Honeycomb 7: Writing like an Agony Aunt

Today the students didn't actually work in Honeycomb, but rather the "static site" and comments we created during our previous sessions were used as starting points and stimuli for the session.

To begin this morning we read together and shared the comments and advice we had left for William, Greg and Claire in our previous sessions using the Honeycomb Worry Website as a shared text. The children were asked to work in pairs to identify the ideas that they thought the characters might find helpful, and then to work with me as a class to create a model opening for a letter to one of the characters. Prior to the session I had created a Smart Board Notebook, that divided the letter into the three sections I wanted the children to use in framing their response, within this I provided sentence/paragraph openers that they could choose from, to discuss and develop as they wrote.

Using their Asus Web books in pairs the children were asked to open the wordprocessing package "write" to create their own advisory letters to the story character of their choice. They were allowed to "steal" openers if they felt they needed to and encouraged to use, add to expand and improve the ideas modelled by their friends to support the advice they gave. Throughout the session the students were stopped and encouraged to read aloud their letters as they developed. Suggestions were sought as to where they might go next, while this process also offered opportunities for other children to reread, review and edit their works in progress in response to what they had heard.

To end the session students were asked to attach and send their letters by email to me for moderation, review and printing. As web books the Asus Ees do not have a direct connection to our school network or print solution, they are intended to be used to support use of local applications alopngside the online learning tools and storage spaces we are providing such as the VLE. Drop boxes are the main vehicle for doing this in our current environment, however as I have mentioned in previous posts I really want the students to see our VLE as just this a Virtual Learning Environment, and a social tool to boot. The drop box approach seemed somehow not quite right contextually for this activity and the type of work the children have engaged in. The emails and letters are currently sitting in my inbox, awaiting a response. Being concerned not to lose the enthusiasm that this process has evoked, I am thinking after all their hard work that the pairs of students should recieve a reply from the characters they have sought to help. This should not be too difficult or time consuming, drafting a short standard reply from each character, that can be copied, pasted and edited to provide a little personalisation . Keeping the children hooked in this way I hope will be a really cool in and starting point to the next phase of our writing process which will involve the children using the ideas we have developed empathetically to write their own dilema based stories on these characters and evolving around similar themes. It will be interesting to see what response having an email from either Wiliam, Claire or Greg will have on Monday Morning. Hopefully next week we will be able to upload our letters to the class blog and share some of the outcomes. In the mean time here is a taster offered by two of the boys...

Dear Greg

We are sorry to hear that you have been having girl problems. This is something we don't usually have. We both have a sister and know all about the problems that girls can cause.

Why don't you start by talking to her at lunchtime. You can find out about her and see what she is in to. After that you can ask her out then if she says yes, you can take her on a date somewhere she might like to go. Perhaps you could go to the movies or for a walk in the park.

Good Luck

J and B

I wish I'd had friends like them when I was at Primary school.

Previous Posts

• Honeycomb 4: Thinking Through an Online Role Play Project
• Honeycomb 5: Beginning our Role Play Task
• Honeycomb 6: Collecting Ideas For Empathetic Writing
  

Honeycomb 6: Collecting Ideas For Empathetic Writing

The students had a fantastic time today using our Worry Web to engage with character problems presented from the text we have been sharing this week. I was beginning to worry myself that the work done over last weekend to set up the static site model would flop disasteroulsy if I couldn't get the technology to work for me rather than against as seemed to be the case yesterday.

The problems/dilemas the children were asked to consider were those of three children

William who thinks he is useless at everything...

Greg, who says "I like this girl. I like her very much. I want to be her friend. I want to be her BOYfriend. I've gone all red and shuddery and yucky just typing it! I hate all this lovey-dovey stuff. It really sucks. I don't want to feel like this. I generally HATE girls."

and Claire who says "I have this nightmare. Its really scary. I don't know what to do. I dream it every single night. Does anyone else have nightmares or am I the only one?"

The three problems stirred up active discussions, and it was interesting to see this evening which of worries the children had chosen to respond to in most detail, and how responses had divided along gender lines.

Greg got some really interesting responses from the girls, who interestingly set about replying by changing the perspective for him by reviewing the problem and presenting a way of dealing with what he wanted to do from their point of view. Several of the responses included a "Well as I am a girl," viewpoint, while sharing with him their wisdom and outlining some of the things they thought he might do.

