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. Designed specifically for schools, Honeycomb enables users to publish their own content on their own web pages, and to collaborate with others – sharing and commenting on each others work.

Honeycomb can be used as an e-portfolio tool, bringing together a user’s work into one personal, online space.

It has been designed to serve a wide variety of educational purposes and is suitable for pupils of all ages and abilities. It fosters pupil creativity and allows them to make use of web based technology for communication and online publishing of their work,,in a social media style environment that they enjoy.

Honeycomb can be used individually, or integrated with a number of learning platforms,,to provide rich pupil creativity tools that learning platforms can sometimes lack.

Honeycomb is an ongoing development and will be continually 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 feedback.

Why Honeycomb?

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

Safe and secure environment

Pupils publish their work within Honeycomb’s secure walled garden. Publishing rights are controlled by the administrator (usually the teacher) who can determine whether pages are published to the rest of the class, to the rest of the year group or school, or to other Honeycomb users in different establishments. This means that pages are not published to the internet at large, although pupils still get that important sense of publishing to a specific audience.

Honeycomb is also 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

An e-portfolio tool

Documents of different formats (e.g. Word, Powerpoint, pdf) can all be uploaded onto a Honeycomb page, quickly and easily, together with images, videos and audio files. This makes Honeycomb an ideal tool for creating an e-portfolio, especially as users can access Honeycomb from anywhere online.

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.

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.

Honeycomb also opens the door to working with other schools in other authorities (see the Darlington and Redcar case study) or even in other countries (see the Cornwal pilot project case study).

Pupil engagement

Honeycomb makes use of features that engage pupils. Pupils particularly like the social media aspect of leaving comments and stickers on each others work (peer review) and collaborating on shared documents…from wherever they are! Pupils enjoy using Honeycomb as it gives them an opportunity to showcase their creative flair. They find it more far-reaching that standard word processing / desktop publishing software, easy to use and fun!

“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. Using a webcam and microphone pupils can instantly capture their own recordings and drag them straight onto their pages - powerful in relation to speaking and listening.

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 (a series of pages linked together) or wiki (to share their page so others can contribute to it).

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. It encourages pupils to select the best tool for the task in hand, and provides for differentiated lesson activities as well as for pupils of different ages and with different levels of ability.

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 be text, video or audio.

Engaging parents

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 could 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." 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 pupils can develop their work multi-modally.

Further information

See Honeycomb in action or find out how others have been using it by taking a look at our case studies.