Playing With iSpring Free

I am looking forward to a bit of time over the next couple of weeks to kick back, unwind, play, write and share some of the things I have been up to recently. I have decided to begin by exploring a tool I was introduced to and shared before Christmas but that in the midst of our move to new premises I have not had time to play with.

The tool is iSpring Free, a downloadable plugin for PowerPoint, that enables the slideshows we create to be exported, shared and displayed as flash video files. I originally came across the tool as a recommended "gadget" by a pilot partner from Netmedia, as a way for colleagues to use an environment they are familiar with to develop multimedia content for the VLE.

With iSpring we initially identified how colleagues could use the tool very simply alongside PowerPoint to create

• photo albums
• simple illustrated texts
• Visual writing prompts and models etc

to support online projects.

The tool could also be used in a similar vain with students to allow multimodal texts they created in Powerpoint, to be published directly to webspaces without their reader needing to download a viewer, or as we have often done in the past, publishing their show as a web page for upload and sharing.

I have used online host spaces to publish and share simple linear shows such as learning stories and those I want to use with colleagues away from site, and either embedding these to my blog or logging on in situ to access them full screen. The functionality of PowerPoint however allows so much more than this in terms of developing content. The inclusion of hyperlinks for example allows navigation to be included, and a multidimensional or layered effect to be added to the shows we produce, allowing us and our readers to explore and move around a show in our own way by travelling directly from one slide in the show to another and back again. This feature is generally lost when we upload files to sites such as these.

iSpring while creating its flash file, maintains the hyperlinks enabling the slideshows to behave as they would in slideshow view in PowerPoint. The slideshows remain navigable. Here are a few examples that I converted today to show what I mean.

This Linear show is a learning story/Documentary developed with students as an integral part of a Creative Partnerships Animation Project a number of years ago. Clicking on each slide or using the control bar allows the reader to move from one slide to another in sequence. The show is rather long, but was presented to the students as behind the scenes look at the project and contextualised as DVD behind the scenes look at the film making process. It was later used as a kiosk show in school and at a a local conference on loop to share the process behind the project developed with students. It may be of interest in its entirity as a learning story in this context as well as a demo of this particular piece of software.


This textured or layered show includes hyperlinks. As you navigate watch out for arrow images embedded on some of the slides. These invite you as a reader to engage and interact with the content, to move to other slides that present development ideas and thinking points based in the page you have just visited and also direct you back to this with another hyperlink. The slides can either be navigated in a linear fashion by clicking the slide, or by clicking hyperlinks the reader can move between slides directly. This show created a number of years ago in PowerPoint was an early attempt on my part to create a layered text, with and for students. This has also been published previously on this blog as a swf file generated using 2create.



This file also a linear presentations, contains three poems developed by groups of students using images from the web to think about similes and set to auto run.



These files developed by students, both use hyperlinks in Powerpoint to navigate the show in different ways. The first was created as an esafety unit outcome with Y6 students scaffolded by by this great online resource from teaching ideas. The second example was created by pairs of Y 5 students as part of a challenge to create a CD ROM style book for younger students based on the Non Dialogue based Narrative Bert.





It has been great this morning while looking for files to play with to revisit earlier works, and through experimenting with iSpring to give a new lease of life to some of them, and to display them as I would have originally liked to share them. It has also been useful to begin extending thoughts about how tools such as this can open new paths for old tools, thoughts and ideas.

UK based colleague at porchester has been using iSpring as a tool to help his students publish developed content to their school's blog based web site, and says

Particular favourites of mine from the work presented here are poems such as this based around snowfalling. The power of this for me lies in the multimodal nature of the presentation. Moving beyond text and images, the animation effects applied to the text, with the addition of sound add much to the overall atmosphere and depth of the piece. Very cool.

This is a tool I think I will have to come back to some more this week.

Memories are Made of This: Narrative Recounts and Photostory 3

I haven't been able to get to my Blog recently. The end of term is approaching all too quickly, but this alone hasn't accounted for my not being able to make space and time to write. December 16th is not only our end of term, but represents the end of an era for our current school building. When we reconvene in mid January, the buildings that were once Teyfant Community School, will begin to disappear, hopefully not too violently, beneath the landscape that will form the new BSF through campus site, known as the Bridge Learning Campus.

I have spent many happy years working here, interspersed with the odd secondment. Some of these were intended to lead to other things, but the place and its people have always drawn me back. This move comes during a year that not only means a new beginning, but also at a time when "the old school" has reached a significant landmark in its own service to the community, its 50th aniversary. To celebrate the life of the school we and our students have ended our time here with a themed fortnight looking back over those years.

Making A Simple Video Timeline

As a stimulus to begin work with my class I made a video timeline using Photostory, Moviemaker and CDex. To begin our look back over the past 50 years I spoke with colleagues about their significant moments and used these materials from connected Earth, to frame web searches for images use. The web based collect and store process, began with a google image search. These images were saved to the network, in a share folder, alongside images scanned from dated photographs we had of the local area, and school itself during the period.

Once the collection had been made, these images were imported to Photostory, and using the timeline feature here, each image was dragged into time order. Using the text tool, dates were added as ovelays to each image, before saving the project and exporting it as a video file (.wmv).

Using CDex, I "extracted" mp3 tracks from my CD collection to represent each era in the life of the school, then using Moviemaker began the prepare stage of the process,

• Firstly the video from Photostory and the music tracks were imported to collection.
• The video file was dragged to the timeline,
  
• and each music track in turn dragged to the audio timeline.

Using the crop tool, each audio track was then adjusted, by dragging it to fit within the video clip it represented. The video was then previewed and "played about with" until I was happy with the audio and video.

Using the audio tools in Moviemaker I then clicked on each audio clip inturn adding a fade in and fade out to each clip, before finally exporting the completed video.

E Safety Point: I used music from my CD collection so I cannot publish the timeline here, but perhaps the process outlined above will be useful in helping others to make a similar tool for themselves. If interested I would be prepared to remove references to our school and upload the video minus soundtrack for others to use as a starting point.

Student Outcomes: Digital Narrative Recounts

In class we invited past students, some of whom were the children's parents and grandparents to visit and to talk about their experiences of Teyfant. As you will see in the video clip presented below the students gained a great deal from this process, interviewing and listening to voices from the past, not only provided insight to what the school was like, but also provided modelled voices in past tense to frame the script writing process for the video I wanted them to engage with.

We combined elements from the QCA art unit viewpoints, with a short literacy unit developed from the student's previous recount work to create their scripts.

