2Simple Talk

Many schools are now empowering their pupils as digital leaders. Here the pupils spread their avid enthusiasm for new and existing technologies throughout the school. The benefits of this model of sharing are obvious:

• Good practice is shared across the school
• The ICT coordinator can easily evaluate new tools and technology as she/ he can work with the children to try things out from a child’s point of view.
• More children and teachers get access to high quality resources
• The curriculum can move on quite quickly as the children are part of driving the development cycle.
• The ICT coordinator is not solely responsible for training.

One school, amongst the many across the UK that have been doing this approach with Purple Mash, has been Kensington Avenue Primary school in Croydon. Their ICT Coordinator , Claire Lotriet, recently brought her leaders along to the Bett show, here they described, amongst the noisy auditorium, their role as digital leaders.

It is clear to see from their own digital leaders blog how much fun and enjoyment they got out of coming to Bett and presenting.

Nicholas Hughes demonstrates how he has used 2DIY with his pupils in years 3 and 4 to create games.

I often return to this TED TALK as it makes me think of 2Simple and Purple Mash

One thing I notice more and more about our organisation is how an idea begins, mutates, matures and is then actioned. There are some eureka moments and there are times when the developers, artist and sales people do or say something that is just genius. But mostly things are built or shaped over a period of time by the interplay between all these groups and their interactions with customers.

Take Purple Mash for example, as content manager I take an overseeing role on both what goes in and what we leave out. But, there is a team of people that feed into that and who by reflecting, questioning  and developing shape the product on a daily basis

I am fortunate that this is not a one man job, for a start the applications have been built by a team of talented developers. The look and feel is provided by our amazing artist, who helps ensure there is a more unified look and feel to what we build. And feeding into this is our team of consultants who are in school on an almost daily basis, showing the product and taking feedback from pupils and teachers about what they like and what they’d like to see more of. Furthermore those that interact with us on Twitter and Facebook also feed in views and points they want to raise.

It would be interesting to chart all the links between all these groups and discussions, but suffice to say they all cross and hook up in some way. In short, there are many  good ideas from so many many amazing people who daily help to build and extend this great resource. Thank you to all of you

Anthony

When we started Purple Mash as a successor to our Online Tools offering, we offered a suite of creative tools, some excellent games, quality premium content  such as 2Type  and a few free extras. We called the extras Publish Projects and these structured writing templates have grown from twenty to over four hundred in just a few months. They have also been joined by Paint Projects too and these have also grown, though not all of these have been free.

Over the coming months you will see new content and more extensions to open ended tools. For example, 2Design and Make and 2Publish Extra will be expanded. We have been listening and will be acting on some of your requests, we know for example that many of you would like to make a boat or a pyramid in 2Design and Make. We want to give you a reason to keep coming back to Purple Mash and as such will be looking to increase the functionality and coverage of our successful creative tools.

One thing we do encounter from casual users of Purple Mash, who do not subscribe is that as we have so many open/free resources they wonder why they should subscribe. These are the aforementioned Publish Projects, which have proved a great means of getting people to visit our site, and have grown from 20 to over 400.

Publish Projects – image Simon Haughton –

To clarify Subscribers, do get an amazing deal which now includes the following:

• All 12 Creative Tools – including 2DIY 3D
• Maths Games
• 2Type
• All Paint Projects
• The ability to save Publish project work online and amend font size
• All Post Cards
• All Leaflets
• All Purple Mash Cams

But is it time to now restrict the majority of our Publish / writing projects to just a few that are both topical and typical of what can be found on the rest of the site. Perhaps we should return to just 20 or so being open to everyone.
Should we have so many free/open resources on Purple Mash?

Your comments please?

Well Bett is almost upon us and we are very excited and keen to get along to our almost finished stand and deck the walls with Purple Mash.

What can you expect from us this year?

We want to show you Purple Mash and our vast back catlogue and hear about how you have been using it too. Though we’ll try not to keep reminding you where we are and what we have via Twitter. We wont be entering you into a prize draw or looking to spam you, we really just want you to enjoy the buzz and energy of our presenters both from within our team and from our specially invited 2Simple Superstars.

Who will be there and what will they be doing?

The usual 2Simple team will be there , including : Katie, Nigel, Andy, Alan, Katherine, Novah, Daniel, Sam , Sennay, Marcel, Lisa, Anthony etc . Aside from us, the list below outlines who will be speaking on our stand, and what they plan to talk about.

Wednesday 11th January

11.00 -11.20 ‘Using Purple Mash in ICT club’By Charlie Dean, ICT Co-ordinator at Titchfield Primary School in Hampshire

12.00 – 12.15 ‘Un-boring the lads’ – Inspiring boys to read and writeBy Jonny Zucker, Children’s author

12.45 – 13.00 ‘Un-boring the lads’ – Inspiring boys to read and writeBy Jonny Zucker, Children’s author

Thursday 12th January

11.00 – 11.20 + 12.00 – 12.20 ‘Using 2DIY 3D in Purple Mash at Engayne School’By Stephanie Homewood, ICT Co-ordinator at Engayne Primary School in Havering
14.00– 14.15 ‘The Power of Programming’By Nick Hughes, ICT Co-ordinator at Nightingale Primary School in Redbridge
16.00– 16.20 ‘Mashing it up at home’By Tim Handley, ICT Co-ordinator at Woodlands Primary School in Norfolk

Friday 13th January

10.30 – 10.50 – ‘Look What I can do’By Nick Hughes, ICT Co-ordinator at Nightingale Primary School in Redbridge

11.00 – 11.15 ‘Mashing in Action’By Dawn Hallybone, ICT Co-ordinator ar Oakdale Junior School in Redbridge

