Today we’re excited to announce the addition of Graeme Glass to the Umoya development team!
Graeme joins the team in Cape Town as a Senior Developer and DevOps lead. He’ll be dividing his time between working on some exciting new products in the education space, and improving our technical infrastructure.
He brings a wealth of experience in building cloud-based systems using open source technologies and cloud services.
We look forward to growing our development and operations teams in 2013.
A pilot project of UmoyaFunda has been installed this week at S.I. Gobbs Secondary School in Omaruru, Namibia. This marks UmoyaFunda’s first deployment outside of South Africa.
Four classrooms were selected to receive the installation of the data projector, LessonBox and have the chalkboard converted with vinyl to a whiteboard. They also received networking via CAT 5e cable, and are now connected to the internet.
The installation of the four classrooms, network and teacher training took three days. We were amazed at how quickly the teachers gained confidence in using the new technology. they all love the system.
The chalkboard conversion in progress
Teaching Inequalities
Watching a KhanAcademy lesson on inequalities
Today Thembisa Joyi joins us as a Umoyite.
Thembisa has a BTech degree in Office Administration from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. She joins our UmoyaFunda Support Team as a Customer Support Representative and Project Administrator.
She will be assisting customers on a daily basis via our Email Support Desk as well as tracking the progress of various projects.
We are delighted to welcome her to the Umoya team.
Umoya is delighted to be partnering with Norman Henshilwood High School in Constantia, Cape Town to deliver our advanced interactive school management, teaching and learning solution called Umoya Funda.
Umoya Networks are installing a structured cable network throughout the entire school. Each classroom receives multiple LAN connections and a wireless access point for both teachers and learners to access the network.
Each classroom will have an interactive networked data projector installed which turns a standard whiteboard into an interactive teaching surface. The networked data projectors are centrally managed and also offer the ability to have messages broadcast from a single location to every classroom. The projectors have adequate sound capability allowing for a full multimedia teaching experience.
Umoya Funda “lessonbox’s” are being installed in each classroom. These specialised devices come pre-loaded with a vast library of digital content such as Khan videos, National Education workbooks, textbooks, interactive whiteboard applications, games and supplementary teaching material such as pre-prepared lesson plans aligned with the new CAPS curriculum.
Included in Umoya Funda is Umoya Sofware’s acclaimed “staffroom” school management software which makes school administration easy and gives back hours each day to teachers so they can focus on their core responsibility of teaching.
Umoya Funda includes our fundacloud service as well as myfunda learner and teacher access. Umoya Funda is designed around promoting as much interactive teaching as possible and includes functionality for mobile devices such as cell phones, tablets and laptops to be used and managed within the classroom.
Every lesson that is presented in class is recorded and can be downloaded by the learners onto their cell phones, tablets or laptops to view as many times as they need to. Recorded lessons are also ideal for learners who may have missed the class due to sickness or some other unforseen circumstance.
Umoya Funda also gives the headmaster the capability to broadcast video messages to the entire school or simply send a text message that will show up on the interactive whiteboard.
