We are attending the UKLA Internatioanl Conference being held at the University of Chester. StoryPhones is exhibiting in the Small hall and I am also attending some of the lectures and seminars.
I will be tweeting during the next few days to share some of the interesting ideas and thoughts I have come across. You can follow our tweets via our website or follow us on twitter at @storyphones.
June has been a busy month for StoryPhones.
We started in Stratford Upon Avon at the National Primary Head Teachers Annual Conference. As always, we had a great deal of interest in StoryPhones, met lots of friendly people and had the chance to walk around Stratford and visit Shakespeare’s birthplace.
The link with Shakespeare and StoryPhones may be a bit tenuous. However, Shakespeare used words and spoke
n language to tell his stories and this is the core of StoryPhones, using spoken word and language to tell a story. I am sure Shakespeare, not just a play write but also a business man would have made great use of modern technology!
Next, we headed for Bournemouth and the Nursery Show, our stand had a wonderful view of the sea and the rain lashed beach! Meeting lots of visitors to our stand and chatting to them always sparks off ideas. As the result of this, we are putting together a pack of posters and leaflets to help with fund raising efforts, and some special offers to go with it. We’ll post more details later.
Monday, we were in York, attending the National Literacy Trust’s ‘Talk For Writing’ conference. This was held at the National Railway
Museum, and we had lunch among the engines! The conference was led by Pie Corbett. The whole day was packed with brilliant ideas and ways of helping our children to become creative, effective writers. If you ever have the opportunity to attend, it is well worth it.
Today, June 24th, we are attending the NGFL conference in Newcastle Upon Tyne finding out about the ways technology can support children’s learning. How about making an audio slide show using audio and still images to tell a story. More thoughts about this idea later.
National Primary Headteachers’ Annual Conference 8th and 9th June 2011
The Holiday Inn, Stratford Upon Avon
We are exhibiting at the Primary Headteachers Conference in Stratford. If you are attending, we will be delighted to meet with you and demonstrate our award winning MP3 audio systems. We will have our classroom displays with us and lots of ideas about different ways to use digital audio in the classroom.
The Nursery Show, Bournemouth International Centre, 17th – 18th June 2011
Visit us on Stand S39
We are returning to the Nursery Show this year and looking forward to meeting everyone on our stand. We will be demonstrating our award winning Story
Phones MP3 players and Little Listeners, our loud speaking MP3 players. You can also find out about the wide range of audio downloads available in the Bookshelf download store..
The importance of listening and communication skills has been highlighted by the recent Bercow Report and the Year of Communication’s ‘Hello’ Campaign. StoryPhones will help you to support and encourage your children’s listening and communication skills. Vistors to our stand will be able to chat to our experts and find out about using digital audio and MP3 players in your nurseries, preschools and homes.
We didn’t have too far to travel this time to the National Early Education Conference at Bolton. It was a very well organised conference and we enjoyed meeting all of the organisers and delegates.
Everyone must have had a very good day since there was a wonderful line up of speakers. The theme of the conference was ‘The Cleverness of Boys’. In the morning, delegates listened to talks by Nikki Buchan from Mindstretchers and Gary Wilson, Education Consultant and author. In the afternoon, they were treated to a wonderful session lead by Ros Bayley and Sally Featherstone which at times was informative and moving as Ros told us stories about some of the boys she has taught over the years.
Although I was only able to attend the afternoon session I learnt so much about the way boys brains develop and that by changing and adapting the ways we teach boys we can work with these differences to make their learning experience a positive and sucessful one.
Our International Sales Manager, Piero Alberici has just returned from Dubai after visiting GESS (Gulf Education Supply Show), the biggest education supply show in the Gulf region.
Piero was invited to attend the show by Projection House, our new distributors for StoryPhones in the UAE. Piero joined Lita Matthews and her collegues on their stand to demonstrate our StoryPhones systems. He chatted to teachers and visitors from around the Gulf region, including Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Egypt, Qatar and Kuwait.
Piero was delighted with the teachers response. Children’s educational needs are the same the world over and the teachers were excited by the creative possiblities that StoryPhones would offer them.
We have just returned from a busy week of travel.
TES Primary Exhibition
The TES Primary show at Manchester is always a pleasure to attend. The wonderful old railway terminal makes a fantastic venue, Manchester city centre is vibrant and we always meet such frienldy people. Thank you to everyone who visited our stand and for all of your positive feedback about StoryPhones. Our new display attracted a lot of interest. We decided to develope this to demonstrate a few ways that StoryPhones are being used in schools and nurseries around the country.
I was able to take some time away from our stand to wander around the exhibition and saw some very good new resources. I liked:
- Speak Clearly Ltd, resources designed to help and assess children’s spoken language skills.
