Barbara Mallinson recently launched Obami – a new social networking site in Johannesburg, South Africa that is available only to students, teachers and parents in participating schools. TechCentral wrote a great article on them a few days ago.
The site currently supports five schools. It allows students, teachers and parents at member schools to interact with one another. Obami has many of the features similar to Facebook such as allowing users to post status updates and view news feeds, create mini blogs, share photos and chat. In the works are applications that will provide supplemental aid to students for homework and test taking.
Obami seems poised to provide a real value-add for students, teachers and parents as they continue to expand. Students doing research on a subject located thousands of miles away may be able to reach out to other students or resources located in that region to aid their research. Parents will have more transparency and information for the typical, “what did you learn at school today” conversation around the dinner table. Teachers will be able to communicate and augment their course schedules like never before. It will be interesting to see how well these groups embrace Obami and interact with one another as the company grows.
Keep Learning!
Daniel
