News

05 November 2005 - Launch of MKM's Custom Course and Teaching4 series of IT tools

One of MyKnowledgeMap’s two stands at the Becta Post-16 Conference in Manchester was the focus of keen attention this November, as MKM used the conference to launch two new and exciting products as part of their e-learning platform.

MKM has created Custom Course as a tool for teachers who want to build great courses without extraordinary IT know-how. User-friendly and approachable, it enables teachers to bring together the computer-based resources and e-learning that they find most useful into a course that they want to teach. Delegates were also quick to see that the tool would work very well as a way of organising and cataloguing their own materials.

MKM’s other new product is the first of their projected Teaching4 series of CDs: Teaching4 IT - interactive visual tools for use with whiteboard or data projector, for teaching a range of IT material, including HTML and CSS, a SQL Simulator, Binary and Hexadecimal Numbering and Normalisation. Each CD comes with an array of supporting documents: lesson plans, activities and handouts, and case-studies.

Delegates responded very warmly to the visual nature of the tools. The animations, they said, helped greatly in making difficult material accessible and comprehensible.

Two further Teaching4 series are in the pipeline, Teaching4 Management and Teaching4 Retail, and what with these and the interest already shown in Teaching4 IT, the MKM e-learning team have a busy time ahead.

Some delegates returned through the day to watch demonstrations again, and many of them requested demo CDs for both the Custom Course and the Teaching4 series. A series of workshops is planned to be held nationally in colleges with a view to enabling tutors to customise their e-learning.

As one delegate at the conference commented to the MKM team: “At last somebody’s made something that my teachers can really use”.