2CASS Wins

2Simple are thrilled that 2Create a Superstory won the ERA award for best Primary ICT Resource at the Awards ceremony on Friday night. The prestigious event was held at the National Motorcycle Museum to celebrate the fantastic resources available to schools in the UK and abroad. The ERA awards are held alongside the Education show in Birmingham where the guys at 2Simple had a wonderful week meeting so many enthusiastic teachers, trainee teachers and school leaders who were all very excited to take away their own copy of the award winning program!

Introduction to Action Script in 2DIY

I have been working with a Year Six class via Skype to introduce them to Action Script in 2DIY. There are loads of excellent examples on the 2DIY Archive , for this and other classes to look  at. However adding or amending scripts can be daunting, I created this quick video last week to support my lessons as the first of many on this topic.

Please let me know if this is helpful.

Are there others that you need?

Let me know via the comment box or email anthony at 2simple dot com

Creative Online Tools Update

Last week, we added two updates to the Creative Online Tools. I am sure many users will have already spotted these, but for those of you who haven’t, let me point them out.

2GO 

 As you can see we now have a much wider range of background screens and cursors, in order to fit in with more topics. These include:

• Under the sea
• A fairy tale castle
• Help the mouse find the cheese
• Space and rockets

 

 Logo

We have added a help menu to Logo to remind children of the commands they will need and a box which will explain each command as they type it. This can be toggled on or off with the ? icon at the top right.

If you need any further help with Logo, then we have a list of commands on the resource page of this blog.

If you have any further suggestions, or feedback do let me know, by leaving a comment or email anthony at 2simple dot com.

Using Online Tools with our ‘Learning Portal’

Here is a guest post from Mark Warner of the Downs School in Kent. He tells us his experiences of using our Creative Online Tools.

Although we don’t have a VLE at my school, we have recently set up an ‘online learning portal’. The site is called TheDowns.ME and it’s intended to be a place for children to start their explorations online.

World Book Day 2Investigate Online

Yesterday was World Book day , and we used the opportunity to test 2Investigate Online, creating a large database of favourite books from pupils all over the world. As  you can see from the screen grab there was a great many entries, some from as far away as Australia. We have locked the database now, in order to edit it and tidy it up.

However, look out for future developments with 2Investigate online, atool that  will enable much greater collaboration and bring the topic of databases to life.

You can see an early video of 2Investigate online below:

My First Experiences of Using the Online Tools

I’ve only been using 2Simple’s Online Creative Tools for a few days and yet I already love them.

For those of you unaware, they are basically several online versions of their popular programs which can be accessed both in-school and at home.

 

To begin, I’ve followed my usual strategy of trialling/testing ideas outside of lessons by first introducing them in clubs – a parent/child Internet cafe one night afterschool and with a group of Year 5s during a lunch time session. For me, this always has two major benefits: mainly that if anything ‘goes wrong’ no actual lessons are lost and that since there is no planning/scheme to follow I can also just simply be creative and go in whatever direction the children (who have opted to attend in the first place because they enjoy doing ICT) want.

Setting up the accounts was pretty straightfoward – all I needed to do was log onto the 2Lasso ‘tool’ and add the usernames/passwords I desired for each user in turn – there is an option to bulk import from a .csv file but since I was only creating a few accounts at the moment, the simple one-user-at-a-time online method worked just fine.

Now to be honest, on the two ocassions when I’ve used the tools already, I haven’t really done anything structured – I just went to each child individually to show them the logging in procedure and then simply let them loose to explore as they chose. The beauty of 2Simple products is that they are always very intuative to use, so meaning that the children could quite easily get started working on whatever task they desired without the need to constantly ask for my assistance.

What they achieved was pretty basic given the limited time available, however when I told them that they could access their work (and thus finish it off) at home they all looked really excited. Clicking on any user in 2Lasso lets you view each user’s recent activity and so when I saw that nearly all of them had been logging in outside of school to do work I was quite impressed to say the least. I had given practically no demonstrations of how to use any of the tools and hadn’t even set them any work to do at home – yet they still went away and did work on their own, at home of their own choosing!

You can view some of their work which I posted onto the school website here. Obviously I plan to gradually teach the children more structured tasks (I can’t wait to show them how to design nets using 2Design and Make) and to roll out the tools to classes as a whole for use in actual lessons with curriculum links (I have grand plans for 2Sequence in KS1 and 2Graph in KS2), but for the moment I just want to enjoy looking back on what 2Simple have helped me achieve in just 3 days.

Live from the Education Show

Today many of us are at the Education Show at the NEC in Birmingham - here we are eagerly waiting for the show to begin.

If you are going to the show, do come and see us at stand k56 .

