School 2.0 in South Africa

Dear Natural Sciences and Technology educators

Siyavula is involved in a project to create workbooks for Grades 4 – 6 in Natural Sciences and Technology, that will be printed for all schools for free, in 2013. This is in partnership with Sasol Inzalo and interested primary school educators that volunteer their time.

But we need your help!

Please join us in this collaboration! This is a fantastic opportunity for educators to have a say in the workbooks they will be using in 2013. If you know any other educators from your school or other schools who may be interested, please forward this on, on our behalf.

Over the course of three weekends, educators will unpack CAPS, and really get to grips with the new curriculum. They will be creating the workbooks – a great opportunity for professional development.

Where and when?
We will be hosted by St John’s College, Johannesburg.
If educators are not based in Johannesburg, we will be sponsoring some lucky educators from other provinces to join us for these weekends!

Workshop 1: afternoon / evening of Friday 2 – Sunday 4 March 2012
Workshop 2: afternoon / evening of Friday 23 – Sunday 25 March 2012
Workshop 3: afternoon / evening of Friday 4 – Sunday 6 May 2012

We request that educators be there for the whole of workshop 1, and then the Friday sessions of workshop 2 and 3.

Please see our flyer invitation Siyavula Invite.pdf (218.00 KB).
Please also see Siyavula Sasol Inzalo Workbooks Weekends – Additional Info.pdf (267.00 KB) for further information.
You can visit our project website at: http://projects.siyavula.com/naturalsciences/

To apply to be part of this exciting opportunity, visit: http://projects.siyavula.com/naturalsciences/get-involved/ .

Siyavula’s focus area has always been Grade 10 – 12 Maths and Physical Science. But we are very much aware that in order to produce a Science literate South Africa, one has to lay a strong foundation on which to build scientific concepts, laws and principles – starting in the earlier grades. Siyavula may have excellent FET Science and Maths textbooks, but we know that starting at FET is too late for many learners…

Siyavula News
Siyavula has some exciting news! Our openly licensed Grade 10 – 12 Maths and Physical Science textbooks have been printed by the Department of Basic Education, for free distribution across South Africa! This means that every single learner in a government school that is taking Maths and / or Physical Science in Grades 10 – 12 will receive a copy of our textbooks, paid for by the Department of Basic Education. This is hugely exciting for us as an organisation, but also for the world of open educational resources – as far as we know, this is a world first. The books have their own website and can be viewed at Everything Maths and Everything Science!

Please don’t hesitate to contact me for further information!

Kind regards
Bridget Nash
Community Coordinator
021 469 4771

Website: www.siyavula.com
The Open Innovation Studio, 27 Buitenkant Street, Cape Town, 8001A Shuttleworth Foundation Seeded Project
Website: www.shuttleworthfoundation.org

I attended a librarians’ conference last week and at some stage we got into a discussion about wether or not reading books online will ever take off. After thinking about this, I came to the conclusion that I was in any case doing most of my reading online. I still love books and I don’t think this will ever change, but I definitely do not have a lot of time to actually read a saucy novel curled up in bed or on the sofa. The “sad” reality of my life is that I am mostly curled up with my laptop, reading blogs and articles and bookmarking them for distribution to my learning networks. The only time I get to indulge myself (and it is a specific treat for me now) is when I visit my house in Hogsback (paradise). There you just have to sit in front of the fireplace with a good book or go and read it next to the stream or something!

I am trying to get my mind around actually reading whole books online and set out to see what is available. I was inspired to find a treasure cove of goodies online. In the past I have mainly downloaded ebooks in PDF format for offline reading. I on principle never print ebooks, as it is a far more costly exercise as actually buying the book and having that fresh book smell welcoming you every time you turn a page. I must also admit to never actually reading a whole book online, just snippets of text here and there for use in papers and articles. If there is anyone who would read a book online, surely it will be me?

So I have decided to investigate some book options and am busy making a listing of all free e-book sites for our  new librarians blog (see lists there) . I could not believe the variety and depth of free e-book collections from all over the internet. You can download books in a variety of formats from audiobooks to photobooks and more. You can subscribe to get a book delivered in your e-mail inbox on a daily basis in smallish chunks and of course, you can buy a Kindle or read books on your cellphone for those wasteful occasions where you are forced to spend time stuck in a que.

While I was busy with my investigations my learning network friends @rashkath and @russeltarr shared some books with me. The one book was made by a grade 3 teacher for/by her class. I like the page turning effects worked into the site….

| View Sample Photo Books | Create your own Photo Book

So what do you think? Should we start burning our dusty books yet?