Primary school teacher We've got a new program with 3D graphics to encourage young children to tell stories. We tried it out last term and now we use it regularly. There's a mat in front of the monitor, like a carpet. There are pressure pads under the mat. When the children stand on them, they can move about inside the pictures on the screen. If they stand on the right, they can move to the right, and so on. The good thing is that it works better if there are more children on the mat. This encourages them to work together.
What I like about this program is that if you ask the children what they've been doing, they don't say, 'We've been working with the computer', and they say 'We've been telling stories'. The computer doesn't get in the way of learning; it's just a tool we don't get that reaction when we sit them down at a keyboard.
Open University student I've had a computer for about three years now. I'm an OU student doing a degree in mathematics. I work full time so I study at home in the evenings and at weekends. Some Saturdays there are tutorials I can attend in town but mostly I work alone. I use the computer to write my assignments. I also use the Internet to email my tutor if I have any problems with the course work. There's a help group too onthe Web made up of other students doing my course - not just here in the UK but around the world. We can chat about assignments and help each other out if we're in difficulty.
Louise, aged 6 Well, I make cards for my friends. I made one for Mary's birthday last week. I use Word and you go into clipart. Then these things come up on the screen. And you can click on any one like animals and two people with a heart, and a star and a hat. I've got CD ROMS. I like Splat the Cat and Pets 3. You click on Go to the Adoption Centre, then you go to Pick a Pet and you can choose what you want, a cat or a dog. And you can give it a name and feed it. The one I'm going to adopt is a cat. … And you've got to give your cat a name. But first I'll take its picture, then
I'll save it.
Artist I paint mainly figures in imaginary interiors. Erm, they represent myths. I work in acrylics although I also make woodcuts. Erm, I keep photographs of most of what I've done, apart from the work I've destroyed - the ones I didn't like. I've scanned in about a third of these photographs, around 100 paintings, to make a CD. I've organized the paintings into themes and added a soundtrack so that each group of paintings is accompanied by music. Erm, I'll send the CD to dealers. In the past it would have been slides. I'm also going to start my own website to try to sell directly. The difficult thing is trying to get people to visit your site.