Hello readers,

As you may have noticed, we’ve added some new products to our website recently.  In a series of blog posts, starting with this one, I’ll be looking at each new product and giving you an idea of why we think they’ll be great additions to our product range and to your school or home.

Today, we’ll be looking at the Bee-Bot.  The Bee-Bot is a programmable floor robot, designed to be child-friendly, simple to use and a great starting point for teaching control, directional language and programming to young children.  It’s like the Roamer, but far more attractive, much less complicated to use and more cost-effective.

The Bee-Bot has been creating a buzz for quite some time now, winning its first award, the Gold Award, in September 2005 at the Practical Pre-School Awards in London, just a few weeks after it was released into the education market.  Since then, it’s won a BETT Award in the Early Years and Primary Hardware categories and an Education Resources Award in the Primary ICT category – both in 2006.

Feedback from teachers and industry professionals has been very positive.  Dan Plane, ICT Specialist Support Assistant at Hatton School, stated that ‘Most, if not all, children were motivated by the Bee-Bots’ movement, sound or in some cases just the bright colour!’

Chris Wood, Vice Chair of The Association for ICT in Education, said this about the Bee-Bot: ‘Precise and pronounced execution of moves, eyes lighting and beeping to confirm command steps, sound off option, small enough to use on a table and it works on rough or smooth surfaces, even carpet.  I’d recommend it to schools without hesitation to be bought in group packs of at least 5 or 6.’

We’re offering two purchase options for the Bee-Bot.  The first is a single Bee-Bot, which currently has a special offer of £2 off until July 31^st.  The second is the Bee-Bot Class Bundle (pictured above), which includes six Bee-Bots, two rechargable battery units and 20 rechargable batteries.  This also has a special offer; £10 off until July 31^st.

Next week we’ll be looking at the Easi-Speak Microphone, but for now I’ll leave you with some videos of the Bee-Bot in action.  Thanks for reading.

Hello blog readers,

Those of you who frequently read blogs on various websites will probably be bored of reading about the World Cup by now, so I’ll only mention it briefly in this post.  If you aren’t one of the 2000+ people who’ve downloaded our Interactive Whiteboard World Cup Wallchart, it is still available for download completely free of charge for schools.  This free software allows your pupils to track scores, enter match reports and even choose their Man of the Match for each game.  Some of you might even find it handy if you’ve got any score prediction bets on with colleagues!

Right, that’s the football stuff over with.  I was recently on Twitter and I came across an interesting tweet from On Board Learning, which links to an article called ‘The Culture of Public Education’.  The article delves into a fascinating debate on the current state of public education, and whether or not the focus on testing and grades is good for learning.  The article argues that teachers who gauge their pupil’s abilities through watching, listening and monitoring how they perform educational tasks, are helping their pupils learn more effectively than teachers who rely on tests and assessments instead.

I certainly found it to be an interesting read, so I thought I’d share it with you all.  The full article can be found here: http://www.joebower.org/2010/03/culture-of-public-education.html

Thanks for reading, see you next time.

Hello readers,

The half-term break may be over, but summer is still fast approaching and with it this year comes the (football) World Cup.  I mentioned our two new World Cup-related products in the previous blog post, and they’ve proven to be very popular; we’ve already surpassed 1000 downloads for the free World Cup Wallchart.  In fact, this week we’ve had more hits on our site than ever before.

However, the focus of this post is not on the World Cup, but on our next software program, Ben & Lexi’s Early Keyboard & Mouse Skills.  The program will contain plenty of fun activities which will help young learners get to grips with using a keyboard and mouse.  We are still in the early concept stages of development at the moment, but we have an early screenshot for you to feast your eyes on:

As you can see, we are trying to make the software as attractive and child-friendly as possible.  For the keyboard activities, a full keyboard will be displayed on the screen and the keys will ‘light up’ to show the child which key they ought to be pressing – and more importantly, where it is on the keyboard.  This screenshot shows the virtual version of our Large Lower Case Keyboard, however in the full program teachers will be able to select from a range of keyboards, including our Lower & Upper Case Keyboard.  As the program is still in the early development stage, we are open to any suggestions you might have – leave a comment in the box below if you have any ideas.

Well, that’s about all for this week.  I’ll be posting again next Thursday, if I can find time between watching World Cup matches.  Thanks for reading.

Hello readers,

First up, my apologies that there wasn’t a blog post last week, but I and my colleagues were extremely busy for reasons I’ll explain further down.

It’s been an interesting two weeks for us here at Wishtrac.  We’ve had a glimpse of summer with some sunny weather, which was a welcome change from the gloomy weather we normally get.  We’ve also been looking ahead to the biggest sporting event of the year – the football World Cup in South Africa.

To mark the occasion, we’ve created two brand new products – one of which is completely free.  The first product, the 2010 International Football Activity Pack, retails on disk at £4.95 and contains over 100 pages of printable resources, including a number of fun football-themed activities.  These activities include simple puzzles such as Dot to Dot, Spot the Difference, and Navigate the Maze as well more complex puzzles such as Number Puzzles, Anagrams, Word Searches, and Quizzes.  There are up to three difficulty levels for each activity, so even the football-mad ones will find a challenge!