Beginning from the students we discussed our favourite memories and places associated with these from around the school site and used view finders to frame shots, before using digi blues to capture the planned images. These images were then transferred to a share folder on the school network.

The students were then encouraged to compile a 3 image video montage, using Photostory, to use as a frame for their script.

Alongside this we used the relationship between colour and feelings to explore some of the images we had captured, sketching these, and using photocopies to apply different media types and colours to help us explore the vocabulary of feeling.

Using our vocabulary and representations we began thinking about our memories and feelings not only about our time at school, but about our views of the future, and the context for the student's script was set. We wanted the children to imagine that they were visiting the school site some time in the future, the old school had gone and they were looking back on their time here in the same way our visitors had when they came into school. The children were encouraged to write a short voice over, that would need to be written in three parts or paragraphs, that they would record to support the images they had placed in their photostories.

Once complete and reviewed/rehearsed in pairs, the students have begun adding these. Here are two example outcomes, with more to come as we complete the process.





It has been interesting to see how the students engage with the task. As well as the presenter role, they have also begun to assume directoral and editorial roles, one child recording and supporting the other to improve their presentation, talking about, deleting and redrafting the spoken writing outcomes, in response to what they hear. These video's may represent the student's thoughts on the end of an era, and their views of the future, but I find myself increasingly interested in and looking towards what they might afford as we move on. Now the students are familiar with the tools, it might be interesting to see what they make of them as vlogging tools, and ways to record and share community learning experiences.

An Animated Short: From Wrapping Paper to a Digital Greeting

I know, I know, its only the end of November, but as we all know preparing quality work takes time. For the last 3 weeks I have been working with my students in the school's ICT suite to develop graphics for use in their own personalised and Desk Top Published Christmas cards.

The process took the students through

• Wireframing a draft Christmas Motif
• Editing this to create a final coloured design
• Copying and pasting this motif to create repeating patterns (wrapping paper style)
• And finally experimenting with how different background colours and colour sequences in their designs effected the seasonal appeal of their image.

My favourite file name has got to be "complicated," expressing the students view of his work, as he included 2 colours in his background pattern and developed a similar process in recolouring sequentially the Christmas trees on his paper. Mathematically the task provided opportunities to use flip and rotate tools in MS Paint, enabling exploration of ideas around translation, rotation as well as line symmetry. Linking patterning to these ideas also provided challenges around rule making, and requiring visual prediction skills, and editing to ensure all spaces within the design followed the rules we had decided upon for our patterns.

This week most of the students have chosen their "favourite" wrapping paper design and used design wizards in MS Publisher to create their card, including this design on the front, and some including the smaller design motif elsewhere, personalising the greeting. They are very attractive as outcomes and even the simpest of designs, when repeated have produced some really intricate outcomes.

One of my students, building on our units of work last year, has developed a real interest in using Pivot Stick Animator to tell short visual stories. It's been a bit chilly this week and during lunchtimes he has been working away on this.



Very imaginative and creative yet somehow "Pythonesque" or "game like," he extended his use of the wrapping paper design to form a background and structure for his story including characters, who navigate a maze of santa's sleighs, falling between gaps, or limboing under others, transforming as they move shapes from one sleigh to another. This has inspired some thought about how easily we could extend this project to use images we have already developed to create digital online christmas cards.

To make this movie

• The pivot animation file was saved as a .gif file
• The gif was imported to MS MovieMaker along with a suitable sound track.
• The gif was dragged to the timeline and sound track added
• After some editing in MovieMaker to get the look and feel right, the completed movie was then exported as a video file in .wmv format.

I have posted previously about this and you can read about it by following this link. The completed movie can now be played standalone in a Media Player, or could even be uploaded to somewhere like Google Video for hosting and inclusion in a blog or school website like I have done with J's permission here. So J and I will begin the festivities here early and with no apologies by wishing you all a very Merry Digital Christmas.

Stick Figure Animator: Extending the Possibilities with MovieMaker

My students have asked a few times how to get the animations they make with Pivot to stop looping, and whether they can add sound...

The simple answer to this is Yes!
Yey!
But not using Pivot itself!
Oh! So how?
By using Microsoft MovieMaker.

First of all

• Create action sequences as clips in Pivot.
• Export or save animations as .gif files (animated images)
• Open Microsoft MovieMaker and...
  
• Import your .gif files to media clips.

Once you have imported your .gif files to a media clip gallery or collection they can be dragged to the video timeline, moved around and if neccesary resequenced, as if they were photographs or video clips.
Once on the video timeline

• Scene transitions can also be added between clips, and opening and closing credits added.
• Sound files can be imported to the clip gallery too, and then added to the audio timeline to support the action, and here they can be edited, split or cropped to match the length of the movie.
• If you would rather, the narration tool can be used to record your own sound or add a voiceover using a microphone.
  

This model movie using a few clips created by yours truly, a couple by my students and a borrowed sound file from the web, was made using this process and uploaded to google video for sharing. The video file could also have been saved to somewhere like podomatic to become part of a video podcast sequence.

I guess this process would work with images from other tools with the ability to export images as animated gifs too.

Saltford Lock: 1st Play with Disgo Camcorder

It has been a beautiful evening and visiting a friend we decided to have a drink at one of our favourite watering holes. The Jolly Sailor, is on the bank of the River Avon, next to Saltford Lock, between Bristol and Bath. The activity around the lock and weir became the focus for this very short movie and first try out of the Disgo Camcorder I bought the other day.

This very short movie was compiled from 5 x 10 second video clips I shot, and then put together using Microsoft Movie Maker. The sound is actual footage, recorded by the camera. The clips were imported directly to Movie maker from the camera's SD card using a USB card reader. Some of the clips were trimmed, before adding clip transitions, a title and short credits. As an experiment, to explore the ease of use, quality of video and sound this has proven a really useful activity. I am really impressed with the outcome considering the relatively cheap cost of the camera. Fancy a class set of these to supplement other digital capture devices, really got the creative juices flowing. What to do next? Are you ready for your closeup ...?

Disgo Video

At £24.99 the disgo Video camcorder, I found in PC World this afternoon seemed too big a bargain to miss. A pocket sized camcorder with built in Microphone the unit is powered by two AA bateries and comes with a 1 GB SD Card, that holds approximately 1 hour's video stored in avi format. The card is upgradable to a maximum of 2GB. A 2.0 inch tft screen acts as a viewfinder and playback space, and an internal speaker allows for audio playback and review.

