Every Child a Talker: Guidance for consultants and early language lead practitioners (Third instalment: Autumn 2009)

"Every Child a Talker (ECAT) is designed to help practitioners and parents create a developmentally appropriate, supportive and stimulating environment in which children can enjoy experimenting with and learning language... Every Early Language Consultant (ELC) and Early Language Lead Practitioner (ELLP) will have followed a different route on their journey towards ‘Every Child a Talker’... Within all these diverse journeys, however, there are some common elements. This third instalment of the Every Child a Talker (ECAT) file looks at the commonalities of the journeys through a series of case studies." - page

Seamless pedestrian positioning and navigation using landmarks

Many navigation services, such as car navigation services, provide users with praxic navigational instructions (such as “turn left after 200 metres, then turn right after 150 metres”), however people usually associate directions with visual cues (e.g. “turn right at the square”) when giving navigational instructions in their daily conversations. Landmarks can play an equally important role in navigation and routing services. Landmarks are unique and easy-to-recognise and remember features; therefore, in order to remember when exploring an unfamiliar environment, they would be assets. In addition, Landmarks can be found both indoors and outdoors and their locations are usually fixed. Any positioning techniques which use landmarks as reference points can potentially provide seamless (indoor and outdoor) positioning solutions. For example, users can be localised with respect to landmarks if they can take a photograph of a registered landmark and use an application for image processing and feature extraction to identify the landmark and its location. Landmarks can also be used in pedestrian-specific path finding services. Landmarks can be considered as an important parameter in a path finding algorithm to calculate a route passing more landmarks (to make the user visit a more tourist-focussed area, pass along an easier-to-follow route, etc.). Landmarks can also be used as a part of the navigational instructions provided to users; a landmark-based navigation service makes users sure that they are on the correct route, as the user is reassured by seeing the landmark whose information/picture has just been provided as a part of navigational instruction. This paper shows how landmarks can help improve positioning and praxic navigational instructions in all these ways

Loudly sing cuckoo : More-than-human seasonalities in Britain

This research was funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, grant number AH/E009573/1.Peer reviewedPostprin

Early Years Developmental Journal

The Early Years Developmental Journal is based on extensive analysis of a wide range of developmental assessment tools. It is a resource for families and practitioners working closely with them to record a child’s developments to better aid the identification of areas where additional help may be required. It is designed to support key working and foster communication between all those involved in a child’s development. While its primary use is for families, it is also intended that the Journal will be a useful resource for the 24-30 month statutory EYFS progress assessment as well as supporting child health monitoring