About Honeycomb

What is Honeycomb?

Honeycomb is a media rich set of creativity, collaboration and publishing tools delivered in a safe and secure online environment, specifically designed for schools. It enables users to create their own web pages, and to collaborate with others – sharing and commenting on each others work. It encompasses tools which make use of Web 2.0 technology including wikis, blogs and widgets, but most of all it enables a user’s work to be brought together in a personal, online space.

Honeycomb fosters independent thinking and learning, and is intuitive and easy to work with. It allows users to publish to any permitted audience and receive feedback from peers, parents and teachers thus encouraging collaboration within a community, e.g. within a class or school or further afield.

Honeycomb has been designed to serve a wide variety of specific educational purposes and is suitable for pupils of all ages and abilities. It fosters pupil creativity and allows pupils to make use of web based technology for communication and online publishing of their work, whilst schools are reassured that this can all take place safely within Honeycomb’s secure walled garden.

Honeycomb naturally encourages exploration and investigation. It can be used individually, as part of a group or class activity, or by a teacher in a wide variety of pedagogic ways. It can also be integrated with learning platforms providing rich pupil creativity tools that learning platforms can sometimes lack.

Honeycomb is an ongoing development and will continually be enhanced over time. This means investing in Honeycomb now will not be the end. New features will be added regularly as technology develops and as Honeycomb users let us know of their ideas.

Find out more about Honeycomb and how it’s being used by reading the Honeycomb Blog, or see it in action by taking a look at these demos.

Why Honeycomb?

There are lots of good reasons for using Honeycomb. Here are some of them…

• Learning beyond the classroom
• Pupil engagement
• Positive impact on learning
• Pupil creativity
• Easy to use
• Collaborative working
• Personalisation
• Safe and secure environment
• Assessment
• Engaging parents
• Improving literacy standards
• Provides tools for your learning platform

Learning beyond the classroom

Honeycomb is delivered entirely online. Not only does this mean that as we release new updates you receive them automatically, but also that Honeycomb is available at school and at home, or in fact, anywhere with an internet connection.

In our experience, pupils are only too keen to continue using Honeycomb when they get home, motivated by the opportunity to continue to collaborate on work with their peers.

Beyond facilitating pupil’s continuing their schoolwork at home, Honeycomb also opens the door to working with other schools not only in the same vicinity, but even working with schools in other countries! This has huge potential for MFL learning for starters.

Pupil engagement

Honeycomb enables pupils to publish their work to others, sharing it with peers, teachers and even parents. Publishing is controlled by the administrator (usually the teacher), who sets up who published work can be viewed and / or edited by. This could be fellow classmates, others in their year group, Key Stage, school, or all other Honeycomb users, which are largely other schools. As Honeycomb operates in effect like a walled garden, this gives pupils a sense of publishing to an audience, which is a huge motivator for them, without their work being published to the internet at large.

“My son has been very enthusiastic about doing homework on Honeycomb and has logged on every day on coming home from school to show us the work he has done and to ‘play’ with his pages.”  Parent of pupil at Milverton Primary School in Warwickshire

“The quantity and quality of the work from all my class was far better than I would have expected on paper.” Caroline Tribe, Class Teacher, Milverton Primary School

Pupil creativity

Honeycomb promotes pupil creativity by providing a media rich toolset including audio, video, text, graphics and presentation features which provide pupils with the wide range of creative choice they would expect from any desktop tools. Using a webcam and microphone with Honeycomb allows pupils to instantly capture their own recordings and drag them straight onto their pages, both powerful tools for recording speaking.

Pupils can use these tools to produce highly creative multi-modal pages, but in addition to creating their content on a web page, they can also choose to create their own blogs, to produce a series of pages linked together, or wikis, to share their page with others to contribute to.

Positive impact on learning

Honeycomb can be treated as a blank canvas and used as a place to record and write anything, e.g. from writing about Ancient Egyptians or World War II to blogging about a football match. The sense of audience for published work encourages pupils to think about writing for an audience and to improve the standard of their presentation. Also Honeycomb’s commenting feature means fellow classmates can leave feedback for the author, who can then benefit hugely from this peer review.

Ease of use

Honeycomb is an easy to use application for teachers and pupils alike. It has been extensively user tested prior to launch and has been designed for use by learners of all ages and abilities. Its clear icons and in-built guidance features are designed to support intuitive learning.

