Social Media and Your School

Join Umoya Web developer, Tim Keller, and Lanner House headmaster, Arthur Preston, to find out how you can build an online professional learning network, promote your school using Social Media, rethink how your students submit work, and understand what all these buzzwords like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and Weebly actually mean to you.

South African Principals’ Association, 19 May at 15:00, Norman Henshilwood High School.

Update: Arthur Preston has blogged some additional thoughts about this talk.

Are you interested in learning computer programming? Want to find out what it is all about, without devoting too much time? Do you have a child or learner that might be interested? The University of Cape Town is holding a free course to give young learners an introduction to computer programming. They will teach the basic skills needed to start creating your very own fun and useful computer programs.

The course will be run from Friday 26 to Sunday 28 February 2010. It is targeted at learners in grades 7–10 with little or no knowledge of programming, but learners of other grades are also welcome. The course will teach Python: a real-world programming language used by many large companies such as Google, Yahoo and Industrial Light & Magic that is also easy to pick up.

The only prerequisite for the course is a fair level of computer literacy: using a web browser and text editor. The course will start from the very basics of what computer programming is about and end off with an introduction to programming concepts: flow control, lists and functions.

You can apply online at http://algorithm.cs.uct.ac.za/apply. Dead- line for applications is 21 February.

]]> http://timk.co.za/2010/01/22/school-kids-want-to-learn-computer-programming/feed/ 0 http://timk.co.za/2009/10/11/staffroom-effective-school-admin/ http://timk.co.za/2009/10/11/staffroom-effective-school-admin/#comments Sun, 11 Oct 2009 15:14:50 +0000 Tim Keller http://timk.co.za/?p=62038181

Hopefully this doesn’t across as an ad – its not. I want to discuss why we bothered building an application to help make teacher’s lives easier. Here goes.

The majority of my life has been spent around teachers. My father is a principal of a local school called Sun Valley Primary and my mother is the remedial teacher. My grandmother, aunt, brother and even fiancé are also teachers. So I’m fairly surrounded by them.

What I love about teachers, is their willingness to search for ways to improve what they do. Gone are the days of grumpy Latin teachers, and angry PE instructors who don’t. Despite the often difficult South African teaching environment, the teachers I get to see on a daily basis are passionate, dynamic and innovative individuals who work tirelessly to give their kids the best education possible.

The problem is that they’re caught in a system which requires inappropriate amounts of “admin” to be completed. There are paper-based assessments, markbooks, schedules, reports and moderations that have to be completed well outside of the standard working day. The tragedy is that, by the end of the term, they’re too worn-out to be effective in their core competency: teaching.

Enter Staffroom from Stage Right.

In late 2006, I visited my father’s school and saw how the teachers were using an arrangement of Excel spreadsheets and Word Documents to file their termly academic reports. The overworked academic heads would prepare these elaborate spreadsheets and give them to teachers on USB flash drives. These flash drives would eventually return a week later for processing.

Very often this “processing” would involve changing the font from Comic Sans 12pt back to Arial 10pt, the text justification from Justified to Left, and the textbox from two centimeters off the page to where it was meant to be. All in all, it was a circus that left staff and teachers disheartened and exhausted.

I knew there had to be better way, and I set about developing a replacement system with the following characteristics:

• No Duplication: Capture information once.
• Access Anywhere: Web-based
• Teacher-friendly: Intuitive software, designed, tested and approved by teachers.
• Security and Access levels.

Three years later, we’ve achieved that and more. Umoya Networks has integrated the software with the rest of its products. We re-branded the service “Staffroom” and launched it at the South African Principals’ Association conference in May 2009. Our operations team is busy rolling out Staffroom to several South African schools, both public and private/independent.

I encourage you to read more about it at http://www.mystaffroom.net

We recognise that we’re not going to change school admin overnight, but if we can make the painful daily tasks of being a teacher less painful, then our country’s teachers are going to be a whole lot happier and able to train tomorrow’s much needed leaders.