Website themes are back!

We've made some very big changes to the latest edition of the website builder recently which you may not be aware of. Firstly, you can now re-use, share and modify themes amongst the school. This means that if a class teacher has created a topic theme for a class, then this can be saved and shared with others to use too.

The same also applies for personal websites; now - students can create personal websites and use as many themes as they want. This is a great tool to demonstrate many aspects of ICT as students can now keep many copies of themes as they learn. If you don't have the website builder, then why not ask your administrator to activate the 30-day free trial?

New menu themes available for customers

This morning, we have released a further 6 VLE designs for users of our menu themes within the learning platform. If your administrator allows you to change your theme, visit the "Options" menu and select "Themes" to see the new arrivals.

Our updated system allows us to quickly put together a range of varied colours and designs. Remember that we like suggestions, so feel free to suggest new colours and designs for us to create!

Additional "Button themes" for younger users will be provided during the upcoming UK Easter holiday.

New content being added to My Learning Junior

The team are pleased to announce that over the next few days, all Primary schools will have an additional 800 activities added to their content library! This material is aimed at Years 3,4,5 and 6 and will allow teachers to search, view and copy a range of new activities covering the entire curriculum for Key Stage 2.

Best of all, you don't have to do anything - the upgrade is automatic. So, keep an eye on your resource centre, and check the TES iBoard content library to find the new goodies during this week. You'll see the new folder icons to represent the additional content.

Hermes - our new search assistant - coming soon!

Hermes was a Greek God closely associated with writing, learning, memory and persuasive speech. We've chosen this as the name of our upcoming enhanced search tool. Hermes will act and behave in a similar fashion to Google, in that within your learning platform you'll be able to search for all types of resources, such as:

Images, videos, text, people, courses/topics and websites. The new search tool will also be able to find content linked to curriculum area's too, and display material based upon licencing types.

Our updated search system will also automatically tag your work based upon popular keywords and semantic natural language. In short, when you create a new document, upload a PDF or Word document our system will now be able to automatically tag your work with the top 10 most prominent keywords in your document.

The Hermes engine will provide teachers and students with a fantastic way to search for a range of shared content within the school. Most importantly, it will also be able to automate the process of tagging your work on your behalf - something which we all forget to do!

So, watch this space and we'll update the platform in a few weeks with our new search engine!