What is Honeycomb?

In a nutshell, an integrated set of online creativity and collaboration tools that work through the Internet.

It encompasses tools which make use of Web 2.0 technology and enables a user's work to be brought together into their personal online space. In the first instance these tools will be blogs and wikis but they will be added to as Honeycomb continues to develop and as new technologies become available.

Honeycomb is about student creativity and collaborative learning. This is at its heart, and its future direction will be founded upon this premise. This is why Honeycomb, similar to our previous release Podium, has been designed to serve specific education purposes and is suitable for pupils of all ages and differing abilities. As far as we're aware such a development is currently unique in the market place.

Honeycomb will foster independent learning. It will encourage students 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. It will help to create independent thinkers and learners.

Honeycomb will be intuitive and easy to use for both teachers and students. It will be about a community of users which might exist within a class, a school or across the whole Internet. Users will have counters which show how many people are visiting their site, and how many other users are referencing their materials. This sense of audience will help to encourage students to think about the standard of their presentation. Teachers will be able to assign tasks, feed back on students' work, organize project and class groups and create shared resources all online.

In addition to a sense of audience, Web 2.0 technology has a number of educational benefits, e.g.:

Student engagement
Facilitates writing for a particular purpose
Can improve student self esteem
Helps to teach students the need for responsible use of the Internet
Fosters independent learners
Encourages peer to peer review of written pieces
Allows for collaboration - users working alongside each other on documents and ideas from wherever they are!