Today Lisa, Cynthia and Karien left to head off to Estonia, California, and Cape Town respectively. It has been great having the ISKME team here and they’ve added a lot to our team strategy and approach.

We’re generating a lot of interest at the stall and many teachers have shown interest and left details so that they can be contacted about further project developments. We’ve had lots of requests for training in other areas and we will review these once SciFest09 is over and integrate them into our strategy for the year wherever possible.

Khosi and Zipi had a SABC radio interview which they held in isiXhosa.

We had a number of our training sessions that were filled to capacity which is really helping us perfect our training.

Day 6

Today William also left to head back to Cape Town and his Khanya work. Having a team with a diverse set of backgrounds really added a dynamicism to the training.

We had some great discussions with a SASOL representative, curriculum advisor and teachers all from the Secunda area that have already been working together. There is golden opportunity to connect with established programmes to deliver our message to teachers and support the formation of communities around the sharing of content.

We had a special evening training session at the Rhodes Education Department which went off without a hitch. The room was filled to capacity (28 machines) and participants included teachers and faculty. We received a very positive response from all participants and the session ran over time with everybody happy to learn more.

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.