The increasing pressure on teachers to manage overcrowded classrooms and complete plenty of admin while still delivering satisfactory education to students inspired DataDiGEST, a Strand-based software developing company to create edly, a cloud-based platform which comprises of three apps which aim to ease teachers' workloads.
According to DataDIGEST CEO David de Villiers, the passion for education and the need to help raise the standards inspired the innovation. "We believe teachers are the key to a great education and that's why we developed solutions that empower them in the classroom."
De Villiers explained the technology behind the platform. "On the front end the platform is built on .NET MVC in C#, in the browser simple HTML 5 is used with quite a bit of JavaScript employed on the jQuery framework to spruce things up. Some of the apps also employ Angular. On the backend, where the real magic happens, it utilises the technologies in the Microsoft Azure product range. NoSql is employed for data persistence, via Azure Storage tables, processes are managed by Azure Storage Queues and processes are actuated by Azure functions. We also utilise Azure search and MS SQL in places where needed features required those technology's strengths."
The choices for such technology was guided by cost by utilisation instead of the traditional cost for availability, De Villiers continues. The platform can be customised to suit a school's set of principles and code of conduct and runs on desktop, tablet or smartphone, he adds.
The three apps are edly Attendance, edly Behaviour and edly Note!. The former two enable teachers to capture class attendance and behaviour, while the latter sends instant reports to parents. De Villiers says the platform does not require much training and teachers are easily able to familiarise themselves with the functionalities.
"For the administrators customising the platform for their school's specific needs, it is a little more involved and thus ample documentation is available online and our support staff is only an e-mail away," he said, adding that a few schools have employed the technology. "The proof of concept application, code-named Apollo, has been successfully employed in several schools in the Western Cape, namely Oude Molen Academy of Science and Technology, Hottentots Holland High School, Bredasdorp High School, Malibu High School and Bellville Technical High School."
The main focus at the moment is to focus company resources on schools and classroom teachers. Then only will the company consider pitching to the Department of Education, he continued. "They are the front lines of education and that we believe can make the biggest difference in the educational outcomes. Our medium-term plan includes to continue work on the edly road-map which includes various additional applications, features and add-ons to save teachers time in the classroom. We are also looking to grow our classroom presence across the African region and a few selected regions outside of Africa," noted De Villiers.
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