Reading Software - Long Vowels, Adobe AIR and more...

A new way of delivering content... This weekend sees a small change to www.roythezebra.com but with a big impact - I’m excited to announce a new Reading Software service where users will be able to download bundles of games to their desktop as software... it means you won’t need the internet or a web browser to access these new games (internet needed to download). The main benefit is that it completely removes the risk involved around planning a lesson where an internet-based resource is used (i.e. internet safety, internet connection issues, possible but rare website failure).
The first wave of games to be delivered in this way focus on Long Vowel Phonemes and come with hundreds of worksheets, resources plus two lesson plans for each long vowel phoneme. To run the games from your desktop you’ll need Adobe AIR installed - it’s a new free product from Adobe - think of it like Flash Player but for your desktop. Don’t worry about installing it - it’s done whilst downloading the games. It’s a brilliant product from Adobe and opens up a world of opportunity for everyone. Visit the Adobe marketplace to view some other applications / software available.

All NEW content from now will be built to be delivered via Adobe AIR.

For this new service I’ve decided to add a small charge for the reasons outlined below (Please note: only the new long vowel Mango games, plus any new content from now will be charged for, other older resources remain free and accessible):

To support future development:
Each game developed for the site now involves a huge amount of time - for example; the new Mango games have taken 3 to 4 months to build, plus 1 year of reading and learning the new skills required (the programming language for Flash has evolved tremendously, it has now become a full Object Oriented Programming (OOP) language - in sum I’ve had to hit the coding books full on and grow a double double super super strength brain - I can tell you getting my head around ActionScript 3 has been an emotional voyage!!). This time needs to be funded somehow... I have another job which has paid for the initial development and balancing the two has been extremely difficult, I’ve sacrificed weekends, holidays and evenings to get the site where it is today... it’s been enjoyable and I’m not looking for sympathy (it’s my choice!!) but the long-term survival of the site depends on me being able to keep up this pace - clearly unrealistic... especially if I want to do all the other things people do when in their thirties... relationships, starting family etc etc...

Hosting Charges:
Traffic to the site has now grown to massive proportions - more than 80,000 teachers visit the site monthly downloading well over half a million pages - this is brilliant, exactly why I built the site - thank you for coming. However, the site is hosted by a third party and I’ve been recently clobbered by extra hosting charges - since I’m not funded by any means these charges come out of my pocket... which is fine in the short-term... but not any good for the long-term since they are going to keep on growing! The money made from the online store and advertising is very minimal...

Donations:
I had a dream... that we could all pull together and pay a very small amount each to support the costs of the site (less than £1 or $1 per school per year would have been fine). It didn’t happen, that’s OK, I don’t mind, now I need to plan around this not happening. A BIG thank you to the 7 donators that did...

Price:
So the conclusion has been to add a small charge to the new content - older content will remain free and totally accessible as it has been for the last 4 years - I hope this is understandable. I’m also very happy to give the software to schools in poor countries - please write to me at tim@roythezebra.com - telling me where your school is and perhaps sending me a picture of it... please note this offer is only for schools in the poorest countries, e.g. Burkina, Mali, Tanzania, Chad, Nepal and so on...

I hope you enjoy the new Mango games, thank you for using Roy, as always, feedback is always welcome (good or bad...).

... Operation Rescue Lucy: It had to go on-hold whilst I relearnt my Flash skills - there was a risk that if I didn’t upgrade my programming knowledge that I would simply be creating new content in an old fashioned way that wouldn’t stand the test of time... as soon as there is an opportunity to get back on the job I will - thank you for your patience and I hope you understand...

Tim

Tim Bowerbank
www.roythezebra.com

USA, Latvia, UK, Australia and Japan Virtual Meeting

Yesterday, working closely with Lorraine Leo (a BIG thank you), Technology Integrator at Jackson School, Massachussetts, we were able to facilitate an online meeting between 5 nations around the world, including myself in the UK, Lorraine and Noel in the US, Tanja and Madara in Latvia, Geoff in Australia and last, but not least, Sigeto Sakari from Japan.

The session allowed the students to meet each other and then to use the online discoverE interactive whiteboard software to draw with each other creating an underwater ocean scene - we used a background from one of the Roy the zebra games and discoverE's drawing tools and then text tools to give all our sea creatures names and to say something about themselves...

It was an amazing feat and we all felt very proud of ourselves, great that we had managed to meet, communicate and create without any barriers...

Sakari also kindly shared other news with us from Japan... specifically a concert that his students had performed at.

I have included a screen grab of our output - beautiful octopus from Madara and some great fish (especially Speckles) from Noel... well done everyone!

If you're reading this and would like to network with other schools and engage in this way please send me an email..., thanks again to Lorraine for bringing everyone together and also to Geoff from discoverE for allowing us to use his software.

Best wishes Tim...