12.00– 12.20 ‘ Staff Meeting (Purple) Mash up’By Claire Lotriet, ICT Coordinator & Year 6 Class Teacher at Kensington Avenue Primary School in Croydon

15.00 – 15.15 ‘Purple Mash in the Primary School’By Ian Addison, ICT Co-ordinator at St John the Baptist Primary School in Hampshire

15.45– 16.00 ‘ Purple Mash at Porchester, how to use Purple Mash in KS2 across the curriculum’By Simon Widdowson, ICT Co-ordinator and Blogger at Porchester Junior School in Nottingham

Saturday 14th January

10.30 – 10.45 ‘Un-boring the lads’ – Inspiring boys to read and writeBy Jonny Zucker, Children’s author

11.00– 11.15 – ‘Using Purple Mash in Key Stage 2′By Claire Lotriet, ICT Coordinator & Year 6 Class Teacher at Kensington Avenue Primary School in Croydon

12.00 – 12.15 – ‘Creative Purple Mashing’By Simon Haughton, ICT Co-ordinator and blogger at Parkfield Primary School in Rochdale

14.00 – 14.15 – ‘Purple Mash in the Primary School’By Ian Addison, ICT Co-ordinator at St John the Baptist Primary School in Hampshire

15.00 – 15.15 – ‘Un-boring the lads’ – Inspiring boys to read and writeBy Jonny Zucker, Children’s author

Do you know that you can add some popular 2Simple titles to access via www.purplemash.com?

Add in any of:

2Simple French, 2Simple Spanish and 2Start English for a one off price of  £200 each and enjoy them from both school and home.

2Start English  £200

2Simple French  £200

2Simple Spanish  £200

For more info on each of these programs please click on the images above

Also please note our Purple Mash prices for 2012:

Purple Mash Annual Prices

Very small school                < 50 pupils            £250

Small school                        51-120 pupils       £350

Medium school                    121-400 pupils     £600

Large school                        401-600 pupils     £750

Very large school                600+ pupils           £900

We can set up a trial of Purple Mash for your school.  Send us an email / dm / facebook  with your details and we’ll get right on it.

I regularly use the 2Publish Projects (available on Purple Mash) with children at my school to produce documents and posters with linked to topics currently being studied in class.

Each of the project templates – also known as ‘apptivities’ – are linked to a different: theme, celebration or event.  At the time of writing there are over 200 of these available covering a diverse range of titles from ‘Seaside Senses’ and ‘Blitz Poem’ to ‘Superhero Profile’ and ‘Election News’, with the list growing and being added to on a regular basis. They can be easily retrieved by: going directly to a specific project’s URL, doing a key word search or by looking through the different subject folders on Purple Mash itself.

The projects all begin with a helpful instruction screen explaining to the child what they should do in it (e.g. write a persuasion leaflet or recount an historical event), with many containing a short video clip too which helps children relate their work to a real: person, setting or scenario. A word bank is provided as well, containing questions to prompt children’s thinking and useful vocabulary/sentence starters which are typed in automatically when a button is clicked on – extremely useful for encouraging reluctant or struggling writers.

In addition, the children can also enhance the appearance of their work by making use of one of the desktop publishing tools available to illustrate it – such as by:

• importing high-quality photographs;
• inserting lovely clip art pictures;
• painting on pictures.

The ability to rotate/resize the clip art and use a simple cropping tool to bring emphasis onto particular areas of photographs gives children the power to be able to control the appearance of their work even further. 

Whilst most of the 2Publish Project functions are free to non-subscribers to Purple Mash, children from subscribing schools also get the added functionality of being able to save their work online and to change the format of their text from the default settings – such as by increasing/decreasing the font size or by change the font colour. This helps them personalise their work even more to their own individual requirements.

Each project is very highly focused and tailored to the theme it is about – the clip art, photos and associated word bank only contain a selection of relevant text and pictures, for instance. This means that all the resources that children may require are all easily available and they don’t need to waste time searching for them (especially useful for the more obscure topics).

To ensure that the 2Publish Project apptivities are accessible to as many children as possible, they have been carefully designed by the staff at 2Simple Software to have:

• a ‘speak aloud’ function on the words on the word bank to aid the less confident readers;

• a high-contrast colour scheme that is visually quite clear to see;
• child-friendly icon graphics whose functions can be quite easily interpreted.

As I only have a limited time for each ICT lesson (whose main focus obviously needs to be on developing ICT skills), if any cross-curricular links can be made then I always consider it is a bonus to the session. To help prompt the children in entering the text for each apptivity, I therefore provide them with a sheet containing some words to help inspire them with ideas/aid them with spellings. These include: sentence openers that need finishing off, cloze procedures that need completing and lists of key words that need putting into full sentences. Whilst this may be seen as not being very creative, it’s important to remember that the children are taking part in an ICT lesson and not a literacy lesson. Obviously, I do try to differentiate the sheets whenever possible and like to encourage the more confident typists/writers to add extra detail/information  to improve their work further. 

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In conclusion, I think that the 2Publish Projects have a valuable contribution to make in ICT lessons during the middle primary school years. They allow children to learn and to develop confidence in using a variety of ICT skills to produce posters/documents which can then be easily utilised in other subject lessons and later transferred to other software packages too (e.g. PowerPoint). I’ve always found that the children really enjoy using the 2Publish Projects, mostly likely because they are literally so straightforward to use for creating both pleasing and attractive pieces of work with – you would be amazed at what a difference to their levels of independence and motivation having all the clip art and photos readily available to illustrate/inspire their writing has. The fact that they be accessed online at home too just makes them even more perfect and I highly recommend that you introduce them to you children!

How do you use the 2Publish Projects in your classroom?