Claire seemed to gain most responses from the boys, who were quick to point out she was not alone, they too had nightmares or bad dreams, they tended to explain the reasons they thought they had "bad dreams" and made practical suggestions about how they had overcome these. These included sitting down and trying to relax before bedtime, emptying their minds and thinking happy thoughts. Perhaps the problem stemmed from the things she was watching on TV. One of the students explaining how he asked his mum to help him decide if the things he wanted to watch might be too scary if close to bed time. There were also some interesting suggestions about what to eat and drink and ideas about how to make yourself comfortable before trying to go to get off to sleep, perhaps taking a waterbottle and teddy to bed, putting luminous stars on the ceiling and so on.

It has been really interesting reading the responses to see how the nature of the space seemed to affect the boys partiucularly in terms of the things they said. The sympathetic and open way they said they too had nightmares, and the suggestion of a teddy bear is something some of the "cooler" guys would probably not have suggested so matter of factly. There was none of the switch to "she could" we would have gained in discussion, but more of the "why don't you.?" or "you could try.." type of response, that is exactly what Iwant to develop in our writing outcome.
I am really pleased about how the task and environment engaged the students empathetically with the talk for writing process. It also began the initial drafting of models we will draw on for our guided write tomorrow.

During our writing task I want to build on today's using the comments collected as scaffolds to help us write Agony Aunt type responses to the characters. When we planned this process I was thinking how interesting it would be for the children to work with the responses we collected to write a Dear Claire, William or Greg Letter. I am now wondering about having the children create these collaboratively using a word processor and offering two publishing outcomes. One to be printed for display, the other publishing to their Blog spaces, in order to extend the conversation and commenting process as part of an AfL and review activity. Encouraging review of each other's letters not only in terms of the content or how they feel about the advice. But also in terms of our ongoing writing targets while extending our ongoing work around reading for meaning.

Previous Posts

• Honeycomb 4: Thinking Through an Online Role Play Project
• Honeycomb 5: Beginning our Role Play Task

Honeycomb 5: Beginning our Role Play Task

Today during our literacy session the students began their work using the version of the "Worry Website" I created in Honeycomb over the weekend. During this session our focus was on writing in role and how we might begin a conversation or response to character's problem. If these students/characters were in our class, how might we encourage them to talk or listen to us and the things we had to say?

The session was slow to start, even though the students are now familiar with the log in process to access our Wireless network and VLE from their Asus Ees, today was the first time we had visited Honeycomb in a while, and the first time we had visited it from the direct hyperlink added to our class page. Hopefully tomorrow the process will be quicker.

We did encounter a problem today however which we struggled to find a work around for, and currently I am not sure whether this is an issue with Honeycomb, something we will have to think about when using the Asus, or perhaps a combination of the two. The comment box in Honeycomb is fixed and does not float, its size in the browser, combined with the inability to scroll within this page element meant that the add comment button appeared in most cases out of view in the browser window. Thinking on my feet I was able to rescue the situation suggesting that for today the children draft their comments to Use on our Worry web pages in "write" to transfer later. This will mean students either going through a slightly extended process of tranferring these files to the network, and so as not to lose the work and impetus from today, adding these comments when we complete the task and engage with our comment reviews tomorrow.

One or two of the machines seemed to give different renderings of the environment, allowing use of the add comment button, and I thought I would share a couple of the outcome comments generated as part of the task today to give a flavour of how this task is beginning to effect the student's thinking process.

What I am really pleased with in these examples is the apparent empathy that the environment has begun to create in the two student comments. They have begun to put themselves in the shoes of Claire, and to draw on their own experiences as they offer advice and support about the problem using

• "the you are not alone perspective," sharing how a similar event has affected them
• "the in my experience approach" offering practical suggestions about the things that have worked for them.

It is still early days for this activity but these comments are useful beginnings to support the discussion I want to generate around language choices when we respond to others.
They also offer models we can develop or use to frame our agony aunt responses during this week's writing outcome.

Previous Posts

• Honeycomb 4: Thinking Through an Online Role Play Project

Honeycomb 4: Thinking Through an Online Role Play Project

This term we have begun to use our Asus Ees in the classroom, and during one of our VLE blogging sessions the students began asking when we were going to be working in Honeycomb again. Well guys the answer is this week, and here's some of my thinking as I am preparing the tools I want to use with my class.

