If you’d like to keep up to date on the event and other projects we’re working on, please signup to our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/iO6m

Our main premise for the day was that anything we’d do, the teachers could take to their classroom and use with the pupils straight away. With the podcasts we asked them to introduce a subject to the pupils that would be new to them this year. Although we only had fairly little time for this, 3 hours or so, all the groups of teachers were able to write their scripts, plan their shoots, film and edit by the time the day was over. Great success.

Here’s some of the web 2.0 tools I recommended for the teachers to have a look at:

Flockdraw.com. Collaborative drawing space where many students can get involved at the same time. I see this working like the game where you ask a class of pupils to form a a shape in the hall and no one can say a word. In the same way you could ask the kids to illustrate things together as a group without being able to talk to each other.

quietube.com is a simple website where you input the address of a YouTube video and it then shows you that video on a very plain back ground, without all the comments that you might not want to show a room full of 8 year-olds. Unfortunately, it still requires you school to have access to YouTube but I think it’s just a matter of time when that possible in most schools.

buildyourwildself.com. Here you can make an avatar of yourself using parts of different animals. This could work nicely as a starting point for story writing in English lessons.

wallwisher.com is kind of a collaborative noticeboard. It allows you to create your own noticeboard where the kids can then post links, embed videos and photo and write notes. Could be used for collecting research results from kids or giving out homework. Very versatile.

Similar to above is spaaze.com which I found out about after our session at Chalkwell Hall. It’s similar but first of all isn’t Flash so it works on an iPad but also has a lot nicer design. You should check them out, too!

xtranormal.com again this would be fantastic for, say, an English lesson. What’s better than bringing your stories alive with animated characters? This simple to use tool allows you to do just that. All you need is your script and you’ve got an animation ready in less than 5 minutes.

To find out more about the INSET days we can deliver, check out our CPD section!

Here’s a few photos from the day:

Darina from Suklaa is over the moon at having recently become part of the Sandbox Network. We first heard about this brilliant organisation a couple of months ago when we read about TED X Volcano. Some of the TED X Volcano organisers are part of Sandbox.

So what is Sandbox?

Sandbox is a global community of hand-selected young achievers and innovators under 30. We help inspiring young leaders from all fields build meaningful relationships and realize their next big idea. What do you want to achieve next?

Kristian and Darina attended their first London Sandbox dinner last week where they met young entrepreneurs from all over the world. Great to connect with and to keep us on our toes! One of the attendees at the dinner was the very inspiring Fraser Doherty who started his company Superjam at the ripe(!) old age of just 14. Watch this space for more about our Sandbox connections.

Links:
Sandbox Network

We are super-happy to announce that our first iPhone app is now ready and in the App Store. At Suklaa we’re 100% Mac based and have been using iPhones since the day they came out here in the UK. Really, it was only a matter of time before we had to jump in! Although we don’t have cocoa development skills in-house, we didn’t let that stop us from scratching our itch. (Well, at least my itch). Yes, it’s running related and if you’re into this sort of thing (running 10k to marathon races) you’ll most likely find it useful. I’ve recently got really into running (have another marathon this week!) And it seems loads of other people love to run too. If you know some keen runners- please pass this on!

From the website:

Split Times is an iPhone app that allows you to quickly and easily generate split times for each kilometre or mile of your marathon, half-marathon or 10k race. Once you’ve inputed your time, you can view the results as text or send it to yourself as a PDF. The PDF can then be printed. It’s formatted so you can cut out a pace band to wear around your wrist during the race. This way you always know if you’re running too fast – or too slow – right through out the race.

You can find more information about it – including a screencast showing how it works – on the dedicated website at splittimesapp.com.

Keep on Runnin’
Kristian

Claudia Barwell and I were in New York in December meeting with our inspirational friends Sir Ken and Lady Terry Robinson. We had a fantastic time- meeting brilliant people, talking about educational reform, The Element and creative practice.

We tendered and we got it! -NESTA idiscover

Suklaa have a fantastic network of people that we work with and Claudia Barwell is an example of someone who quite simply makes our lives better. Claudia is a project and events manager extraordinaire, she’s organised, inspiring and a master of charm. (She’s also quite posh.)

Darina (Co-Director of Suklaa) and Claudia recently teamed up and put together a tender for the idiscover Programme Manager post for Nesta (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts). We are very excited to say that we were successful!

The idiscover programme is happening in London and Manchester- over the next two years- and we are working with the London Schools who are all part of The Harris Federation in South East London. idiscover is all about developing the innovative capacity of young people by giving them access to a vast range of experiences produced by dynamic learning providers. The programme will put power into the hands of young people and aims to foster some of the skills essential for innovation such as creativity, self-belief, energy, leadership and risk-taking within the cohort of students.

We’re expecting great things!

Links:
Nesta
The Harris Federation
idiscover -website

About Nesta:

NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts – a unique body with a mission to make the UK more innovative. We invest in early-stage companies, inform and shape policy, and deliver practical programmes that inspire others to solve the big challenges of the future.

Last week, I did a workshop at BBC Blast for teachers looking for new ways to reach students. We talked about new technologies that are available on the Internet and about podcasting. Here’s the slides I used during the workshop.

(Also available as a downloadable PDF: BBC Blast Workshop.pdf)

-kristian

So here it is! The new improved Suklaa website!
We needed a better way of sharing all the great projects that we’ve worked on, all those photographs we’ve made and the people we’ve met on the way. A website that keeps growing with us, day by day. I believe we’re getting there. We’ve made it really easy for us to add content on the site, so as soon as we finish something we can share the results. It’s nice to finally be able to show really large photographs on the site. 600 px by 600 px just didn’t cut it anymore. These look really good (even if I do say so myself!), hopefully the next best to seeing them printed.

A few tit-bits about using the site:

We’re structuring it around the three main categories you can see on the front page; Media, Education and Blog. There’s often some overlap between media and education so we’ll do are best to keep them in the right categories. The blog is a space to talk about other things that are going on that more or less relate to what we do. I will most likely have some screencasts and tips how to make things and talk about techniques that I find useful. I’m also planning on doing a ‘making of’ write up of the Tapes video. If you want to keep up to date on what’s happening, grab our RSS feed by clicking here.

And the technical award goes to…

Although, the website itself is designed in-house, we do need to thank WordPress for providing the back-end. WordPress is a great blogging platform / CMS that is a joy to use. Sandbox is the theme used to provide framework and basis for our own custom design, so thanks to Andy and Scott for creating it!

One more thing

On the left you can see a few photographs from our recent trip to New Zealand (click to make them bigger). These and many others will be available to purchase from our forthcoming online store, Suklaa Editions. If you wish to be notified when this is ready, please click here to receive a notification email.

Stay tuned!

Kristian