Travelling the world from the comfort of the classroom

Dec. 8, 2011 - PRLog -- Shortlisted in the Primary Digital Category at this year’s BETT Awards and recognised by PTA Magazine as a Top 10 Buy, Oddizzi from Little Travel Bug is a captivating and engaging new cross curricular teaching resource designed to bring the world to life for Early Years Foundation stage, KS 1 and KS 2 pupils.  Created by primary teacher Jenny Cooke, characters Odd and Izzi take children on a fascinating tour of the world, its people and places, sharing knowledge along the way.

Featured on stand P47, Oddizzi comprises an interactive map, a live news feed, 500 pages of fresh and lively content written by teachers and travel writers, games and a tool that enables pupils to communicate with classrooms around the world. With strong cross curricular links, Oddizzi also covers areas of the curriculum such as Global Awareness, Language, Art and Literacy.

Central to the resource is the OddPod, an interactive map designed to make navigating around the world really fun and engaging.  Pupils can change the view of the map and the view of the world, zoom in, out, move around the world, discover hundreds of Oddizzi pins that have been organised by category, click to expand the pins and access the relevant pages. Teachers and travel writers have put together the content which is linked to the geography national curriculum, so material is current and child friendly as well as being perfect for research and discussion. Thousands of images and videos bring the text to life, providing superb stimulus for Literacy and Art and saving teacher’s time in sourcing relevant classroom materials.

Navigating through the site is simple; pupils and teachers can jump from page to page and create their own journey through topics using the resource’s highlighted links and bookmark pages for quick access. Within more detailed topics, such as environmental change, pupils can click on Sneak a Peek, a helpful feature which condenses the topic down to one page of easy to read sentences. Oddizzi also provides teachers with a bank of creative ideas illustrating how to take topics across the curriculum.

Communicating with other children around the world is the best way to learn about another country and ClassPals allows a class to do just that. Faciliated by their teacher, they simply click on the list, sort by country and request to become friends. Once accepted the class can communicate as often as they like by sending virtual postcards to each other. Not only is it a clever and e-safe way for teachers to bring an international dimension to lessons, it also helps children understand more about other people’s lives.

To top it all, this great resource includes learning games about the world for children to play and extend their understanding of the topics covered.

Oddizzi is priced at £199 plus VAT per annum for 24/7 access for all teachers and pupils.  Schools with less than 100 pupils can purchase Oddizzi at the reduced cost of  £129 plus VAT per annum.

Commenting on the resource, creator  and winner of an Mumpreneur Gold Award, Jenny Cooke said, “As a primary teacher it frustrated me that there wasn’t one place that I could send my kids to that featured good quality, well presented material about the world. Invariable they would turn up with information from Wikipedia which they didn’t really understand and was far too difficult for them to process.  Now teachers can point them to one site that communicates facts in a child friendly manner and in an exciting and engaging way”.

Visitors to BETT who collect a voucher code from the stand can purchase Oddizzi for the special show price of just £169 plus VAT.  One annual subscription to Oddizzi will also be given away free each day to the teacher who provides the most riveting world fact, placed on a post-it note on the stand’s large world map.

For further information about Oddizzi, visit http://www.oddizzi.com/ Follow Oddizzi on Twitter @Oddizzi  Visit them on Stand P47 at BETT 2012