At the moment we are working on an extended literacy unit based on stories with dilemmas, and during our planning time last week, my partner teacher suggested using the text "The Worry Web Site" by Jacqueline Wilson as a stimulus. I loved the idea and an immediate thought was how much fun it might be if we could get the students to begin interacting with the text as if they were "Agony Aunts." The writing outcome we have proposed for next week after we have engaged with some of the children's dilemmas together from the book is to have the children draft a reply, to help a character overcome their dilema. Thinking about this for the last couple of days and how cool it would be to bring a version of the worry website to life that they could engage with in real time I wondered first of all about our VLE and creating an imaginary user space. But then I began to think about Honeycomb.

The space we need for this doesn't need to be all singing and all dancing, but does need to provide an environment where the children can interact together safely and socially, while experimenting with their thoughts and how they communicate their ideas and structure how they might offer their advice. I have put together 3 simple pages to act as a stimulus for this, all of them are simple web page like mockups.

1. The Worry Website Home Page
2. and 2 based on the Worries of two of the characters in the book Greg and Claire.

My original thoughts were to create a Wiki and allow the children to engage directly with the page adding their ideas as the week developed, however after some thought I began to see that maybe this might not work in quite the way I wanted the sessions to develop. I began to think instead how this might be an ideal opportunity to develop the space for "Role Play," as an interesting situation for the children to practice their commenting skills.

Honeycomb does not currently allow the creation of internal hyperlinks between a users pages. But colleague John Sutton has suggested a neat workaround for this. By saving the Home Page I have made as a Honeycomb Blog I can transfer the contents of each page in the model "Worry Web" I have already made to create a post and so allow navigation between the home page and the individual "worries." This has involved a little reworking of the material I made earlier, but now I can use this space to encourage the students to work together to plan and share their comments for each of our "worriers."

Commenting on Blogs is a real skill, and something I am not very good at myself. It should be really good fun to work with my students as they practice this skill. I am really looking forward to exploring this process with the class this week. Perhaps using it as part of our "Speaking and Listening" focus to develop a list of dos and don'ts that can help us work together more successfully in our other online environments.

Previous Honeycomb Posts

• Preparing to Work Online With Honeycomb
• Honeycomb 1: Peer Review or The Joy Of Commenting
• Honeycomb 2: Students innovating on a teacher tool
• Honeycomb 3: News, Thoughts, Reflections and Tools From Other Places

Honeycomb 3: News, Thoughts, Reflections and Tools From Other Places

Thanks to James Watson for pointing me last week to the new Honeycomb Blog a space where Softease will be sharing news and views around the tool as it emerges.

I have also enjoyed tweeting and chatting with colleague John Sutton, about his views on the tool and how he has been implementing and using the space. His recent post outlining introductory work with his Year 5 and 6 groups is a really good read. I like particularly his idea of using lists to create autobiographies, something he has posted on previously in using blogs with students. Keeping these lists short and around themes seems a great way of allowing children to affirm who they are while providing oppportunities to consolidate and discuss further esafety and netiquette issues.

I was thinking how useful they might be to support student response to web based and book based research. Perhaps as John has done initially encouraging students to read together from a range of material, before using a list or series to record, highlight and share the ideas they think are important and comparing these across texts.

A recent post from Angela Maiers, on "Determining Importance" in texts by listening to the author's voice and responding, highlighted again the importance of bringing multimodality to the texts we share, but has come to the fore here through John's post and his reminder of the need to consider bias when working with students in an online world.

Helping students to understand the nature of fact and opinion, and the higher order skills required to sift infromation from disinformation. Deciding what is valuable and what is not,
what is important or trivial are key and critical skills for students using the web, but it is also important to remember, that what is important to us may not have the same value for others, and to consider why this may be.

