To change languages use the drop down menu at the bottom left of the site. If a page is not available in any particular language, the site continues to show the English version.

On 11 and 12 Ocober the Refelctiive Evaluation project parters met in beautiful Sinaia at the gateway to Transylvania in Romania.

The middle ware engine for creating activities for self reflection was rolled out in public for the first time. It worked almost perfectly with all the partners particpating in creating learning activities.

The partners worked further on the structure and scope of the materials designed to support reflection and self evaluation by teachers and trainers.

It is hoped that the initial development fo the materials will be completed by the end of 2006, with testing to commence early in the new year.

The project also aims to develop electronic versions of these tools. At an early stage of the project, it was agreed that the tools should be accessable through the web. This posed a problem. There is a (very) limited software budget for the project. Design and development of web based tools can be time consuming and expensive. Furthermore, project parters have developed some exciting and ambitious ideas for tools.

Two of the partners, Pontydysgu and CRED, are now developing a middleware engine. This is a piece of software designed to assist in the development of the tools.  Following the initial brainstorming of ideas for tools, it has been possible to identify common elements of functionality. Through a friendly (we hope!) user interface, project partners and tool developers will be able to themselves directly develop and test new tools for self evaluation.

The middleware engine is being developed to run on the Joomla platform used for project development and communication. A beta version fo the engine should be available for testing in mid August 2006. The software will be released under an Open Source Licence. If you would like to know more, please contact Graham Attwell.

The site is deliberately simple to allow easy access to working tools. However the software we have used to build the site is deceptively powerful and more functionaility can be added when and if we need it.

The site has a number of features and tools:

• This front page uses a blogging interface and it is easy to add new entries - including pictures and multimedia.
• The left hand menu gives access to ’static’ pages. New pages and menu items can be created from a simple adminitration interface. Any page can be password protected if we so wish
• The project forum is part fo the shared bazzar Forum area. Reflective Evaluation has its own forum pages. We can choose whether or not we wish these pages to be accessible by other members of the Bazaar community.
• The project wiki also is shared with other memebrs of the Bazaar community. Once more we have our own working area.
• The gallery is supplied through a Reflective evaluation Flickr account. All members of the project can use this to share photos.
• Finally the RSS feeds on the right fo the page allow us to display RSS feeds from other sites - for instance from delicio.us bookmarks. We can also offer RSS out for others to share in our activities.

The site is very easy to manage. Please do not worry about making a mistake - everthing can be edited and changed. And if you have any questions please email me, Graham Attwell.