April 2016 marks 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare – an English poet, playwright, and actor who is widely considered the greatest dramatist of all time. Some of the most famous Shakespeare’s plays include “Hamlet”, “Romeo and Juliet” and “Macbeth”. His plays remain highly popular, and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted throughout the world.

This month, the celebrations have officially started in the United Kingdom and across the world to honour Shakespeare. Today we are sharing some of the main events happening to celebrate the 400th anniversary as well as some online resources for improving your knowledge about Shakespeare and his work.

Events

1616: A Momentous Year at the Shakespeare’s Globe

Visit Shakespeare’s Globe in London for a year-long programme of performances, exhibitions, talks, workshops, conferences, a family story-telling festival, and even a Kabuki inspired ‘Ophelia’ in Japanese.

Shakespeare Lives by The British Council and the Great Britain campaign

Shakespeare Lives is a global programme of events and activities celebrating William Shakespeare’s work on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of his death in 2016. The work of Shakespeare will be celebrated throughout 2016 directly on stage, through film, exhibitions and in schools.

Shakespeare400 by King’s College London

Shakespeare400 is a consortium of leading cultural, creative and educational organisations, coordinated by King’s College London, which will mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016. A number of public performances, programmes, exhibitions and creative activities will take place in the capital and beyond in 2016.

Online learning resources

BBC bitesize learning resources for schools
Check out the BBC bitesize learning resources to learn about Shakespeare and his work. Great for schools!
Teaching Shakespeare on TES
Teaching Shakespeare provides a number of useful resources for learning more about Shakespeare’s work.

Other activities

Visit Shakespeare’s birthplace
Visit the house where Shakespeare was born and grew up.
Visit Shakespeare’s classroom
The original classroom where William Shakespeare is believed to have studied and seen his first plays opened to the public for the first time last week.

 Bett Show always attracts a number of inspiring people from the education sector. Bett 2016 wasn’t an exception and today we are sharing one of our favourite speeches.
“How teachers can do what technology can’t”- one of the most interesting discussions at Bett 2016. It was presented by Tom Starkey who is a teacher and a columnist. He made some good points about the things that good teachers can do that any education technology can’t.

This is a topic that can definitely start a very controversial discussion, especially at the education technology exhibition. With all the latest technologies in the education sector, it can be easy to forget what the true role of a teacher is. Discussing topics like this can encourage people to remember that there will always be things that could not be replaced by any kind of technology.

 “It is a battle to be better than a computer because we are not given time enough to reflect on our own practice, to reflect on people in front of us. If a computer could do that, that would be great…”

It is important to look at both positive and negative things when talking about technology in education. There are some amazing things that technology can do to improve learning. For instance, different learning platforms can be used to make lessons more engaging, they can also be used for homework and assignments. Making lesson plans or even marking assignments can be done with the help of technology. However, as acknowledged by Tom Starkey, although technologies create some amazing learning opportunities for students, there will always be things that could not be performed by any kind of technology. Technologies provide information, but a teacher is someone who can motivate, encourage, give feedback, listen and help with building creative and curious personalities of children.
It can be said that technologies are there to provide information whereas teachers are important for guiding students on how to use that information and to provide any other support that could not be done by any kind of technology.
Check the video below for some more inspirational thoughts by Tom Starkey.

Miles Berry and Tom Starkey at Bett 2016 from Webanywhere on Vimeo.

Webanywhere will be exhibiting at Bett 2016 – the world’s largest learning technology event!
When? Event will be taking place from the 20th to the 23rd January.
Where? ExCel Centre in London, stand F350.

Bett is your annual opportunity to experiment with the latest technology, hear from inspirational figures and experts in the industry and meet your peers from all around the world.
Join us at the event and learn more about our education products including School Jotter – the school website builder – the world’s most popular open-source virtual learning environment. Our friendly education experts will be happy to meet you, answer your questions and demonstrate our education products.
We have some exciting things planned for Bett Show 2016! Watch this space for more updates regarding the event.

Planning your time!
Download the official Bett 2016 mobile app as a planning tool for your visit and make the most of your time before the show, at the show and after the show to stay tuned.