Angela's post and the video that accompanies it shows how she likes to use the author's name when thinking about and formulating questions and responses. Simple enough you might think, but do we place as much importance on the author and their voice as we do on the way the text is written, and its content? How often do we bring personality and voice into the work we share? Do we do this at all with Non Fiction? Angela's approach here gives a personality to the writer, the text representing the author's voice in the learning space where she and the students are working, and enabling a role for the author in the conversation to be had. With my class we have worked to develop a sense that what we write reflects what we have to say. Angela's video moves this on bringing the author as a person into the space, as she encourages her students to ask and direct questions toward them through the text as an interface, seeking to find what it is they are trying to say, before asking the students if they feel the important points have been made from their perspective. Since the author is not actually there, the students are required to infer what the response might be, and to challenge whether the text provides the outcomes and information they may be looking for.

Looking at John's work using All about Explorers I was wondering what my students might make of the "spoof website," when guided through a process of responding to the texts as a starting point, for critical web literacy work. For those of us unsure or still uncomfortable with linking ICT tools directly to units of work as writing outcomes, this would be an ideal way to use critical reading as a starting point in the process perhaps through notetaking and discussion to begin, using comparison charts and lists to plan and create simple non fiction texts that could be shared online for comment and discussion. The frame provided by Angela, could be adapted to support peer review and commenting work, since it consolidates the presence of the person behind the voice/text and key to what we are looking for in supporting students in understanding the relationships between reading and writing, their purpose and function.

Online collaborative learning tools, (eg Honeycomb, Think.com, VLEs) are not single applications but rather composite toolsets. Honeycomb specifically is intended as an open and flexible environment, that can be used on its own, but which I can see working well and progressively in tandem with others, either "plugged in" or used as a standalone to meet a range of "pedagogical outcomes." Most of the ideas I have been using with my students this term for example have been adapted from previous work carried out in other places, or as in this post built around those borrowed from colleagues. Many of these ideas were initially developed while using Think.com with students, and in turn were adapted from table top tasks used with students as community builders and collaborative/cooperative activities pre web. These links to previous posts present some of these tasks, and are posts that hopefully readers may find useful.

• Think.com: Starting Up Your Community Part 1
• Think.com: Student Voices Part 1
• Think.com Community Learning Activities (Thematic History)
• Bill And Ben's Outstanding Adventure: Closing One Chapter to Begin a New for Online Learning
• Think.com a practical place to engage with E Safety
• Chain Stories

Honeycomb 2: Students innovating on a teacher tool

Before I began working with the students last week I had a play with some of the tools that Honeycomb had to offer for myself, including the "wikki" and page share tools.

Using page share I set up a page about Grace Darling the Victorian Heroine we would be using as the focus for our Newspapers and Reconts unit. While planning this I had created some screen captures from a flash based tool found on the Shorething Website, to support IWB based "talking for writing" tasks and to assist in sequencing events, and added these to the shared image bank.

Using the share space ("wiki"), (image above) one of my students J, has has created a tool similar to that we had used on our Smartboard to engage and involve us actively in recreating the story for ourselves, dragging these screenshots onto the page and adding a label asking can you sort these pictures? This is something I have to admit I had not thought of, but what a great idea, an online interactive storyboard... This is a tool I feel sure we can work more on later. Thanks for the inspiration J:-)

Honeycomb 1: Peer Review or The Joy Of Commenting

Popping into Honeycomb this evening was an absolute joy... Its official and from the mouths of babes, I can design cool pages. Greeting me when I logged on was a comment from C, who is as chatty in text as she is face to face.


Visiting her space to reply I was greeted with her home page now with the addition of a poem she had written in school today, and a browse around leading to a blog she had added that included an additional poem innovating on one developed in previously in class about Morning.

In addition to her own work, C had also been busily visiting her friends leaving encouraging comments and stickers too. What I was particularly impressed with was her use of the "assessment Sandwich," A slice of well done, followed by a filling of astute and insightful things to help her friends make their work better and sealed inside a further slice of encouragement. These will be really great tools to help others see how we can work and learn together in this space. Thanks C you are an inspiration.

Preparing to Work Online With Honeycomb

This term I have been working with my students to revise and review how we use some of the communications tools we have previously engaged with while waiting for the return of all their e safety agreements to begin work with a new, and very cool tool Honeycomb.

I first saw and played with this environment during the pilot stages following preview release at BETT in January 08, and was excited by the potential it seemed to afford for online collaborative and home school learning activity. This week most esafety agreements returned I was finally able to get most of my class logged in for the first time.

