Much excitement surrounded the launch of the FullMarks website which took place on the morning of Friday 27 August, at the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town.

The Siyavula team has spent weeks uploading content to this Open Education Resource (OER) platform, with content that has been contributed by Bishops Diocesan College, Pinelands High School, Pinelands North Primary School and Wynberg Girls High School. We have also previously had a workshop with AMESA KZN – see the blog post here – to empower teachers to upload and maintain their own content on the FullMarks website. At the breakfast we had reached over 3000 questions with solutions, and we watched this number ticking over, as Mark demonstrated how to use the live website.

We had a good turnout of people at the breakfast launch, despite the majority of the local principals not being able to attend due to the teachers’ strike. Over the amazing spread that constituted the breakfast buffet, everyone was given the chance to get to know each other and chat amongst themselves at their table. The conversation ranged from teaching in London, to the difficulties in South African schools with keeping up to date with current technological advancements. And that was only at one table!

Mark talked everyone through the simple registration process on FullMarks, and then demonstrated how easily one can navigate around the site, and the various functions it has to make teachers’ lives that much easier. Aside from the website having numerous questions and answers on hand just waiting to become part of a teacher’s test, a teacher is also able to generate useful statistics on learners’ performance, on a per test/topic basis. How cool is that? We have visions of many an impressed principal in the not too distant future!

The Siyavula team also brought along the first printed copies of the FHSST books, to demonstrate what is possible at R30 a copy. Everyone was suitably impressed (and we are suitably proud of them too!), and many a person asked to take a copy away with them. Unfortunately we could not oblige at this stage, but we were pleased at the response.

Joy Rosario from the DoE attended the FullMarks launch, and is very enthusiastic about the FullMarks website. Gauging the response from the audience at question time, it looks like a few other people are keen to integrate the website into their schools too. (Another) great thing about FullMarks, is that as we get more and more content from the “privileged”schools in the bank, it means that teachers from under-resourced schools will be able to use materials that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to, which we hope will help raise the level of education in South Africa. But FullMarks is not just limited to South African users because, as Mark explained, the site software is opensource and available under the Gnu Public License so it can be used anywhere and privately to manage an individual school’s database of teacher resources. All the content on the site is available under a Creative Commons License (by attribution license to be exact!), and it can be copied and tweaked to apply to whatever other need may exist.

Overall, the launch was a success, and we have seen some principals now approaching Mark to run FullMarks training sessions at their schools, or to speak at meetings about bringing technology into the classroom. This is great for the FullMarks project, as it means it is being accepted by schools, and assimilated as a new resource for the classroom. We look forward to seeing the growth that will take place over the next few months as more people become aware of the project, and start uploading content and actually using the website.

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