I am pondering just how useful this tool might be as part of a "collect, store, prepare and share" toolkit. Granted it does not take stills, but these can be captured from video using the provided editing software and also through MovieMaker. I wonder also how useful the tool might be as an audio capture device. There seems to be quite a lot of space to play, and explore. A little something else to delve into over the break.

Making a Layered Text With 2 Create

In my last post I mentioned using 2 create to develop homemade layered texts, that work in a similar way to those developed by the Hamilton Trust. With a Year 4 class I originally used Powerpoint to do this, while working on our theme around the Romans in Britain. As a class we developed a paired collaborative writing project based on the life of a slave boy called Victor and used this to frame a "really long historical story."

We used available non fiction texts and Scheme materials including secondary and primary source material to support the information gathering process, and began exploring through the use of images, talk for writing and role play, how it might have been to be a slave of Victor's age. From the information we had available, comparing this with our own lives as we tried to develop empathy with our central character. The text presented in the flash presentation below was developed over the course of our writing unit, during guided and modelled composition activities. It was originally part of a PowerPoint story, including hyperlinks to lead us off to the stop and think areas, that were developed, we hoped, to engage our readers with the story in a different way. Adding depth to the engagement our readers would have, by asking them to explore aspects of the story we had written more deeply, and doing things in response to our writing.



Using 2Create to Add a New Dimension to an Existing Idea

This morning I have been playing with 2create, by 2 simple, and as I mentioned in my previous post, this tool has the ability to export, what is in this case a mirror of the powerpoint show we originally created as a class, in a flash format. To create the basis of this presentation, I opened 2 create and inserting the same number of slides as I had in the original PowerPoint show. Toggling between PowerPoint and 2Create I copied the content of each slide from PowerPoint to its corresponding slide in 2Create.



Bringing the Show To Life

Adding Common Navigation Structures to the Show

With the content in place, I then added a series of common buttons for navigation.

• A back button - to take us to the previous slide
• A next button - to take us to the next slide in the story
• A home button - the house, to return us to the first slide in the show
• A thought bubble button - to take us to one of the stop and think or explore pages.

For ease of development, I made one full set of buttons opn the first page, and then selected, copied and pasted these to each of the slides in my 2create presentation.

It is important to emphasise to students why common navigation structures are neccesary in texts such as this which have strong parallels and models in the web sites we visit. The navigation structures help our readers understand how the text we have and are creating is intended to work. Readers need this in order to help them engage with our work in the way we intended. Good Authors of course take their readers into account when they are writing. Not all student shows need to have the same navigation tools or symbols, but within each show or text the navigation style should be consistent.

Linking the Pages in the show

With the navigation buttons in place, hyperlinks can be added between slides, allowing readers to turn or move from one page to another. In 2create this is done, by

• Clicking on the button or object we want to use as our link
• Right clicking to reveal a context menu for that object.
• Clicking the actions tool,
• In the "actions" dialogue box. Clicking the "turn page" tab,
• Selecting from the drop down menu the page we want to link to, before pressing the ok button.

When working with the students on our mapping project they were required to give each page or slide a name, so they could see at a glance where their buttons were leading to. You may find this process useful too if you decide to play with this tool. This process was repeated with each button throughout the show, with buttons not required on certain slides being deleted as I went.

Testing the Show

This may seem obvious but when building or compiling anything with Hyperlinks in I always try them out locally or through preview, to make sure they lead to where I want before I publish. Pressing the green play button in 2 create, compiles a flash file to run in the program, so the look, feel and navigation of the project can be trialled and evaluated before being published. Working on our mapping project the students have been encouraged to engage with this process continuously as their atlases were being developed, it has a kind of a DT feel to it, but in projects such as this we are not just learning ICT skills we are creating content and authoring textual spaces that we want our readers to engage with. There is nothing more frustrating than engaging with an online text and then hitting a dead link. It is advisable therefore to spend time working through the text you have created or encouraging the students to spend time playing in their own texts before publication.

Publishing the Show

Using 2create, the slide show can be saved in the software's native format (.2cr), but also exported as a "Flash File." (.swf). Flash Files, are a web standard format, many of the websites we visit everyday use flash, BBC Bitesize interactivities are flash files, and the navigation panel in "Espresso" for example is flash based. Flash files can be added to the school website, and as you can see here to a blog so visitors can engage interactively with the work we or our students have developed through 2create. In order to have the file run, it must be uploaded to a web host in the first instance, this file has been uploaded to the file storage space on my web site and then linked to the blog through a piece of code I borrowed from "Flash For Blogger -Dummies Guide."

The SmartBoard's Notebook, is also enabled to allow the inclusion and use of flash based interactivities. So the files developed in 2create can become additional multimodal resources for use on the IWB.

Slideshow Credits: Original Story by SMills and Y4 (2004) Teyfant Community School, Redeveloped by SMills in 2create 2008

The Bayeux Tapestry

Yet another You Tube Video, but this time courtesy of Joe Dale's Blog.Here he has pointed readers to this amazing Animated version of the Bayeux Tapestry by David Newton, and additonal online resources from The Museum of reading.

The Common Craft Show: Some thoughts on Visual Story Telling and Animation

The Common craft Show, published by Lee and Sachi LeFever, has really helped me understand some of the principles and ideas I found tricky to explain to friends and colleagues, particularly blogs and wikis, and the principles behind RSS Feeds. During the Summer I was drawn into the "Twitterverse," following friends and fellow bloggers in between posts. An "enthusiastic lurker" perhaps more than a proactive participant, but nonetheless Twitter as a tool has fascinated me, like so many environments in the web2.0 world in terms of its hidden or not quite yet discovered potentials. It has among other things been used to facilitate audience participation at a number of conferences I have attended lately, through live publishing of comments and questions among other things during presentations and events, so when in my feeds and tweats I found the folk @ Commoncraft had made a video about Twitter, how it worked and how it was useful, I was quick to take a look.



This post is not about Twitter actually, sorry... Its more about the "CommonCraft" style and approach, and the additional videos I found in the catologue after watching the Twitter video and the inspiration that they evoked around the potential of this style of presentation for use in the classroom. As you can see the video presentation is chatty, friendly and I think enormously appealing. The professional homemade look and feel, I think lends them beautifully to a genre and style of animation and presentation that could be readily adapted and used to develop multimodal writing outcomes with students in the classroom.