In the build up to this session we have spent time working on the web, practicing the skills we need to find, collect and store materials for use while working in Honeycomb. This has been done by working in local applications to consolidate skills that would be useful when agreements were returned.

To begin we spent some time exploring and working together on the Simpson's Movie website. Here the students designed and saved "avatars" that they could use as online representations of themselves. We also resized and cropped these to make smaller "icons" that we could use alongside our work on the class blog or perhaps to represent our work later in wiki pages developed within the Honeycomb environment. This has been part of an ongoing process of introducing the importance of keeping our online identity safe. We have considered and discussed how, if we can use images like this to represent ourselves can we be absolutely sure of who we are talking to online. Introducing the concept of how "stranger danger" in the online world might be dealt with as we do in the "real world," through seeking advice and help from an adult we trust, has been a key teaching and learning point for these activities. It was interesting to see how many students tried to create avatars, that were charicatures of themselves but a really great device to further consolidate the main e saftey teaching point of this process was when some student avatars outrageously moved away from the physical person they really were.

In addition to this, we also began modelling the process of collecting visual material to support topics and themes we were working on in class. This included beginning to make with the students local network image banks or share folders from photographs the students had captured on visits or downloaded from the web. We initially used these in local applications through the file insert process. This was intended to prepare the children for the collect and store process needed in learning how to upload images to publish to their Honeycomb pages. To practice and familiarise them with the browse to find, and browse to upload process, we used local applications with which they were familiar such as 2 create and 2create a story, developing multimedia texts around for example our visit to the SS Great Britain. In order to develop these the students were required to download images from cameras and the web first and then to use the browse and insert process to include their images in their documents.

What I am already loving about Honeycomb is that despite its ease of use, it does not wash down the process of getting material onto the web. In order to get an image into a page it must first of all be imported or uploaded to the webspace. As with most current online spaces images cannot simply be copied and pasted, as with local tools, and this is something I feel is really important for students to understand. To get an image from a web page to Honeycomb it must first be downloaded and then uploaded. This provides a very physical opportunity to introduce students to a key esafety aspect, that of intellectual property rights. It is all too easy when using local tools to simply copy and then paste images from the web. I hope the process of using Honeycomb will provide an opportunity to discuss and help students understand the importance of saying thank you, acknowledging the person/people or place that has provided any materials we use. This is still to come, in the course of our work but is key reason I hope the environment's developers, softease, do not seek a route that would make image inclusion possible simply by copy and paste. The principle of "collect, store, prepare and share," on which the above is based, is also key to the elearning projects to be developed using Asus Ees as generic tools and web books over the coming year.

This weeks session was intended to be simply introducing how to log in, log out and to set up our first page. Our preparatory work carried out using local applications and previous work on blogging has proven incredibly useful in enabling the students to work with the tool. Here is one example created by a student who currently has no internet access at home. This was her first attempt at using an online authoring environment beyond the class blog where importing images had been largely supported.


During this first paired 45 minute session J managed to log in, create a new page, customise the background, upload and insert her avatar, give her home page a title, spending some time playing with font style, size and format as well as browsing the available image bank to include a few images a short piece of body text asking her friends what they think about her avatar? The students have begun to make suggestions about how they would like to use the tool beyond school to support home learning tasks, something I hoped would begin to emerge later as they worked with the environment but that is extremely encouraging in terms of supporting development of future home/school e learning projects.

I began today visiting pages and leaving comments on student pages only to discover that I been pipped to the post, discovering on my page a nugget that had been left already. Thanks J:o) I'm quite fond of my avatar too!


There are one or two things that I personally still need to sort out and explore. Think.com allowed access to review work published by students in one page, and when blogging we can use RSS feeds to pull together material for review to one space, to monitor engagement or to remove/flag for follow up. A message today from a colleague reminded me that this was something to be further investigated and a potential management issue within Honeycomb. Maybe we have missed a tool that will enable this to happen, but nonetheless is something to explore further if I intend to use the tool with students beyond the school day. Currently I have set the environment so that children can only publish and comment within their year group, which hopefully will make this manageable, but also begun to extend previous online experiences by asking that students leave a comment on my pages when they have published, so I and other children can see, share and check out what they have been working on.

