as the schools in Tongaat, from which the majority of the participants came, had already been working together. It was their previous collaboration, under Selvan Chetty, to manage the transition between junior and high schools, presented at a conference in Limpopo in 2008, that made an impression on Palesa Tyobeka, Deputy Director General for General Education. Palesa asked us to include them in our roll-out of Siyavula.

We had allocated an extra hour of technical training on the second day. Forming groups in the community session before that and allowing the group to write a manifesto meant that the final technical session could be used to actually set the workgroups up on Connexions. This worked well but would not have been possible with a random selection of teachers that had never worked together.

We are busy finalising our training manual and plans for support in KZN and are looking forward to some great work coming out the Tongaat area which will help teachers all over South Africa.

• Show the power of the Connexions platform for using, building, sharing and adapting resources
• Promote the formation of new communities forming that use Connexions as a use to support their activities and provide the possibility of for new communities to form
• Provide an environment that can enhance existing communities or swap and share groups

We don’t prescribe groups, we don’t force communities and we let workgroups find their own organising principle. What we promise is to support any groups/communities that do come out of our training. This makes it a little harder to ensure that a certain number of groups come out of any particular training exercise but should mean that they are less reliant on us and more sustainable.

The good news is that it is paying off, today we got our first concrete support request from a group that has formed from some teachers who were at our Cape Town workshop but, more excitingly, also teachers they’ve recruited to the group that didn’t attend our workshop.

They are already organising their own meetings without our prompting or coordination (sustainability!) and we’ll send a rep to their next meeting to help them form a workgroup on Connexions and answer technical questions.

The next step is to follow through on our hypothesis that creating an environment where communities of practice, built around curriculum resource development on Connexions, can flourish will achieve sustainability of both the site usage and the material. By partnering with Connexions we’ve already dealt with the sustainability of the software.

We are almost finished with the uploading of English and Afrikaans content for all learning areas for grades 1-9 (you can see it here) and we felt that enough had been done to start getting teachers involved on a large scale. So we jumped right in with a weekend workshop for teachers. We had a great turnout and we had to turn away many enquiries for participation in the weeks leading up to the event. A total of 70 teachers eventually participated in the weekend.

The objective of the weekend was to:

• show the power of the Connexions platform for using, building, sharing and adapting resources;
• promote the formation of new communities forming that use Connexions as a use to support their activities and provide the possibility of for new communities to form; and
• provide an environment that can enhance existing communities or swap and share groups.

The agenda was designed to consist of two parallel themes, workgroups (community) and technical (site usage), which converged in the final session where good group practices were discussed with teachers in potential workgroups. This session coincided with the participants learning how to create workgroups on the Connexions site.

I will post a more detailed discussion about communities, our process and the material we have very soon.

Agenda Teacher’s Workshop August 2009

The agenda was very dense but participants were engaged and lively right until the end and the weekend was a resounding success. You can see the photographs on our Flickr stream. We have received a lot of very positive feedback and are looking forward to supporting the participants in their use of Connexions.

In order to achieve this we had to combine a number of different partners, which made the weekend even more of a challenge as it was the first time we had run an event together. The team worked incredibly well together with everyone jumping in to help whenever anything was required. The team that has helped make the event possible includes:

• Edunova, an organisation whose goal is support the full integration of ICTs in education and provides Siyavula with technical facilitation capability
• Feather Associates and Cielarko, organisations that support the community development within the Siyavula project providing community facilitation capability
• Just Think, an organisation specialising in innovative solutions for a wide range of projects and providing the Siyavula project with training material development
• Upfront Systems, a software development company that supports Siyavula by developing extensions to the Connexions platform that meet the specific needs of the Siyavula project
• Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, an organisation providing the monitoring and evaluation of the Siyavula project to make sure that all learnings are captured and made available to other projects

Our follow-up process involves providing support to any workgroups that request help. Workgroups do not have to be restricted to participants from our weekend but can include other teachers as well. If a group requests support then one of the Edunova team will attend their meetings and provide technical and community support on the topics that the group requests. It is important that groups find their own structure, purpose, leadership and identity if they are to be sustainable on their own.

This coming weekend we’re running another workshop in Kwa-Zulu Natal which I am really looking forward to.

The conversation included a number of the Connexions team, Kathi Fletcher, Manpreet Kaur, Philip Schatz, and Vickie Nguyen, as well as Michelle Smith from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Margaret Beier from Rice University, and Roché Compaan from Upfront Systems. This diverse group ensured that we discussed issues from the technical implementation through to the research aspects of creating assessment items which are effective and useful. Specific use cases differ but collectively we want to build an assessment bank tool that can be used stand-alone or plug seamlessly into Connexions.

From the Siyavula side, our initial interest was in a question bank that:

• allows teachers to integrate questions into their Connexions modules,
• allows for the creation of random exercise sheets/tests quickly and easily that meet a set of criteria (subject, topic, difficulty, etc.),
• allows teachers to add questions to the bank, and
• accepts feedback on specific questions.

Once a critical mass of questions has been achieved, this assessment bank would allow a teacher to create a test or exercise sheet with separate memorandum in a few seconds, saving teachers a lot of time. A simple interface covering:

• subject
• grade
• topic
• number of question for each cognitive level
• and many optional refinements ex. total marks etc.

would allow us to sample the bank of questions and produce a question paper and memorandum which the teacher could download.

This also allows the teacher to make a custom exercise sheet for learners with special needs quickly and easily, be those more advanced or weaker learners.

Given that the alleviation of time pressure on teachers our focus would be on encouraging teachers to add new questions with a focus on originality and quality as well as to provide feedback on questions.

For a tool like this to be useful the questions need to be stored in such a way that we can extract the questions and solutions easily. More sophisticated use requires even more markup. We are currently leaning towards implementing the most common set of question types from the QTI-specification. Examples of the question types can be found here.

If built exposing an API the assessment bank could be integrated into other tools. One example of such a tool has emerged in discussions with Anil Kanjee of the Human Sciences Research Council (HRSC). The HSRC plans to build a diagnostic tool which couples to an assessment bank. With the correct meta-data stored for every question their tool will capture learners performance, like a Learning Management System, and provide feedback to the teacher on learner’s weaknesses and strengths. It will also allow comparison on a class-, school-, district- or national level with additional restrictions based on other relevant meta-data. The tool can then also provide teachers with recommended strategies to address learner’s shortcomings.

The HSRC has been developing questions and the required meta-data and is now busy with development of the assessment bank. The diagnostic tool will be built and trialled over the next few years.

I think that this is a very exciting extension to Connexions and will save teachers a lot of time. Alleviating some of the time pressure on teachers should have knock-on benefits in all areas as an added bonus.