Tunbridge Wells Control Day

Last Friday I had the pleasure of working with children and teachers from schools across Tunbridge Wells.  The schools, each represented by two members of staff and four pupils, came together for a training day based around various control sessions including  Beetbots, Probots, datalogging, Scratch, NXT Mindstorms and 2Control NXT.  At the end of the day each lucky school went home with three Lego NXT kits and site licences of the Mindstorms NXT and 2Control NXT software.

During the hands on 2Control NXT sessions we whizzed through a range of activities designed for a variety of  year groups.  We started with the simple exercise of controlling the robot around the table, avoiding obstacles that had been placed in its path, before moving on to creating a simple program activated by a sound sensor.  We also took some time to think about how control technology helps make our everyday lives easier.  The activity that the children were most excited about involved sending some Lego men whizzing round on a ‘scream if you want to go faster’ fairground ride.

Seeing as the kit comes with an extra motor, it was easy to quickly build a simple fairground ride and attach it onto their existing models, but the children were full of grand ideas about how they would develop this further back at school.  The children used the My Model screen in 2Control NXT to create a program to control the speed and direction of the fairground ride and then started to work on including the sound sensor to bring in the scream to go faster element.   We talked about how to extend this further, such as adding flashing lights and programming the light sensor to activate the lights when it gets dark, or adding a health and safety button to bring the ride to a complete stop.  There were lots of ideas floating about and I got the feeling that the children will be pestering their teachers back at school  about getting their hands on the Lego NXT kits.

The day was hosted by St Gregory’s Catholic School whose staff and students proved to be very welcoming and helpful hosts.  A big thanks is also owed to Carine Jacquel and Mandy Barrow from the Kent ICT team who coordinated the event and made sure everything ran smoothly.  Not an easy task given the number of children, staff and general technical bits and bobs involved.

E-Safety 2010 Competition

We have had lots of entries to our E-safety Competition, which closed last Friday. Thank you to all who entered, the standard has been very high and I have enclosed some of the entries for you to browse below. The winners should be announced later this week.

Created by Akhil from Gearies Infant School, Redbridge with 2 Create a Superstory.

 

Created by Emily from Parkfield Primary School, Rochdale with 2Create a Superstory Banner template.

Created by Jasmin and Olivia from Nightingale Primary School, Redbridge with 2Do It Yourself.

Created by Ashley from Pembroke Dock Community School, Pembrokeshire with 2Connect.

Created by Jake from Park Road Primary School, Trafford by 2Create a Superstory.

Created by Cody, Zac and Lucy from Alderman Bolton Community Primary School, Warrington with 2Create a Superstory.

Created by Kiran and Daiyan from Nightingale Primary School, Redbridge with 2Do It Yourself.

Created by Kirsty from Pembroke Dock Community School, Pembrokeshire with 2Publish+ Booklet template.

Created by Ryan from Pembroke Dock Community School, Pembrokeshire with 2Publish+ Booklet template.

Created  by Ashmonique and Kiera and by Shawaib and Ben from Oakdale Junior in Redbridge using 2Publish+.

Using 2Simple to inspire learning within learning platforms: How do you use yours?

We start the week with a Guest post from Learning Platform guru, Fiona Aubrey Smith:

Given that  learning platforms are becoming increasingly familiar as part of school learning provision, it has been fascinating to see how 2Simple tools and outcomes have been used to inspire, engage, enthuse and extend learning.

Many schools are showcasing children’s work by embedding 2Create, 2 DIY and 2Create a Superstory into learning platform pages and galleries. Some examples include:

• The Coombes Primary School – who have been sharing their 2DIY games with younger children (click on Dress the Duck!)
• St Stephen’s Primary School – who have used 2DIY games within their learning platform to support differentiation and home learning

Lots of schools have been using children’s work as a powerful Student-Voice message; ensuring that the school learning platform is very clearly a place for children’s learning. Some great examples include:

• Polehampton Infant School – who have been using children’s 2Paint drawings to provide child-friendly navigation links

There have been many great examples of children using 2Create a Story talking books to share their news with other schools around the world. Some great examples include:

• The Hawthorns Primary School – who have been using talking books to share the journey of Benny Bear to their school with other partner schools in Singapore, Australia, the US and Hong Kong.

Have a look at some more great examples at 2Simple’s UniServity demonstration learning platform where there are also guides on how to embed your 2Simple creations into your learning platform. Remember too of course that you can access 2Simple Online tools through your school learning platform to make these exciting opportunities even easier for your children to be part of!

If you have an example to share of how you are using 2Simple within your learning platform, add a comment with a link, and we’d love to hear from you!

(For more updates about 2Simple being used within learning platforms follow Fiona Aubrey-Smith on Twitter: http://twitter.com/FionaAS)