The students were certainly fired up by the tool and I hope we can maintain this level of motivation. This is potentially the start of an exciting experience, one that I hope will allow me to develop further the online pedagogies I began using in Think.com, I also hope that the students will begin to use the tool to extend their classroom learning experiences as it is perhaps linked to activities set for home learning within our upcoming elearning project and as we move towards the opening of our new school in the spring term. I look forward to any comments. :o)

Planning My Classroom Learning Wall: Learning and Thinking Together

Previously I have posted about our School contract and online charter, which use the principle of 3 Bees, "be responsible, be respectful, be safe" to support students understanding of why we have these guidelines. In class we unpick what each principle means to us, and work together to form our classroom learning contracts from these, discussing what they might look like in action, sometimes using digital images and captions to model these processes and routines in action, providing students with visual frames of reference and models of what we think desirable classroom behaviours and actions look like.

As a staff we recently began discussing how we could develop these using the bees as characters to help students link learning behaviours to targets for curricular learning, support self and peer assessment and help develop autonomy and ownership over personal and group learning paths. I thought I'd post today this draft centrepiece for my classroom learning wall, and current thoughts around how I'd like this to work in my classroom. Its a bit tatty at the moment as it is lying on my study floor. Each child is represented in the display as a "bee." The honeycomb in the centre is where we will be displaying our learning to learn and speaking and listening targets for class and group work. These will be unpicked with the class to help identify the smaller steps that describe the learning path we need to follow towards them. Personal targets I am thinking could also be displayed here as "keys to learning," "honeypots," or individual student "flowers." This still needs some thought and discussion with the students though to enble ownership and so the display does not become too contrived.

Anyway expanding the metaphor, and building on colleague sugesstions, since bees tend to work cooperatively within a hive, each hive here represents a student home team or group. I would like the students to extend work we have already begun to develop greater ownership and responsibility for reviewing and evaluating their progress together towards and within these targets, and am currently pondering how we might extend use of tools like comic life, digital imaging, audio recording and our class blog to enable and encourage this.

I was struck the other day by Wordle, and how the visual representations of text had helped me see ideas differently, am considering thispart of the mix to promote talk around learning. I am pondering how the creation of weekly or monthly text files to gather thoughts and ideas during review, might be useful in encouraging and supporting learning about learning. Asking students to use one word to sum up their groups feelings about how they worked together, their learning tasks and outcomes, or to record student descriptions of what they have learned or now understand from a particular activity could be really powerful for later discussion and as evidence of progression in the use of process skills. Student repetition would be really valuable in this case highlighting through the "cloud" commonalities in their ideas and thinking. Perhaps these could also help to support development and use of the vocabulary we need to describe features of learning and thinking together in tasks. They might also be great to display on our learning wall, visually representing aspects of our learning journey, forming starting points for discussion as we develop our grow our common language of learning. They could also be an interesting way to post to our class blog as a starting point to mediate discussions with parents and other stakeholders in our learning community about what has been going on in school.

I also want to link the use of this classroom tool with how we further develop and embed learning within and beyond school through the use of online community tools. A nice tool to use with this would be Honeycomb, for obvious metaphorical reasons, but a new look at home school learning that sees these virtual places as flexible places to extend ongoing classroom projects and activities collaboratively will be an interesting place to start in developing a modelled framework for use of our VLE as we approach the huge changes due to our school in January 2009.

This is only a starting point and a bit of a ramble, but I would value any thoughts or contributions you might have.

Honeycomb Video Demonstrations

Doug Dickinson has published a link to his video demonstrations of Softease's new Web 2.0 Learning Environment Honeycomb. This tool really excited me on my visit to BETT08, not as a standalone system, but its potential to engage students and teachers in content development, management and sharing within a learning centred toolbox approach to the use of ICTs. Check out the tool and its affordances for your self by visiting this link

Bett 2008: Softease Honeycomb

First impressions of this per pupil subscription based web 2.0 development environment for schools, led me to ask for a follow up onsite demo at school, and to discuss pricing initially for 250 user s with colleagues on the Softease stand.