- Sing Your Times Tables. Children can learn their times tables by singing along with three characters Fizz, Buzz and Wizz to catchy songs. The tunes are easy to learn and there are opportunities to join in with the answers.
We held a prize draw again at the exhibition, the prize was a Little Listener. Congratulations to the winners, Knypersley First School.
Nottingham Literacy Conference
On Wednesday 6th April we exhibited at the Nottingham Literacy Conference. We had the chance to meet lots of people, the workshops were very interesting and lunch was good too. Alsso at the exhibition was:
The UK Literacy Association
I was delighted to meet Eve Bearne from the UK Literacy Association. UKLA is a charity with the sole objective of the advancement of education in literacy. The research and information they produce is invaluable reading for anyone interested in supporting and teaching literacy skills. If you would like more information about the UKLA then please click here to go to their website.
The Naughty Bus
I was able to buy a copy of the ‘Naughty Bus’ by Jan and Jerry Oke. This is a wonderfully humerous, imaginative story about a little red London bus. The photographic illustrations are brilliant, my favourite page is the little red bus in the shower! The story is so easy to follow and I really liked the way the text changed shape and size to reflect the story. I can’t wait to take it to school to share with the children. My big disappointment was that I didn’t have time to have my book signed by Jan Oke who was attending the conference.
Where next?
We are not travelling very much in May, but June and July are busy again. If you would like to see StoryPhones in action, then please click here to visit our website with details of the exhibitions and conferences we are attending.
We have just returned from the TES Primary Show at Manchester. As usual, I always like to look around to see what resources and ideas are on show. I was pleased to have the opportunity to meet with Naomi Mason, a Speech and Language Therapist who runs her own company called Speak Clearly Ltd.
Naomi has produced a whole series of resources which bridge the gap between Speech and Language Therapy and schools/nurseries. Her teaching resouces give clear, practical guidance about how to enhance speech and language development within a classroom or nursery. The Speak Clearly resources have hundreds of simple five-minute activities for teachers and their assistants to identify and help children who have Speech and Language difficulties or EAL. All of the resources are presented on a CDrom so the whole school can share them.
I really liked the Speak Clearly resources, the photos were clear and simple, the instructions were easy to follow and I liked the fact that I could use them to make simple assessments of children’s spoken language. These resources are ideal for the non specialist to use.
If you would like to know more about the Speak Clearly games and resources then it is worth visiting Naomi’s website at www.speakclearly.co.uk.
Congratulations to our latest prize draw winners.
The Village Childcare Nursery in Worcester won our Education Show prize draw. The nursery told us “We are delighted to know we have won a Little
Listener and can’t wait for it’s arrival”
Reed First School in Hertfordshire won our prize draw at the Hertfordshire ICT Festival and have received their yellow Little Listener.
We hope all the children have fun using their Little Listeners.
TES Education 2011 8th and 9th April
We are off on the road again, this time to Manchester for the TES Education Show 2011 at Manchester Central. After our success at Birmingham with our new demonstration area and displays, we are looking forward to bringing these to Manchester. Come along to Stand A15 and we can demonstrate the latest version of our software and talk with you about the different ways of using StoryPhones.
It would be lovely to see you because …
- we are a small, very friendly company and love chatting to people
- you can see the latest version of our software, we’ve made it even easier for you and your children to use and you can import audio resources in even more different audio formats
- we have even more audio stories, songs and games in our download store
- you can see our latest product, The Little Listener in six brilliant colours
- you can take advantage of our show discounts and prize draw
- we also have seats to rest your weary feet
We will look forward to seeing you there.
Last week we were at the Education Show. We always enjoy this exhibition and everyone is so friendly. It also gives us a chance to meet our customers and to find out how they and their children are using their StoryPhones systems. Thank you to Westgarth Primary School in Redcar who said ‘StoryPhones was a brilliant invention and took all of the stress away from children having to use buttons to control equipment’.
We also met Lisa from World’s End Infant and Nursery School. Lisa’s enthusiasm for StoryPhones was infectious and we could have chatted all day. Lisa has been using her StoryPhones in the creative area. Her children have been listening to Jack and the Beanstalk and making clay beanstalks as they listen. A brilliant idea.
In fact we have a big thank you to all of our customers for their wonderful feedback. It was a great pleasure to meet everyone and to hear how children are benefitting from using StoryPhones.
Demonstration Area
This year we were able to create different areas of learning to demonstrate how our StoryPhones systems are being used in schools and nurseries. We also set up a demonstration area and we able to deliver mini training sessions.
Colourful Little Listeners
We also launched the full colour range of Little Listeners. You can now purchase them in six vibrant colours. Everyone had a favourite colour!
