My Digital School is designed to give students a different perspective on the content they are learning. Built-in learning scaffolds help pupils understand concepts they might not have grasped otherwise. Advances are made in a relatively short period of time.

Students do not have to be entertained to be engaged. Most student use computers recreationally. Although offering some graphics and animation is a sound strategy, educational software should engage students in a way clearly intended to develop skills and not to entertain.

The cost of passing by the opportunity to use effective educational materials is enormous. Researchers have measured the huge cost of illiteracy. It impacts everything from school funding, to student’s future earning and health. Well-designed software can help students learn crucial skills.
1. Engages students in active learning
2. Is easy to master and easy to maintain
3. Measurably improves learning
4. Accommodates student’s individual needs
5. Effectively supplements existing teaching styles
6. Makes teacher’s lives easier

My Digital School gives everyone involved (teachers, tutors, parents and students) the tools and opportunities to improve learning and attain positive, measurable results. The programs provide detailed coverage of the core competencies students require to succeed.

These components are discussed in more detail below.

Detailed syllabus based on the curriculum: A well designed module/unit structure of the outcomes framework bases on the RNCS. More detail is added to obtain a clearer view of what content components are required to meet the curriculum objectives. This is done for grades R-12, between 4 to 10 subjects per grade.

A textbook:

This is the entire textbook as published by Nasou Via Afrika. The textbook is converted to a digital format which is full text searchable and interactive in terms of placing bookmarks, highlights and personal annotations. Components can also be tagged and grouped and viewed in a collapsed format.

Subject references:

A reference is compiled to have available all the important components of the curriculum content for a subject for fast look-up, research and used as a study aid.

Lessons to supplement the content:

Lessons to cover in more detail, difficult areas not covered adequately in the content section. It also addresses areas, as experienced by teachers, where learners have found difficulties in understanding content and concepts. This section would also cover printable and online worksheets. Lessons must map the same modular structure as the curriculum content.

Worksheets

Worksheets are made available in the same modular format as the content. These are used for activities for learners to gain a better understanding of topics they may have difficulty in. All exercises have full solutions.

Test Centre – auto generated and marked:

Learners are assessed on what they have learned to determine if the required outcomes have been met. This comes in the form of an interactive test centre where a learner can select any number of test questions based on one or more modules or units of the curriculum content. All tests can be immediately marked by the computer and results of tests are stored to monitor learning progress.

Test and exam papers – with memos:

Here a learner can find at least 3 sample papers for both mid-year and end-year assessment based on past tests or exam papers. These papers are carefully designed to give a fair weighting for points, coverage of the content and a time allocation for the assessment.

School Projects

Here learners can explore many topics and links to other sites to find content that has been categorised under specific topic headings. This section also contains a step-by-step guide on how to plan your project, how to set it out with logical components, how to plan the substructures of these components and how to cite bibliographies.

Relevant web links:

A collection of learning area specific web links to assist in further resources for both a specific learning area and for general project research.

Personalization tools

Personalization tools – Highlighters, Bookmarks, Notes and Tags - are used to help learners find key pieces of information, to mark and tag them and to annotate the content where necessary.

Highlighters allow you to mark passages in the content you want to remember. Just as you may have used a highlight pen in school to mark up your books, so can you use an electronic highlighter to mark up content. Electronic highlighters, however, have several distinct advantages over their paper-based counterparts: they may be named for easy reference, searched to find specific information you have marked, and formatted with any of the standard character attributes available in the content (including foreground and background colours, fonts, and effects).

Bookmarks allow you to pinpoint locations in the content you may want to return to later. Like highlighters, bookmarks may be named for easy reference; they may also be moved from place to place in the content. Because they are unobtrusive, you may have as many bookmarks in the content as you need. Teacher support

Notes allow you to place comments about a paragraph or section of the content in the margin of the content. Notes appear as small "sticky note" icons in the left margin (double-clicking a note opens it for reading or editing). New notes may be added to any paragraph in the content.

Tags can be used by learners and teachers. They allow you to construct lessons from the data. Tag different components of the content then reduce the data to only tagged content. Tagging is ideal for the creation of lesson and worksheets.

Platform:

PC