My experiences with students, tell me how challenging amid the excitement of making a film students find taking time to frame shots, waiting for that hand to get out of the frame. It is usually not until the finished product, as they see it, is aired, that groans emerge about the hand in frame that shouldn't have been their. While watching the Commoncraft Show again this week, I have begun thinking about how often my intentions and desired outcomes may overcomplicate what is neccesary to enable the technology to fulfill its roles in class based animation activities. The students are usually happy with the work they make, and the outcomes they achieve excite and motivate them. I began wondering just how important in using audio and video as a writing medium it really is for students to be hindered by the issue of "hands in" productions. We all want quality outcomes to result from the work our students develop, but perhaps the question I have missed when thinking about animation projects in the classroom is why we were really doing them. What purpose will they serve? For me animation is about multimodal communication and storytelling, so maybe if this is what I want to achieve, then I should review this side of the process rather than dwelling on the technical aspects too much. Disney, Pixar and Aardman's animators, spend years honing their skills, and hours/months planning the outcomes and making the sets and environments in which they will set their stories. Perhaps their are other ways to develop situations where emergent learners can develop their understanding of the elements that make up the audio visual storytelling process. Ways that enable them to tell stories while they engage with and explore the nuances of the media and tools involved, and this is where the Common craft show came into my thinking.

I made some films with students in Y4 last year using the Stop Motion Process, and Stick Puppets to tell the story of the Ramayana. The project was split into scenes that we storyboarded in class and which the students went on to use in small groups to recount and tell different parts of the story as short stop motion clips. Their completed group video clips were later compiled as a class movie, by editing together on the IWB in Movie Maker. Communicating beyond the visual however was something the students found difficult to reconcile, and to support their story most drew on the familiar comic strip genre, including speech bubbles and captions to support their narrative. Because of our limited experiences at the time, time limitations for the projects and student eagerness to complete their work, the text elements were displayed for too short a time for their audience to see and appreciate them, but the idea was their. Animation as a storytelling process is incredibly complex, requiring more than the skills and knowledge of how to achieve motion, though in the emergent stages I think this is what the students find most exciting and appealing, the bringing to life of static and inanimate objects. While watching the Common Craft Show what struck me as powerful, was what might have happened if we had actually seen the video creation process as a digital writing outcome. Like "The Common Craft Show" this project used paper based hand drawn and screen printed cut outs. I have begun to ponder on how a "Common Craft" type approach, combining talk with the props we had developed as the "writing outcome" may have enabled text rehearsal and the bringing of these objects to life as a visual narrative.

A common craft type approach to using video and animation in the classroom seems to offer a powerful pedagogical tool, for linking some of the ideas I have explored in previous posts around multimodality and literacy development. Check out this description from The Commoncraft Blog where Lee describes

"How the workflow breaks down:

• I create the first draft of the script and basic storyboard, we review it
• We both edit the script, often concurrently using Google docs.
• I create the illustrations
• We walk through the storyboard and script together
• In the studio, Sachi runs the camera and effects (animation/stop-action) and I direct the story
• Sachi does all the video editing/finishing
• I blog about it

In terms of our views of literacy and the writing process, what does this reveal about the complexities of digital text authoring. This reflects the complexities of a process based outcome, What Lies Beneath this situation, far outweighs the apparent simplicity of the outcome. Planning, drafting, , reworking/editing/revising, rehearsing, performing, evaluating, before re-editing, revision and publication; and throughout... Collaborating.

The process of oral storytelling, storyboarding and talk for writing we have begun to develop in support of "podcasting" seems very similar. Many of the materials the students develop to do this never see the light of day beyond the planning stage. Using this whiteboard based visual storytelling medium and process would I'm sure not only be really good fun but an interesting way to blend and evidence the role of talk for writing through practical activity and outcome. The added bonus is that using this medium as the writing outcome, we have courtesy of Common Craft a number of ready made models of the text form to draw on, share, evaluate and work with as a frame to hang the text development process on.

As a final soundbite, how about this project or one like it to link ideas from a science or geography project through ICT and an extended Literacy unit. How would you classify it? Is it a non chronological report, an explanatory or a Persuasive Text or does it encompass elements of all three?



How could we use this tool to enable students in taking ownership of and sharing their conceptual models or in bringing concept cartoons to life, perhaps using the process to explain pollination, photosynthesis or condensation? What about creating a set of instructions? Could we use the process to tell stories drawing on storyboards as writing media in their own right, with cut out characters and voice overs using digiblues. This would also be relatively easy to accomplish using digital cameras/ scanners and PhotoStory. How about using IWB presentations, capturing video through the smartboard recorder, with students adding narration through tools such as Movie Maker. The smartboard software could be installed for use as an application suite for this purpose on machines not attached to the whiteboard. This as you can tell has really got me thinking. What do you think?

Geotagging a Learning Journey

On Wednesday afternoon we went for a walk around the school environment with the aim of exploring and capturing digitally features of the existing and currently changing landscape around the site. In previous posts, I have mentioned other projects involving creative partnerships, where students are logging these changes over time by digital means, as the new all through school rises in the space behind our current school building. During discussion with my class the other day, it slowly became apparent just how few of the students had actually noticed some of the more prominent features of the locality they pass everyday. It struck me as interesting how easy it is to assume and take for granted the knowledge and experiences our young cares bring to school of their locality and their place in it.

A couple of questions I have always found interesting to ask students when looking at a landscape painting are "where they think the artist was when they made the image?" and "what do they think might have been behind them, to the left, the right or above the canvas?" I pondered the other day how much I enjoyed sitting on the top deck of a bus, with the chance to see familiar settings from a different perspective, and from this came the idea for a digital landscape walk, using digital photographs to enable students to capture different views from the same location, that we could then use to focus discussion back in the classroom in relation to a map of the journey.



This map created using quikmaps, shows an aerial photograph of the route we followed with the students. Each of the small map pins, showing a staging point on the journey. The students used digital blue cameras at each staging point to capture two images, one looking out from the school into the surrounding landscape, and another after a 180 degree turn that captured the scene looking back towards the school grounds. Back in class the students were encouraged to review their images, identifying and locating on a shared map where each image had been captured, before matching the two opposing landscape perspectives, to locations on the map. To follow up, and as a table top activity, small groups of students were given copies of a blank map and challenged to mark the route they had followed, locate the staging points for themselves before finally mapping their images to their locations.

