Ian Karten was invited recently to attend a celebration of TEPS –Treloars Enterprise Print Solutions CTEC Centre at Treloar College in Alton, Hampshire. The Centre has been in operation for nearly a year, and the students are all very proud of what they have achieved. The Trust funded an Eduprint system, enabling students to produce very high quality articles for sale. Photographs can be turned into cards, calendars, canvasses and collages, and used to decorate candle holders, T-shirts, bottle openers: the range is enormous! Students have taken different roles in the business, so have had the opportunity to gain lots of business skills. Some photos of  Ian Karten and the Students at the celebration are shown below:

(above:) Ian Karten with student Hanna Hoad

(above:) Ian Karten with student Luke Brazil

The conference is now fixed for Monday 25th October at QAC in Birmingham. The focus will be Thriving in Challenging Times, and will feature a panel discussion on funding, the Karten Awards, info on individual centres and technical workshops, as well as an exhibition.  Attendance is open to everyone. For the Karten Network it is free, and for everyone else £25. Watch this space for more details.

Edgbaston Cricket Ground

Our conference was a great success! The speakers were all excellent, and delegates said they left with lots of exciting ideas to follow up. Many thanks to everyone who spoke. The exhibition was equally successful, and lots of people commented on the value of having such a range of products on display. Rachel Morris, who had been giving the keynote address, was at the last minute unable to join us. Dan Bentley deserves great thanks for delivering a remote presentation!

The Awards Ceremony was a testament to the amazing work done in Karten Centres, and details of the winners and shortlisted applicants will be available on the conference pages.

More on the conference will follow shortly, so please check back on the site.

In the Karten Centre at Beaumont College, learners are practicing their literacy skills in a way that engages their interest in a way that more traditional techniques sometimes fail to do. The College has implemented a safe, internally hosted blogging system – Powerful Voices. It is safe – only staff and learners can access it. The interface has been streamlined so that learners can access it directly. Each blog is stamped with the email address of the person posting it. But it means that learners can blog on issues that are of interest to them, and include pictures, videos and music. People are keen to log on and read the latest! And staff are taking every opportunity to embed numeracy and IT skills as well as literacy. The tutors monitor the posts, and pick up the issues that the learner needs to work on, and feed this back into learning objectives.

This innovation has been picked up by the Skills for Life Update, who are featuring it as one of their case studies in the summer edition.