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)...

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...