Introducing the Little Growers Online School Community, allowing the children/schools to be more closely involved with interactive features including Blogs, Photo and Video Updates and more!

Into July 2010 and we've introduced an all new online community for the Little Growers, allowing the teachers and children to get blogging and tell the world of their progress, with photos, videos, interaction and more!

What's it all about?

Though some of the children involved with Little Growers may be a little young to be active users of the well known Facebook, the new Online School Community we have introduced is best explained with examples of the features that are so well known and used by many.

How does it all work? - We're not too technical!

Not a problem - Don't panic! - The new community has been setup and can be accessed using the various links provided around the Little Growers website, as well as directly by visiting www.littlegrowers.co.uk/schools.

Currently, a selection of 25 schools currently involved with Little Growers have already been setup and for these, an introductory email will shortly be sent out, including a username and password which can be used to login to the school community. For those schools who do not have an account/profile already created, a simple registration process will allow one to be created and after varification of the registration, access to begin blogging and photo/video posting will be provided.

Bringing our Little Growers schools the opportunity to have their own school profile at the website, and create 'blogs', upload their latest photos and videos, communicate with other schools using internal messaging features , among other features, ultimately, we wanted to allow the children to share information about what they're upto with other schools and the public.

What is a blog you ask?

A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called "blogging". Individual articles on a blog are called "blog posts," "posts" or "entries". A person who posts these entries is called a "blogger". A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular "area of interest", such as Little Growers!

In the case of the new Little Growers Community, we hope to see the schools actively updating their blogs and sharing their photo and video diaries.

Encouraging the Children to be Involved

In order to encourage the children to be involved with the new online community, we have created a unique 'points' system which provides a number of points to each school when interaction is made and is per-action based.
This means that, for example, when "Little Growers Primary School" create a new blog entry or upload a new photo, they will be awarded a set number of points for their school account!

What Can Points Be Used For?

To follow;

Our school appears on the list of those 25 that will be registered we'd like to get our school and the children involved right away! - Where do i begin?

Great, thats what we like to hear!

Well, as one of the 25 schools, you should shortly be receiving a welcome email containing everything you need to know to get going! Its all very simple, we promise!

Our school doesn't appear on the list of those 25 that will be registered and we'd like to get our school and the children involved too. How can we register?

No problem!

If you head over to www.littlegrowers.co.uk and click the Register my school link found at the right, you will be able to complete a simple registration form to join the community.

The form will require a few details about the school and its Eco-Coordinator, and after you've submitted and we've varified the school, the new account will be activated and ready for use, with a welcome and instructional email sent to you!