Networking Schools Internationally

Last week’s meeting with Jackson School, via Skype and discoverE, in Massachusetts highlighted to me how easy it is (via the internet) to virtually meet with schools across international borders - which could be used to great effect for learning (and of course it’s free).

However, one of the issues might be finding an appropriate school that would like to meet with your school.
With a large number of registered roythezebra users in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand plus other nations (a big hello to schools in Buenos Aires...), I was thinking I could quite easily put you in touch with like-minded teachers and schools in order to meet virtually - it could be to share or read stories that the children have written or simply to explain what it’s like living in a different part of the world... having that ‘real life’ contact can be so important for motivation and learning.

Naturally everyone involved would need to be vetted prior to meeting, but this is just an initial thought... if you’d like to get involved just let me know... tim@roythezebra.com

Best

Tim

ps. leave me a note here if you think it’s a good idea... if I get an overwhelming response then I’ll put it out to everyone via email...

Virtual Classroom Meeting / Jackson School Massachusetts

Very exciting afternoon yesterday - via Skype and some rather cool ‘Virtual Classroom’ software I was able to spend some excellent time with a small group of students and their teacher from 'Jackson School' in Newton, Massachusetts, USA (www.jacksonschool.org)...

Using Skype the students were able to ask me questions about the interactive Roy the zebra story and also to ask me my thoughts on the ‘Rescue Lucy’ online story and how that was coming along.

We then used the ‘discoverE’ virtual classroom software (www.compued.com.au) which allowed me to upload a powerpoint presentation with a number of my recent sketches - this included some new characters for the next story... we were able to talk about the story and what the plot could be.

Also using the discoverE software I was able to draw Roy and friends on the virtual interactive whiteboard. The students were able to draw with me adding stripes and to colour some of my drawings... wow...amazing to think that we’re thousands of miles apart... and using Australian software!

A big thank you to Lorraine Leo, their teacher, in helping to facilitate this, all the Jackson students and to Geoff Kaye, of CompuEd, for letting us use the virtual classroom software.

It was so great to meet the students and get direct feedback on roythezebra.com and the other good thing... it was totally free as we were talking through the internet - VoIP (Voice over the internet protocol)...

Operation: 'Rescue Lucy' Interactive Story

Work has begun on ‘Operation: Rescue Lucy’ - lots of you have been asking me when the next story is coming out and now with the new site designed I can put all my effort into writing the next interactive story... I’m interested to know whether I should go with the original title, which is ‘Operation: Rescue Lucy’ or go for the ‘Get Lucy’ (like Get Carter)... you can see I’ve got far... stuck already on the title.. (!)

I kinda like the latter... if you have a spare moment leave a note here letting me know what you think...

Also, the last story was written into 9 parts... which meant the story could be spread over a couple of weeks I mapped out the plot this last Friday and and I think it’s going to be another nine part story... I guess you could do the first story and then leave it a month and do ‘Get Lucy’... any thoughts or strong feelings welcome...
So, armed only with a pencil and a sketchpad I’m forging forward... even though I love the internet and all the flashy things that it can do my favourite tool is still the ol’ pencil and a piece of paper... HB to be precise, tried using a 4B the other day - what a disaster...

As I draw the pictures - I’ll be uploading some of them to this blog... you can try and guess what’s going on...

Best Tim

Roy's new interactive reading website

Many of you may have missed out on the launch of the new interactive reading roythezebra.com website at the end of last term... I uploaded it quietly on the weekend of 7th July 2007... did you know the date 070707 is lucky, I chose it by accident but there were plenty of other people out there who had been hatching and planning to do things years in advance - just do a search on Google.

So what's changed and why did I redesign Roy's site... here's my thinking...

• The old site was looking really 'old' - I've been quite ashamed of it... I knew I could do better...


• After creating 80 interactive reading games and lesson plans over the past two years and 'shoe-horning' them into the old site things just didn't seem to flow and the site wasn't logical with the individual reading games difficult to find...

• I wanted to introduce some programmes that would allow the site to start to pay for itself (at worse...) and to give me an income (at best...) to continue the work full-time (... if I could focus full-time we'd be flying...)
  

• I also wanted to increase the quality of the resources and literacy worksheets by using .pdfs


• ... and finally to make the site more Google friendly so more people can find it...

Everything you could find on the old site is on the new site - no passwords added or barriers created to using... you should never be more than three clicks away from what you want.

I hope you like it... feedback, good or bad welcome, as always...

Best wishes

Tim

P.S What's with the random pics for this blog? I'm not allowed to add blogs without sketching a new image, thus forcing me to draw... which I always procrastinate with...

Welcome...

OK, thought it would be a really good idea to create a blog for the Roy the zebra website - this way I can communicate where the site is going, ideas that I have, share feedback and other websites that might be useful for literacy and the ones that inspire me the most.

This blog will also allow everyone who uses Roy to post comments on any of the blog entries that I create.