What is Honeycomb? "In a nutshell, an integrated set of online creativity and collaboration tools that work through the Internet." (Softease 2008)

Based on the familiar object based functionality of other software in the softease stable, A range of web style pages can be quickly and visually compiled within a "wysiwyg" environment. Including page elements is achieved simply by dragging required components onto a page from prepared libraries, and then using familiar drag and drop techniques to place and resize the objects. Images, video and audio content, can be selected from available material within the environment or developed/downloaded and then imported for upload and use in a shared library, either by the teacher or the students. This may at first glance seem complex, but experiences with students using blogs and Think.com have shown how quickly students come to understand the idea that unlike local applications, web based material cannot be simply created by copy and paste. Text is also added to pages by drag and drop, by creating a text box object and then typing into it. Since the environment is object based, every item on the page is movable, by clicking and dragging, so items placed on the work space can be dragged and rearranged until the author is happy.

This is quite a development, in terms of the work I have previously done with students. Think.com for example, which I still think is a fabulous and powerful place to work with students is essentially modular, with each page being developed through the addition of blocks. Blogging too has a linear feel, with each new post, being added to the page in an essentially linear fashion. What I found appealing about Honeycomb, is the individual design element it begins to facilitate for the student. In some ways it reminds me of the Microsoft Publisher type approach to page design, but with direct publication of outcomes possible. In this way it is possible to bring to the environment a feel for the way you would like your page to look, and then to apply page elements to achieve this. For me viewing textual engagement multimodally requires this page design element to brought into play as a feature of writing as well as reading, and so this environment as a structure for learning about web based texts has possibilities for engaging students with available page designs on the web, allowing evaluation, and extension of work to consider how as authors in this environment we intend to engage our readers.

"Honeycomb is about pupil creativity and collaborative learning. This is at its heart, and its future direction will be founded upon this premise. This is why Honeycomb, similar to our previous release Podium, has been designed to serve specific education purposes and is suitable for pupils of all ages and differing abilities. As far as we’re aware such a development is currently unique in the market place." (Softease 2008)

The environment states an intent to enable pages to to be developed that perform a host of functions, currently these include wiki spaces to support collaborative work, the development of web pages and blogs. Although I am an enormous fan of think.com, and have begun to extend this work through blogging, as I said above both these environments are essentially linear in there nature. That is to say the young user of these spaces have no design control over page layout and design. I have favoured the use of other environments such as PowerPoint, 2simple's 2create, MS Publisher to enable engagement with the process of page design and layout, embedding these within html pages to give web life to them later. The structure of and tools available within the Honeycomb environment may for the first time provide a context in which my students could have their first taste of real, multimodal web design.

I am by no means a company man, favouring instead and strongly committed to a multiple tool and environment approach to the teaching of ICT skills. I would not be happy providing one tool for my students to fulfill all needs. There are still some things I want to further investigate through demo.

Looking at this tool, I am interested in its possible role in content management and development. And how we might be able to use it to support student and colleague ownership over the development of publishable web based content.

Purpose and contextual use of tools for communicating is key I feel in the development of learning with and about ICT. We use a number of other tools to develop material for web publication. The power for example of flash packaging material through export from 2 simple environments, has been incredibly powerful in enabling our students to publish material to the web through a third party. I am sure an argument might be that with Honeycomb, this would not be necessary as the students can use the environment itself to communicate multimodaly, but there are affordances within tools such as this that are currently not available, and personally I like the idea of using a range of software environments to explore representations, using this common format would enable cross compatibility. I am still not clear just how possible this is within honeycomb, though a suggestion was hinted at by importing flash applications to the picture library.

Used to working in Think, I am familiar with the leaving of stickies, messages on pages, by other students. Within honeycomb students can also leave comments as with blogs in the real world, but an exciting dimension to this tool for those of us interested in assessment for learning, is because the environment is object based, special icons can be left in addition to comments on particular page elements. By dragging these and associating them with an object, perhaps a gold star, or a tick, can be used to indicate elements that are liked, with perhaps, a comment being left to suggest an area for improvement. I like this and its potential affordance to engage students in self and peer evaluation. The "two stars and a wish," strategy seem to take on a whole new dimension here.

I know that Honeycomb is not intended as a web content and management environment, though one of the possibilities it seems to potentially afford, is that of student and colleague ownership through the development of communities within school. I would be interested to see how this might or could be developed to allow closed project development, that can eventually be opened live to the web via the school website. This links closely to some ideas I have already begun to develop through blogging in class, and have experienced regarding blogging projects in other schools. I am looking forward to exploring some of these questions and ideas further with James when we meet later this term.