The students are currently using 2 Simple's 2create, to to develop their own interactive atlases. These are very much in the developmental stage. We have used maps downloaded from World Atlas.com, to create slides that begin with the world and which will progressively zoom down onto the place where we live and work, using hyperlinked buttons to enable this. I am now thinking how interesting it would be to extend the project, by encouraging the students to think about how this tool could be used to to create a textured presentation about our school in its landscape, maybe in a virtual tour type format. Using 2Create, means that the final projects can be exported in flash format for publication to the web, or on the year group blog, providing audience and purpose for the outcomes.

Post Script:

YAY! Thanks to Tom Barrett and Twitter I have now also learned how to add some of the images that the students captured to our quikmap. This is really exciting...

Talking for Writing: Using a Picture Book as a Multimodal Text To Develop a Script for Podcasting

Just finished the first weeks planning of our new writing unit, and am really excited, having persuaded my collegue that the writing outcomes for work developed might be a series of short whole class podcasts. The unit of work relates to play scripts, and the obvious links within this are that as a written form scripts are intended for oral and visual performance. We discussed how it would be interesting to begin using the context of the unit as a vehicle to explore some of the ways in which speech forms are encountered multimodally within texts, as this links nicely with the way we have begun to approach punctuation for reading in class so far this term, and begins the students on a journey towards our could target.

Our starting point is a familiar story, and we have chosen to use "On The Way Home" by Jill Murphy. I love this text, a picture book based shaggy dog tale, about a little girl, with a "bad knee!" On her way home to tell mum all about it she meets various friends, who greet her, are told about her bad knee, and then subjected to an increasingly elaborate series of explanations and tales about how the injury was gained. What is lovely is the ending, "just how did she get her bad knee?" "Well.... I was p..." I don't want to spoil this and since we want the students to innovate on the story, perhaps you might visit our podcast when we publish to find out.

The page format for "On the Way Home" borrows many of its visual elements from the comic strip genre. Each double fold page being split into panes, that illustrate the story in beautiful and incredibly detailed visuals. The Character presentations in Jill Murphy's illustrations, offer fantastic opportunities for discussion not only around the written text but for developing inferential work, from gesture and expression to talk about feelings they may be experiencing, this inturn offers possibilities for unpicking how the words spoken by a character might be expressed. We have decided to use this as a platform to develop writing frames and Smart Notebook pages to encourage students individually, in small groups and as a class to discuss events, and consider what characters might be saying and how they might be saying them.

Using punctuation spotter activities with extracts from the book as a shared text, we want to extract character dialogue, adding these to the images through speech bubbles to present visual models of speech. Developments from this for students themselves to create their own page for a class book, replacing Claire the central character in Jill Murphy's story with a student from our class who meets friends from school on the way home. Over the course of the week, we intend the students to script a short passage of dialogue beginning in comic strip format, expanding this to think about how they and the friend they meet are saying things. Drawing on the rich visuals in the original text we want to draw out and develop a wordbank including new and familiar speech verbs, that can be applied as the students create there own dialogue, recording and adding these to our WOW word wall.

Since we are going to podcast our outcome, use of descriptive phrases and adjectives will be required to add depth and richness to the content our listeners recieve. Using "rub and reveal" activities, with the cover illustration from the book, we will begin by playing vocabulary games, to help extend the complexity of description given by the students. The WOW words used and collected can also be recorded and added to our WOW word wall for use as we progressively develop our short scripts over the sessions. Playing games the students will be encouraged to be "Claire" or the "class character" we have chosen, and to use sentence starters we collect from the text and develop such as "Weeeell!...." or "it was like this!..." "From nowhere a .... appeared!" "As I was...." and so on to rehearse and present exagerated descriptions, that we can draw on as models for writing in the dialogue we present. We use actions in our speech based activities, to mark punctuation types in spoken sentences and phrases as we speak and rehearse, and these will also form part of the development process through the games we play.

Throughout the week, while focussing on talk for writing within shared sessions we also want to use text book based materials to introduce and model how speech marks, are used to mark what is said by characters. Using speech bubble activities and punctuation spotter activities during shared work will help we hope to model the role they play, and also enable us to revisit prior work on special full stops such as question marks and exclamation marks. Usng student's written speech in bubbles, visual context cues and exercises we want to encourage the students to think about and rehearse speech; returning as we go on to consider how the choice of additional punctuation marks we have already worked on might influence how things are said, and how speech verbs will support this.

Our Big write on Friday this week will hopefully be a process of illustrating our class book and an opportunity for students to record their section of our podcast. Over the course of the week using modelled support the students will have gradually created in comic strip format, a short passage of dialogue between themselves and the class based "Claire" character, and an exagerated explanation of how they got their bad knee. These will then be recorded using the chapter tool in Podium as a dialogue between two children working in pairs, using the context sentences they produce as narration, to link additional dialogue created by other students as we build up the final podcast in chapters. The original story opener read by my colleague, and the close by myself to each story, having been modified to fit with the class characters chosen. The idea being that as we introduce play scripts formally next week, we will have an available class design to draw on helping us to make links between the text types used this week, the picture book, the comic strip and the podcast as we begin to discuss and identify the purposes that the formal structures of a playscript play.

I would like Podium to play a developmental role as a shared writing tool the week after next week, drawing on the "script writer" within the software enviroinment to help model how dialogue is organised within the play script environment. In a comment left by Doug, a couple of weeks ago about my post Reading With Expression: Punctuation for Podcasting With Year 3 he said:

"I would be really interested to hear/read about the role that the 'script writer' in Podium could/did play in this task. The move from text to speach through the study of punctuation strikes me as a very powerful thing indeed."

Hopefully as this unit unfolds I will be able to engage with some of these ideas in a practical context, and be able to provide concrete examples. For me becoming a reader or writer, is more than a process of encoding or decoding. In our multimedia world it is increasingly a journey towards gaining understanding of how text in a variety of forms is used to represent and share an inner voice or visualisation. One of the exciting things about using Podium with my class is that after the giggles and "barge" at the text approach we encountered at the beginning of term, students racing to complete their input; on hearing their own voice several students are beginning to think about what they say and how they say things when they are reading, and this is beginning to impact on how they approach the writing process too. It was exciting on Friday, as you can see from the photographs supporting this post, to see students for the first time rereading what they had written. One student in writing about how Henry VIII had married his brother's wife, asking "did I think he felt guilty about this?" Going on in the text he finally produced to hypothesise that he might have...?