Honeycomb is not simply a pupil productivity tool it is a powerful tool for all. Teachers can use Honeycomb to assign tasks, feedback to children on work, to organise projects and class groups and to create their own content to share with their class or colleagues. Also, as the emphasis isn’t needed on teaching pupils how to use Honeycomb, teachers are able to concentrate on the development and enhancement of curriculum related objectives.

Collaborative working

Collaboration between users is, in essence, part of the application’s design concept and purpose. The pedagogy for collaboration is clear. Honeycomb encourages peer review, evaluating each other’s work and peer sharing. It gives pupils a real audience and an easy means of sharing their ideas. Collaborative working facilitates a sense of community. Not only can work be shared with pupil peers and teachers but with parents (via online access at home) and with other schools who are also Honeycomb users.

Personalised learning

Honeycomb fosters independent learning as well as collaborative action. It encourage pupils to select the best tool for the task in hand, rather than making the tool the task, e.g. you and I might be given the same task and I might choose to do a wiki, you might choose to do a blog.  Using Honeycomb will help to create independent thinkers and learners whilst building confidence and self esteem. Each Honeycomb user will have their own space to store and showcase their creations including their own customisable homepage. Honeycomb provides for differentiated lesson activities as well as for pupils of different ages and with different levels of ability.

Safe and secure environment

Pupils are able to publish their work within Honeycomb’s secure walled garden. This means that opportunities for taking risks in a non-threatening environment are controlled through the publishing rights set within the application. Through the provided publishing structure, pupils have the opportunity to decide who they want to publish their work to, although ultimately publishing rights are controlled by the administrator (usually the teacher) and are completely configurable. So, for example, a pupil can work on a project with publishing rights just to the rest of his/her class, or depending on the appropriateness to the rest of the year group or school, or to all other Honeycomb users in different establishments.

Honeycomb is an excellent tool for modelling e-safety and for teaching pupils the need for responsible use of the internet. Pupil’s use of Honeycomb can naturally teases out issues that arise such as use of inappropriate content, copyright and how to communicate with others appropriately. Honeycomb’s walled garden means children can explore, publish, and safely make mistakes.

“The idea of blogging as a way of recording and sharing work was a good one but the prospect of adapting existing commercial software designed for adult use was daunting both from a technical point of view and also with regards to e-safety. With Honeycomb, we were able to overcome e-safety and technical issues and be able to focus on the pedagogical benefits of the activity.”
Vivien Bailey, Primary E-Learning Advisor, Warwickshire ICTDS

Assessment

Adding a comment

Honeycomb can be used to support assessment for learning, assessment of learning and assessment as learning as it can be used formatively and summatively.

Pupils, teachers and even parents can add comments to pupil’s pages, enhancing communication and dialogue between them and providing a means of assessment and peer review. Comments can written, added as a picture, sound file or video.

Engaging parents

“Improving the quality of discussion between parents and learners about their education makes all the difference to what learners achieve.” Becta website

Due to its online nature, Honeycomb enables parents to see their child’s work and what they do in school so that they can be more involved and support their child better at home. This can still be viewed as a means of online reporting to parents although is much richer than just seeing the mark for their child’s work or achieved grades.

Comments left for the child by their teacher, or peers can also be viewed by the parent and they too can leave a comment on their child’s work.

“Yes, I’ve shown it to Mummy…and Daddy. They thought it was really good.” Alex, Yr 1, Telford Infant School

“We have been really thrilled by how enthusiastic the children have been about their work and how eager they have been to share it with their parents. Of course, with it being online, the children only need to know the URL, username, password and site ID to do this.” Caroline Tribe, Class Teacher, Milverton Primary School

Improving literacy standards

The work done by pupils in Honeycomb naturally exercises many skills and has a positive impact on their literacy, e.g. when editing their work, reading each other’s work, recording their own audio and listening to it…and recording again, doing lots of writing, planning, proof reading and evaluation of work. Honeycomb also facilitates writing for a particular purpose and requires consideration towards genre. It also opens up a whole new concept in publishing as now pupils can develop their work multi-modally thus keeping in touch with modern trends in writing.

Provides tools for your learning platform

Learning platforms can lack not only content for pupils to work with, but tools that enable them to create documents and to publish and share their work with others, or tools which are ideally suited for pupils to use. Honeycomb provides these tools and can be integrated with a number of learning platforms. Take a look at these videos to give a flavour of Kaleidos, Moodle and Sharepoint integration.

Integration with other learning platforms is in the pipeline too. To find out more call us on +44 (0)1335 343421, or email customercare@lightbox-ed.com

Further information

For further information on Honeycomb, or to register your interest, call sales on +44 (0)1332 258381, or email customercare@lightbox-ed.com