The second product is the Interactive Whiteboard World Cup Wallchart, which is available as a free download right now on our website.  The software is designed to be used on an interactive whiteboard, and allows scores and match results to be tracked each day.  Match reports can also be written and saved; pupils who don’t normally feel motivated to write might suddenly want to when Rooney scores a hat-trick!  As mentioned before, this product is completely free – all you need to do is fill in the details on this page and then click on the ‘Submit’ button to start the download.  We’ve had a few people clicking on the ‘Buy Now’ button, which won’t work as the product is only available as a free download.

Well, I hope you and your pupils enjoy our new products and are looking forward to the World Cup as much as we are.  I won’t be posting next week because of half-term, but check back in two weeks on the 10th of June for more news and updates.

Last week I talked about one of our colleagues who’s out in China sourcing some new products for us.  Well, he’s managed to make an improvement to one of our existing products, the ever-popular Large Lower Case Keyboard.  A few of our customers who have a visual impairment told us that the white symbols on yellow keys were sometimes hard to make out, so we’re now stocking a version with orange keys instead.  Take a look at the difference:

Old

New

I think even our fully-sighted readers will agree there is quite a significant difference.  The Royal Society for the Blind and Partially Sighted (RNIB) agree, and have officially approved keyboards which use orange keys rather than yellow.

The first shipment is currently on its way over to us, and we’ll update the product images on the website as soon as it’s arrived.

Next week, we’ll be looking at another keyboard, but this one is of the virtual variety.  Until then, thanks for reading, have a good weekend and I’ll be back same time next week.

Hello readers,

In last week’s blog, I spoke about our Facebook and Twitter accounts, and the week before that I mentioned that we might be rewarding people who visit them with some discount codes.  Can you guess what I’m going to write next?  That’s right, we’ve got a discount code up – but I’m not telling you anything more about it here.  You’ll have to visit our Facebook page and click on the ‘Like’ button to get the goodies.  This offer will expire by the end of Monday the 10^th, so get clicking if you want to save some money (and who doesn’t)?

In the office, things are pretty quiet on the development front, but we have lots of ideas and concepts for our next projects flying around.  One of these projects is Ben & Lexi’s Early Keyboard and Mouse Skills, which I’ve already mentioned previously, but our other projects include some free resources, which we’ll be working on soon.  I can’t say too much about it now, but they may be related to a minor sporting event which is happening in South Africa this summer…

Meanwhile, outside the office (a long way outside it in fact) we have a colleague in China who’s looking at sourcing some new products for our hardware range.  At least, we hope he still is… we suspect that we might’ve annoyed him recently when we phoned him for a progress update at 8pm our time, thinking the time difference was minus 7 hours, only to find that it was actually plus 7 hours.  Consequently, the progress update we received was neither intelligible nor very friendly.  We’re sure he’ll forgive us soon.

That’s all from us for now, but be sure to check back next Thursday for another blogtastic entry from Wishtrac.

Hello again, blog readers.

In last week’s blog, I mentioned our Facebook and Twitter accounts, and we’ve noticed a significant increase in hits to both of those pages, so thank you to anyone who clicked on those links.  If you didn’t, then I’m shamelessly plugging them again as you can see, so you’ve got no excuse for avoiding them this time!  In all seriousness, we are trying to find new ways to communicate with our customers, and communication is a two-way street, so if you’d like to write on our Facebook wall, comment on this blog post, or get in contact with us any other way, we’d love to hear from you.  We’re just trying to give you more ways to see what’s happening in Wishtrac and give us your input too.  (By the way, we also have a YouTube channel… ok, that’s the last plug, I promise!)

In other news, we’ve started getting feedback from schools that’ve been using the snazzy new version of Booster Phonics I talked about last week.  The feedback has been very positive, with teachers reporting that the admin area is much easier to navigate, and that the program is generally brighter, more colourful and friendlier than it was in its previous carnation.  Feedback like that is great to hear, but we’re also keen to hear of any possible improvements that you think could make the program even better, so if you (or your pupils/children) come up with any, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

This blog will be updated most Thursdays from now on, so please check back next Thursday to read about the latest happenings in Wishtrac.

Enjoy the bank holiday weekend!

As this is the first blog post written by myself, I’ll introduce myself.  I’m Jamie Major, and my main role within Wishtrac is to develop the software (or ‘make it look nice’ as I like to think) and create the product videos.

For most of the year, besides attending the occasional trade show, we’ve been hard at work creating the brand spanking new version of Booster Phonics, which we’ve imaginatively titled Booster Phonics Version 2.  Using feedback gathered from schools, we’ve made a number of improvements to Booster Phonics, including network functionality and adding a female voice to the software, which took a fair while.

We’ve currently got a number of schools who’ve agreed to perform a case study with Booster Phonics to measure how much it can improve pupil’s reading ages over this term.  When we get the results back from those schools in July, we’ll put them up on the site for you all to have a look at.  If you’re a school who own Booster Phonics version 1 and you want version 2, don’t worry – we’ll be sending out the new version to schools over the next few months.  If you’d like to have a sneak preview of what to expect, check out the video right below this text!

Next up for us on the software front is Ben & Lexi’s Early Keyboard and Mouse Skills, which will contain plenty of fun activities which will help young learners take their first steps towards learning to use a keyboard and mouse.  Also, keep your eyes peeled for some new free resources on the site soon.

We’re going to be updating this blog, and our Facebook and Twitter accounts regularly from now on (we may even put some discount codes up…) so stay tuned for more info from us.  Oh, and happy St. George’s Day!