The role or potential role of the Podium Scripting tool, in the development of understanding around the place of punctuation for reading is a potentially powerful one, and one which I am keen to explore and exploit, building on the current experiences we are providing with visual and oral textual models. It will be interesting to return to this as the writing unit progresses, and particularly as we begin to use the script writer as a dynamic resource to focus in on features of play scripts. Within this I am particularly drawn to providing an existing story imported to the scripting tool, to be reworked together as a class using the affordances of the interface to model how the format used by Podium in the allocation of roles, within a performance, mirrors formats we encounter in formal play script models we share. Using this to transform visually and dynamically the text on screen as we go, may help develop understanding of why inclusion of stage directions, or narration within the text we create will be neccesary, and seems to me a very powerful imaging role for the tool. I look forward to sharing this further as we explore the tool and processes involved.

Remember, Remember the 5th of November

A few "digi text" ideas For Firework Night. Anthony originally set the challenge of creating "clean" art, using graphics packages around the theme of Firework night. Visits to Doug Linda and Anthony's blog, have set me thinking about how we could use other available ICT tools to respond to or extend the stimulus. Onscreen graphics, rarely look as good on paper as they do displayed digitally, so here are a few thoughts.

Multimedia Firework Poetry or Stories

With Year 1 students last November I used 2 create a story as a tool to write multimodal firework stories. Responding to firework displays they had attended, the student's painted fire work pictures with the tools provided by the software and added texts about their experiences of the events.

Playing with the tools available, some began to add animation effects and sounds from the library provided by the software. The sounds they chose were not always appropriate, but this was their's and my first experience with the tool. On reflection however, in preparing for these sessions, I now might visit royalty free sound effects websites, to download additional sound effects to the computer in preparation for the activity and widen the available soundscape for them to choose from and use. In addition to this the children could also use a microphone to record their own sound effects using the recording tool, or rather than type their stories add it as a soundtrack.

I am a big fan of this tool, it is much more powerful than first viewing might suggests. If you are interested I have a comic strip how to, about using 2 create a story on our school website or you can download it directly by right clicking this link.

As an introductory tool for multimodal text development, 2 create a story is also a great platform to use with older students for planning. As a publishing option the files can be exported as "Flash" for inclusion in a web site, or as "pack and go" devices to share on screen with others.

How about preparing a file and using 2 create a story to frame a guided or shared writing session using digital images as a starting point. Where these digital images come from we have a host of possibilities. We could:

• Google and download a collection of images from the internet
• Use photos we have ourselves of bonfire parties and firework displays
• Or use graphics packages such as Revelation Art, 2 Paint a Picture, Softease's Textease Paint, Photofiltre or Microsoft Paint to ask students to develop firework images of their own.

I find that digital images generated by students present better in digital environments than they do on paper. These images imported to 2 create a story, will act as writing prompts and talking points, to develop class collections of descriptive sentences and phrases and facilitate use of the software environment as a place to model and share the style or type of written outcome we are working on. Using this with the IWB we can work together as a class to collect WOW words eg adjectives, verbs or adverbs, figurative language, perhaps resulting in collections of similes or adjectival phrases using the visual scaffolds to help. With these displayed they become available designs for students to borrow, or help frame their own inventions, to include in the multimedia text we want them to write. One outcome might be a navigable poem, each page holding an image, supported by sound and text, and presenting a textured line of poetry. Alternatively we might use the internet to research the origins of bonfire night, include images from the web, and orally presented commentary recounting or reporting events.

Photostories, Softease Presenter, Powerpoint and 2 Create

I would use similar processes with MS Powerpoint, 2 create, Textease Presenter. MS Photostory as those above to develop "texts." In introducing the tasks and processes involved students might be given their own copies of a template file to work on, or using one of my own I would guide the students through the processes of making their own from scratch. With more experienced groups we would want to encourage, making or collecting, importing and use of their own images, sound effects or soundtracks. This would involve preliminary work to "collect, organise and store" or develop images in a graphics package, that might perhaps involve editing images that students have downloaded from the internet, they might also involve finding and downloading sound effects, or prerecording these using other tools.

How this type of work is done its curriculum and your school context will obviously dictate time available to you or the approach you want or are required to take.

• Are you intending to develop an ICT unit around a theme?
• Are you developing the task as an additional one off project stemming from an extended Literacy unit?

This will influence how you manage student engagement and the degree of design freedom they have with the project. If the latter, you might want to limit the amount of ICT skills input neccesary and begin with a template, since the focus is on text representation, if the former you will obviously want the students to develop as much of the project themselves as possible.

In using 2 create, powerpoint and presenter, the biggest difference in the process would be students learning how to compile and organise their materials in preparation for making their presentations, then learning how to attach sound files, use images as backgrounds and how to hyperlink the text for themselves, while thinking about the effects they want to portray.

Photostory, Movie Maker and Podium

Using Photostory much the same process "collect, organise, store and present" outlined above would apply to the designing and making of the presentation. I have pulled it out for separate treatment here though, because of the output format it generates. The final format of projects developed in photostory being video opens up some really exciting possibilities for sharing, or joint authorship if you are feeling adventurous. Completed video projects made in photostory by the students, can be "spliced" together by importing them to Movie Maker to develop a class project. This could be the poetry idea mentioned above, or might be the production of a report about the Gunpowder Plot, where students in groups are delegated areas to investigate and present, using Internet research, and scripts they develop to produce their individual contributions to the class documentary, a digital news story, non chronological report, or documentary. Using the IWB with Movie Maker, the students can be involved in the compilation of the final outcome and in making editorial decisions about how the programme might go together. Opening titles and credits can be added, before the final programme is aired for viewing and further discussion (maybe over popcorn! or toasted marshmallows?)

I have included Podium, Softease's podcasting solution here also, not as a way of presenting images or as afterthought, but as another possible ICT tool to present and perform oral text outcomes and as a vehicle to give purpose, context or a sense of audience to work developed in class. The purpose of writing in any format is for reading, and as a stimulus the importance and historical significance of the story of the Gunpowder Plot shouts out for a documentary, an empathetic news report, or short play to be presented. A podcast would be a fabulous way to air and share these outcomes as living texts in a different format. November 5th is about more than a "penny for the guy," and the whooshing exploding aesthetic appeal of the firework, who was this Guy and why after 400ish years is his effigy still so revered. I would love to hear from you if any of these ideas have been useful of interest or have spurred you on to explore the development of multimodal texts with your students. I look forward to sharing what you have done.

