A bit more Action Script in 2DIY

Here is a further video I made on using Action Script in 2DIY

This week I look at teleporting and losing a life.

Don’t forget you can find out more about Action Script by visiting the 2DIY Archive http://www.2diyarchive.co.uk/

If you find these videos helpful do let me know, also you may have a query or a suggestion for other videos. Please leave a comment or email Anthony at 2simple dot com.

More Purple People

You may remember that during a recent blog post 2Simple Katherine wrote about ‘Purple People’, which she defined as:

 These are the people who make us wear our 2Simple T-shirts with pride and remind us all why we work so hard.  You can tell when a purple person is on the approach.   They are brimming with positive energy and enjoy telling anyone in the vicinity about the programs they have in their school.

Last weekend many of us were at the Education Show in Birmingham and we met some more Purple people.

Firstly 2Simple Gemma met Jack aged 8. She told me, Jack came to the Education show and impressed me and the rest of the team with his enthusiasm and knowledge of the 2Simple programs. He helped Alan to create a fantastic Superstory.  He is Gemma’s  purple person of the show!

Then, 2Simple Katie met three very enthusiastic teachers, she tells us about Kerri Farrar, Rachel Mee and Suky Dhillon, who are all teachers from Rise Park Primary School in Nottingham.  It was her absolute pleasure to meet them and introduce them to 2Simple Software for the very first time.  Here is a short video clip showing how they reacted to 2Create A Superstory.  They left the stand with big smiles and a CD to try back at school with the children.  Let’s hope they let the children have a go too! :0)

E-Safety Winners

Thanks so much to all of you who entered our E-safety competition that we ran to coincide with Safer Internet day.

The entries were very strong and Gemma and I have struggled to decide on winners, but at last we have made a decision.

1st prize: 3 Home user titles:

Akhil  aged 7 from Gearies Infants for this 2Create a Superstory entry

2nd prize: 2 Home user titles:

Jake M- age 8- Park Road Primary School – made with 2Create a Superstory

Joint 3rd prize: 1 Home user title:

Jasmine and Olivia year 6 Nightingale Primary, made with 2DIY

 

Joint 3rd prize: 1 Home user title:

Ashley year 4 – 2Connect-  Pembroke Dock Community School, Pembrokeshire

We will be in touch with all the winners and once again thank you to all of you who entered. We loved looking through your entries!

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 .