• Decide which speakers you particularly want to hear from and plan your schedule
• Find out who else is attending those sessions and strike up a conversation
• Plan your way around the show floor
• Keep a record of your favourite speakers, exhibitors and products.

We’ve had a couple of people now ask us how to use the free Calendar feature in Jotter Site. It’s a really popular feature, present on hundreds of our websites already, but it can be a bit confusing to set up, so we’re here to guide you through it.
If you’ve ever used a calendar app before, whether it’s Google Docs, Microsoft Outlook or Apple’s Calendar, the interface should be immediately familiar to you, but it can take some time to learn where things are and what they’re known as in Jotter.

It can look a bit daunting at first, so we’ll go over it piece by piece.

• Add Event – This button, at the top, lets you create an event or reminder
• Add Calendar – This button lets you create calendars – sort of a category within the main app, that helps with organisation.

And then the options at the side:

• Your calendars – Your calendars will appear here, you can click them to toggle their display on the panel to the right.
• Settings – Change the important things
• Recycle Bin – Where deleted calendars go

We’ll start with Add Calendar – this is the simplest and easiest thing to do, and will really help you with both getting information out and categorising it at the back.

The name is the name of the calendar, and the description is, well, self-explanatory. I’ve categorised mine into “Clubs and Performances”, “Parents’ Evenings” and “PE” – all things parents might like to know about, though of course what you do is your own choice! Next, let’s have a look at Add Event.
This is a bit more complex than the last one, so we’ll go over it bit by bit again.

• Calendar – Specify which calendar you’d like the event attached to
• Title – What you want to call the event
• Start date, start time, end date, end time – When the event will begin and end, or alternatively check All Day for all-day events.
• Repeat – Set how often the event will repeat, if it’s a repeat event – see below
• Where – The location
• Description – What people will see when they click on the event
• Colour – You can colour-code events to make the calendar a bit easier to read

The Repeat dialog can be a bit daunting, so here’s a run-down of that
Again, we’ll go by it bit by bit:

• Repeat – whether you’d like it done daily, weekly, monthly or yearly
• Every – how many of those time intervals should pass between each event
• Repeat on – which days you’d like
• Starts – the first instance of the event
• Ends – The end conditions for it – whether it’s endless, ends on a specific date or after a set number of occurrences.

You’ll get a handy summary at the bottom of what you’ve selected – you can see my event is set to repeat every two weeks on Tuesday and Wednesday for 10 weeks.
Once that’s done, just press Create Event to send it all live. Made a mistake? Don’t worry, by clicking on the event in the calendar view you’ll be able to make edits to specific instances or even entire series of events.
Now let’s take a look at the Settings page. This is where you can start to get really fancy with what you’re doing.

Here you can import or export your calendars to use in whatever app you’d like.

• Edit details – Change the description or name of a calendar
• Share – Determine which groups can edit your calendars – you might want to give the PTA special access to an events calendar, for example
• Export – Export the calendar in iCal format, for use in your app of choice
• Import – Take an iCal file and put it into Calendar
• Delete – Remove the calendar to the Recycle Bin
• Public URL – create a text string you can use to import an automatically-updating calendar feed in your personal calendar app.

Okay, so you have a calendar now, and it’s looking great. Putting it on your website, ePortfolio or Learnsite is really easy, just go to the page in Edit mode and click Insert Item, then Calendar.

Then you’ll see this dialog:

Choose the ones you want to display using the buttons at the top (you can pick more than one!), then click Choose, and there you have it, your calendar is embedded. Anyone can scroll through the embedded calendar using the controls at the top, including viewing things on a per-week or even per-day basis! You can change the default view using the grey bar at the top of the screen when in Edit mode and the calendar is selected.
Want to receive tips like this one straight to your inbox? Sign up here for our free, weekly Jotter tips emails, or contact us at education@webanywhere.co.uk.

Here at Webanywhere we’ve had a busy few months, packed full of events. The season kicked off with Getting I.T Right in Hull at the end of April. Since then we’ve attended over 16 others, including COBIS, E2BN, Imoot, as well as hosting our own Nurturing Online Learning series.

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