A Potted Guide: This week we have mostly been writing instructions

This week we have been mostly writing instructions in Year 3. But what use are instructions without an audience and a purpose? And how have we used ICT to help? Rather than starting with the perfect instructional text, we began with our student's prior experiences of the genre.

Bringing into school a few potted plants, old plant pots and a bag of compost, I began the session by telling a tale, the story of how I had tried to re-pot the plants I had with me. Being concerned to get it right, I had emailed my friend for advice, but the instructions they had sent me, had left me confused, and my kitchen in a real mess. It was now the cleanest it had been in a long time, but this was only after I had managed to get water and compost everywhere. What I had managed to figure out from my friend's letter was that the things I had with me would would help me to finish the job I had started. Our mission as a class this week was to reshape the email, and create a good set of instructions that we could publish to help other people learn how to pot their houseplants. The publishing format I left blank...

Preparing for the first session my colleague was great, helping out by flanneling and sending the woolliest letter she could imagine, actions completely jumbled and out of sequence, and rather than telling me what to do... she had made suggestions about how I might like to do it. I made two copies of the email. Placing each on separate pages in a Smartbook. One copy was the entire letter as a block of text to share and discuss. The second a version of the letter was split into dragable sentences. Beginning with the block text, we checked through it together using this to unpick problems through discussion, and highlighting issues as we went, while we began thinking about how my friend's email should have been written. Using the dragable text and suggestions from the students we tried rearranging pieces of the letter to see if it could be changed to make more sense. This acted as our first class draft. Using this set of class instructions the students repotted some plants in small groups. As the students worked a digital camera was used to photograph the steps they followed. To end the session we reviewed the draft instructions, and began to edit them on screen, taking out the "suggestions," made by my colleague's email and replacing them with "command words," that drew on the practical experience to describe what had been done. We also added additional steps that we thought were missing, eg putting down newspaper to keep the surfaces clean.

For our second session, the digital photographs taken during the first were imported to the smartbook, and used in a storyboarding activity. Using this new "dragable" tool we revisited and thought about the sequence and order of activities we carried out in the previous session. As visual prompts our photos were used to scaffold a "talking for writing" session. The photographs had been inserted in a random order, so we needed to rearrange them in a chronological sequence. Then the storyboard that resulted was used to rehearse aloud the text we might use to produce clear " instructional sentences" to support them. The onscreen story board as well as being a visual class prompt, modelled the table top, storyboard activity the students would use during the lesson to plan the sequence of Instructions they would use later to write and publish.

In our third session we looked at a set of prepared instructions, and pulled out the key features of the text type. What would a good set of instructions include? We would need a clear title, and would need to split our text into sections, "what you need" and a "what to do." The to do list was identified as a list and we discussed how this could be laid out across the page using commas, or down the page using bullets. We closed the session by looking at how the sentences began, and had a quick look at our storyboards. Did each of our instructional sentences begin with a command word? The model we had explored and developed on screen, became a writing frame, and the students worked individually during the remainder of the session to draft their own set of instructions drawing on their storyboards, to help, but being encouraged to refine their text as they worked. The outcomes are great, and next week will be including one or two in our blog.

Writing is for Reading...

Extending the written instructional text activity, I worked yesterday with a small group of students using Microsoft Photostory, to create a simple vodcast. Using the photographs taken earlier in the week, and instructions written by the students they added voiceovers to image clips, before exporting these to video in .wmv format.

I uploaded these later to Zamzar for conversion to Quick Time's .mov format. I have set up a class account and podcast page at Podomatic, and have published the video file to this space. As I mentioned in an earlier post about using PhotoStory for this purpose, it all may sound a bit complicated and convoluted , but with a little practice the publishing process is quite straight forward. This was my first attempt in class at doing this particular type of activity, and a process that was completely new to the students. I was really pleased with the video outcome it is a little rough and ready in places, but I think it models really well what can be achieved using tools such as this in a classroom context. You will notice the background hum from the classroom where it was recorded. Real children working together, as this group record their file. I like the count in, as one of the students leaves a run in space at the beginning of his voiceover track, not realising at this point that his count is also being recorded. The idea of students taking turns is also inherent in the file as they swapped places and the mike to each record different sections. As a first attempt, there is much to discuss. Asking the class what we might do to reduce the sound level, when we are recording in class. Perhaps reviewing the process of authoring a text like this by asking about strategies we might use to carry out the count in which was so important. Do we need to designate roles in the process, and have a director or software operator as well as narrator.

I have experienced many times from colleagues "the its alright for you but.." statement, But I think this is a really exciting way to work, not only for me but the students too. Learning to use PhotoStory does not take long, but it is a potentially powerful device. If you would like to watch our vodcast file you can find it by following this link. I look forward to any comments or thoughts you may have.

Podagogy a Term to Conjure With!

Following on from a post by Joe yesterday regarding Google Alerts, I set up an experimental alert about podcasting in education, and was returned a link this morning to Podagogy. A place where podcasting meets teaching & learning. Mid dissertation myself a term like this had an almost magnetic appeal

Podagogy is defined by its author as

n. 1. a portmanteau of the words podcasting and pedagogy. 2. The act or practice of delivering instructional content or academic support content via podcasting. 3. Result of Randy’s penchant for inventing new words.

Am flagging the blog here to return to later, but also as it presents reflections on research into applied use of podcasting and other web 2.0 tools in a higher education setting.

Simpsons Avatar Maker

The Simpsons Movie was a talking point with some of my students last week and I couldn't resist dropping by the web site today when I discovered they had an avatar maker. I really enjoyed playing with this simple tool to create a downloadable representation of myself, sad to say it is more lifelike than you might think. I am just pondering on how I could use this tool to support year 6 students and colleagues in creating a gallery of caricatures, to form of a video montage for their leavers assembly.

Possible Futures, Plausible Pasts

What Is That? I don't look like that! I like the way you look your Liverpool kit. I'm going to be a superhero when I grow up, and fly around rescuing people. Year 2 had a cracking time today playing with the digi blues. We set them the challenge of thinking about what they would like to be when they grow up, and then miming or posing in action positions from their future jobs. The poses were then framed and captured by their friends, and after docking with the docking station were exported as jpeg files to personal folders on their home drive spaces.

