Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University

The E2BN Annual conference is always a good showcase for KMi Technologies in Schools, and this year we had a particularly strong showing. The conference was hosted in Robinson College, Cambs. and involved a couple of hundred teachers, IT specialists companies and delegates from DfES, Becta and NCSL looking into ICT, kids and learning.

This year the intro keynote was immediately followed by a plenary session on our Rostra technologies powered Making the News project, funded by the Department for Education and Science. This project allows kids to add their own stories and work to a news portal which publishes and syndicates it. The Rostra system has added new media controls and video-blogging to an arsenal of simple, powerful blogging tools. The project is in the process of being rolled out nationwide.

The conference also showcased FlashMeeting technologies via a workshop on easy-to-use video conferencing systems. The E2B Network is the first Schools networking authority to be running their own licensed FlashMeeting server. Excellent!

Finally, a CNM team (Kevin Quick, Jon Linney and Peter Scott) hosted a future-technologies workshop to allow the region&#39s teachers to explore mobile learning in a &#39tagged world&#39. The workshop saw groups of teachers design their own games and play some games out in the conference area, using RFID tagged objects and our Knowledge Hunter technologies running on a PDA.

So successful were these trials and scenario building exercises that a number of school based experiments are now planned for the upcoming term.