EMPOWERING TEACHERS that's what we do!

What is happening in our world?

Happy New Years and best wishes for what is going to be a GREAT 2023, we have an amazing Newsletter to kick the year off! 

In this edition, we will be taking a look back at 2022 and where after-school.co.za is as you read this newsletter leading into 2023. We have some AMAZING goals for 2023 regarding our platform, courses, and empowerment of teachers and we will share some of this right now in this edition.

What was 2022 to us

I have always envisioned taking our training offering and making it more accessible to teachers throughout our country, reaching every teacher is still a vision I strive for on a daily basis. With the onset of CoVid, we were forced to adapt and think outside the box for our various businesses, this in turn afforded us the opportunity to explore our new platform firstly for the extra murals we offer which in turn naturally lent itself to our teacher training offering.

In 2022 we planned on completing our initial goals of, loading a technology course a month for 12 months, we surpassed this quickly, and we also planned on using a teacher or two to create content for us, we now have a number of teachers, creating relevant courses for us. We have also partnered with a number of international Universities to offer their courses (which we have had certified by SACE) on our platform.

We also wanted to see how we could make our offering even more accessible to teachers around the country and we achieved this by having multiple ways in which a teacher can sign up or be signed up. After our launch special finished we set upon making a standard registration for every teacher, thus keeping the pricing at R200 for an annual subscription.

We partnered with an NPO, Project Liberate so that companies or individuals can sponsor or use their Social Economic spending to empower teachers with an annual subscription to our platform. We launched our Gift card, so schools, family members, parents, or students could thank their teachers by purchasing a gift card/voucher for them. In 2023 we are close to launching another way in which teachers can gain access to our platform by using one of the top banking rewards programs in South Africa, to spend their rewards on purchasing a subscription.

In 2022 we launched our Soft Skills section and this was and has been greatly received with the uptake of course completions really showing its need. In 2023 we will be growing both our technology and soft skills sections. The final section we Beta launched is curriculum, here we intend to get subject experts to help us create content that supports teachers on how to teach and what to teach, our focus will be on the STEM subjects initially, watch this exciting space during 2023.

What's new on the platform?

We are super excited to be starting off the new year with two very beneficial courses which have been added to the Technology and Soft Skills sections. They are;

1) Teaching Digital Literacy: Videogames in Education (Technology)

2) How to succeed as a Newly Qualified Teacher (Soft Skills)

And then it is onto our Blue-bots and Scratch along with our Debugging the new Coding and Robotics Curriculum.

Improvements to the platform

In 2023 we are going full steam ahead with enhancing user experience and implementing Gamification into our platform.

1) We are working on improving the user experience and will be looking at enhancing the experience users have using a mobile device or cell phone.

2) We are updating the user's dashboard to show the current number of SACE points you have accumulated with completing courses on our platform, we are working with SACE all the time to streamline the experience of completing courses and your points being loaded onto the SACE database and website.

3) The most exciting part for me is that we are bringing on partners to support our gamification process, meaning that whilst you do courses you will not only earn SACE points but you will earn points that count towards a leaderboard. Upon completing various amounts of courses on our platform you will receive vouchers that can be used with our partners....all will be revealed soon, and we are SO excited about this!

Live Webinars 2023 - what's up in Jan?

This month we will be kicking off our webinar series for the year with

What is new with Blue-Bots

Besides being one of the best robots to teach directional coding, did you know that you can program the buttons to say the direction they represent in ANY language you want? Have you used the app to its max, so as to teach the concepts without having the hardware or to control your Blue-bot at the same time?

Did you know you can now use block code with your Blue-bot?

Join us for the first of our WEBINAR 2023 series, on the 25th of January at 16h00.

The Webinar series will be a live Webinar for anyone who wishes and can join us, thereafter the recorded session will be placed onto the platform for our subscribers to revisit or visit if they could not make the live session.

Holiday Extra murals!

There are still a few days left of holidays for those kids interested in doing some online extra mural courses, we have a few free ones to get them going.

We need your help!

We are always looking for teachers who would like to create content for our site. Do you passionately use technology to teach, is there an app that you think every teacher should be using - why not share? We remunerate for suitable content and we help you with the creation process, if you are interested, click on the link below and drop us a line and let us start the conversation.

Then

the more teachers we have on the site the more content we can get and the more updates and modifications we can make for you on the site, so if you wouldn't mind there are a number of ways you can do this;

a) By leaving a review after you finish a course.

b) By sharing the course you just completed on Social Media.

c) By simply telling your friends and colleagues about the platform.

How to get a subscription?