[inanimate alice education portal]

For the past few months I've been quietly beavering away on a sample resource pack with lessons, handouts, and links to sources to be used alongside the teaching of Inanimate Alice. I finished it a little while ago and have sent it out to a group of willing educators who are going to give I.A. a test-run (some educators have already used Alice!) in the class room/lecture room/educational environment. The aim of this project is to develop an educational portal alongside the main Inanimate Alice site. Hopefully this will mark an important step in bringing web-based multimodal texts into learning environments. I realise there are new media courses being taught out there (I'm involved with one at DMU) but it would be so handy to have some resources available online so teachers/parents/students/readers can help themselves to ready-made ideas. Plus Inanimate Alice seems to be a perfect building block in the multimodal landscape as the development of Alice and the story probably parallels the experience we've had (well, at least some of us) with new media (we get better with it as time goes on).

I'm hoping to add some case-studies and student comments to the site too, so that we get a feel for what's *really* happening when students access and participate with these kinds of works. I'm also wondering how the reader/author dynamic will shift and develop with the new tool called iStories coming out soon. (Peter Brantley has blogged about iStories here.) With students able to easily make their own multimodal stories I wonder how their perception of what they *read* will change.

Of course, any lesson ideas that you have are welcome.

I can't wait to get some feedback from the educators participating at this early stage. If you'd like to get involved send me an e-mail.