We’d like to welcome Strathclyde University to the PebblePad community. PebblePad is being used to support the Re-Engineering Assessment Practices in HE (REAP) project which is a million pound research project funded by the Scottish Higher and Further Education Funding Council through their e-Learning Transformation Programme. With a strong reputation as a lifelong learning university, Strathclyde is one of the UK’s largest providers of postgraduate and professional education with around 60,000 students per year taking part in teaching programmes.

Coventry University is making PebblePad available to over 20,000 users across the institution during the current academic year. Coventry University were the first major purchaser of PebblePad. Having started with a hosted pilot installation Coventry are now moving towards their own local installation of the software. This approach gave the University an opportunity to run a cost effective pilot before taking the decision to make PebblePad available across the institution.

The primary version of PebblePad had now been piloted with a group of year 5 and year 6 students. At the introduction session staff had to almost drag the students off the computers! To have a look at the Primary version click here.

PebblePad has been chosen by the University of Bradford led ''''Enhancing Learner Progression'''' project; with Leeds Metropolitan and Leeds University. PebblePad was chosen because of its usability and flexibility for the project''''s intended audience. Information on the ELP Project is available from here.

Working in collaboration with the University of Wolverhampton and Queen Margaret University Edinburgh, the LIPID project will use the existing JISC toolkit, Sweet.Net, to develop interoperability processes to enable students to use appropriate institutionally held personal data within their ePortfolios. This will mean students can support and evidence their achievements with concrete evidence from the institution. The project will run for six months from March 2006 with all resulting developments being made available to the wider community as an open source resource.

PebblePad has been chosen as the ePortfolio platform for the Teacher of the Future project at Sandwell in the West Midlands. In the scoping phase of the project we were delighted to hear from the project’s teachers and advisers that even in its existing form PebblePad would be suitable for use by the project’s Year 5 and 6 students. Notwithstanding, the project has given us a tenuous reason to create a fabulous new interactive interface specifically for a younger audience.

We are delighted to welcome West Yorkshire NTI into the rapidly growing community of organisations using PebblePad. The NTI will be using PebblePad with a number of clients to support CPD activity.

Following the successful demonstration of PebblePad’s interoperability capabilities at the Europortfolio conference in Cambridge. The system has been certified as passing the Plugfest’s interoperability test. Click here to see the certificate!

In the demonstration at the conference plugfest we highlighted PebblePad’s ability to import materials in UKLEAP format from LUSID and the ePET system. Once imported the items appear in PebblePad giving the user the option to edit as required for future use.