Congratulations to Katharine Wright of Colonel Frank Seely School in Nottinghamshire on winning our Textbook Mode Authoring Competition with Au Café. Katharine, your bright red iPod is already on its way to you.
This is the introduction to the task: for best effect snap it to full-screen and play it on your whiteboard before setting the task itself.
Judges comments
I ranked the Au café task as number one because it provides student so many different ways to learn and have fun: respond to a video, create a menu, create a logo, write a dialogue or comic strip, research jobs, and create a collage. Gale Sperry
The use of challenge questions to stretch those who are keen or who are more able is good to see because this is something it is easy to forget when using ICT. Hannah Mohon
Good use of a variety of media but this example, in my opinion, is best because it uses the additonal features to support the construction of interesting, relevant and student-centred tasks. For example watching the Animoto montage and then noting down all the examples in French – this is a realistic and useful task, leading onto further learning. An excellent illustration of how to combine rich-media with useful assessment tasks. Andrew Field
The judges were
- Gale Sperry, Englewood High School, Colorado. Prolific Yacapaca author (e.g. American Literature).
- Aidan McCanny, Assistant Advisory Officer for eLearning and ICT, Southern Education and Library Board (SELB).
- Ralph Holmes, Langley School, Norfolk. Winner: Author of the Year 2008.
- Hannah Mohon, Huntcliff School, Saltburn-by-Sea. Runner up: Author of the Year 2008.
- Andrew Field, Neale-Wade Community College, Cambridgeshire and EffectiveICT.co.uk.
- Krystie Alleaume, Ultranet coach at the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, Victoria, Australia.
My thanks to the hard-working judges, and to everyone who entered. I was really inspired by all the different techniques I saw tried around the basic theme of Textbook Mode. For me, it really validated the hard work the team (most particularly Sasha Kostin) put in to make this feature a success.

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