Once we had saved the photos, the children were shown how to open them in photofiltre, and then the fun began. We discussed the tools we had been exploring over the last few weeks and which we might choose and use to help dress up our fantasy posed portraits, in the uniforms, costumes or work clothes we would be wearing in the jobs we had chosen to do in the future. Using the spray can tool and altering the nozzle size, the students were able to use the image of themselves to trace and place items of clothing, on their own body shapes. They were also able to think about how they would like to wear things like their hair, whether they thought they would have moustaches or beards and so on. Using cascade saving there is also the possibility of thinking about what they might look like with or without these features and so on. As you can probably imagine to a seven year old adding a moustache raised a few giggles. But one of things that really wowed them, was in posing for the shot, they were able to add things like paint brushes and easels to artists, Insert footballs under their arms or at their feet if they were footballers, or even add a cat to be treated in their arms if a vet.

Having dressed themselves up, they needed to touch up the backgrounds. My favourites today were one student who, having dressed himself as a footballer, painted in the grass, crowd, and a goal, framing himself in the structure, while a second, who said he would like to be a fighter pilot, painted in the cockpit of an aircraft around the lower part of his body, before adding his helmet and flight suit. Then there was our superhero, who having laid out on the ground arms outstretched in the classic flying position, for digital capture, spent a considerable time dressing himself in a suitable attire. It was not so much the image outcomes as the discussion that this task inspired, that I found exciting to be part of, and the thought process that went with imaginatively engaging with their possible futures, and what the tools provided allowed in enabling this process.

Having seen how the students engaged with this activity, I am also now quite excited about how they might react to future use of this process. Some of the students I worked with this morning will be in my class next year, and I am thinking about using a similar process to help them empathise with life in the past. Our first topic in the Autumn Term is on Life in Tudor Times. It might be interesting to use this as an outcome activity having explored some of the royal portraits, and try to recreate the images or scenes, placing themselves posed and central to photographs which can then be edited to include, contemporary dress and cosmetic touches, or having looked at and discussed tudor pastimes and other aspects of tudor life, having the chldren create pastiche type images, where they frame themselves acting out tudor activities, recreating background scenes around them, and using themselves as manikins to dress in traditional clothes. These images could then be used in digital learning stories, or uploaded to support blog entries photostories or podcasts, drawing on tasks developed in the literacy hour.

Making a Start With Web Design and Development

Over the course of the year, many of the students in upper Key Stage 2 have been working with a host of web based, enabled or modelling resources and tools. Think.com has been used as a learning community tool, PowerPoint has been used to model the principles of hyperlinking and how web like resources work and can be developed offline. They have begun to develop blogs as a class, and engaged with online resources and with think to lay the foundations for understanding what it means to be safe online. This term and last we began working with year 5 on a pilot project with Fronter, the LAs proposed learning platform, and decided that this should be framed by a unit of work I wrote a number of years ago that was adopted and adapted to become part of the LAs scheme of work for ICT.

The unit was originally developed with a year 4 class, as a challenge to help me redesign the school's website. It began as all design and technology units do with evaluation and disassembly activities. We visited a range of websites already available on the web, and created by or for schools. We explored the websites identifying features we liked or disliked, narrowing down gradually those that we might like our website to include. From here on paper we designed a navigation bar, including genreal areas we would like to appear on our site. Having established our website zones, the children worked in small groups on particular aspects of the site, collecting photographs, interviewing people, and using MS Word and MS Publisher to create pages, which were eventually saved as html, and linked into a frame set I had developed from their ideas in FrontPage. The project was so successful that I and Keith Ansell our ICT curriculum Support Teacher extended the project with other local primary schools, as part of an ICT project for the Success@ action zone.

This term however I have begun using 2 Create,(2 create a story's sibling) as a framing tool to engage year 5 students with the process. We began as above, by visiting other school sites, and then returning to our own existing structure. Using their community pages as a starting point I introduced the idea of how some aspects of the site were becoming reduntant, or were perhaps repeating other tools we were using. I asked them in their navigation bar design process to consider how we might change or reorganise the community pages, removing links we were not using, or perhaps adding new sections that were not there in their place. What would they like to have on their website. Instead of using a paper based tool, I opted to use 2 create to enable them to visually develop, hands on, their own version of the site.

They began by starting a new project and inserting the first page, using this to install their navigation structure to. They used clipart as icons and buttons as well as text to do this. They had noticed how the navigation bar and banner section on the opening page of their community pages always remained the same, and in subsequent sessions I have been able to introduce how this is made possible. Our community pages are developed within frame sets. Although seeming to be one page, it is actually made up of three, when a hyperlink is clicked, only the page to the lower right is loaded the others remain in place. To enable this to happen on a single page layout like the one they are using in 2 create, the key is for the visual appearence of the page to remain the same, while only the content changes. Sometimes it is great being an old dog who can teach the newbies some tricks. How to make a 2 create page appear that it is a frame set. With the navigation icons and text in place, we have added coloured boxes to the left hand side of the page, and another along the top to look like the banner. We selected both of these rectangles and used the order tool to send them to the back. At this stage we still only had one page in our site, so looking at the number of icons we had in our navigation bar, which in most cases was 5, we inserted new pages. opening our first page in the viewer, we selected all objects by dragging around the slide, copied them to the clipboard, and then opened each of the remaining pages individually, and pasted these in place, so we had 5 identical slides, on which to present the content identified in our navigation bar. I know I could have skipped the copy and paste process by simply asking the software to insert duplicates, but I wanted the students to develop the select all and copy skill. I tools such as frontpage this would not be achieved efficiently by copy and paste either, but by saving each file as and renaming them.

The students then began linking the pages to each other, and inserting back links. To the lower right of each page, they now have a large clear space, and it is here they will place their page content, and when the link buttons are pressed, and a page arrives what they see appears to be like the frame set in the real school community pages, the buttons will appear in exactly the same place, as will the banner. The students are really enjoying this task, it builds nicely on their prior experiences with PowerPoint and Think, but here they have complete control over the objects and pages they are creating.

In addition what has been said above, what I think is really powerful about 2 create and the students will probably not fully appreciate this until the project is complete, is a built in tool it shares with 2 create a story and how the final project outcomes can be saved as Flash Files. Flash an industry and web standard tool, generates special movie files from projects developed, that can be embedded in to html or web pages enabling them to run as navigable files. These 2 create projects when saved as Flash Files will function in a similar way, with every small web project file the students have created running as if standalone websites within a single page on the school website. The children will be able to see and share their website projects live with each other, their teachers and their parents.

The structures they have identified will be used to develop the navigation and page structure for their VLE Space, somewhere we would like them to work next year. I will also be drawing on their ideas to refine the student community sections of the school website. By working on this project the outcomes they develop will influence a real web project.