Imagine this...

The Imagine Centre has just opened in Colchester United's football stadium. It is a space that Essex LA have built to try out a range of new learning technologies all in one space, so that schools can visit and see what works best for themselves. Imagine's Director Kate Holland simply encouraged us all to use the space and suddenly a lot of serious, besuited grown-ups became playful children...

The Imagine Centre has some interesting features: Can you see the spherical monitor?!! Then there is an interactive floor - similar to the one that the new Chesil school will have, it has a huge screen, but that can also show smaller images from other screens - as you can see, hopefully. At the back is a huge interactive table "surface".

To the left is tiered seating - a bit like the seating in Kent's New Line academy (see other photos below) and any laptop or personal device, including phones, will work within this space.

Rather cleverly, all the devices connect to each other - you might see that the globe on the wall is the same globe that is on the spherical monitor - both coming from the same child's computer.

Bahá'í Centre of Learning

Hobart's Bahá'í Centre of Learning is, of course, a very spiritual place, but also a very clever learning space.

It is a hugely green building, but (perhaps unusually) this does not get in the way of the learning inside - the large central space with filtered sunlight, stunning voice acoustics and a host of playful little break-out spaces lends itself to learning for all, from the youngest (who love little details like the jigsaw block floor) to the 200 or so teachers whose company I enjoyed there for two days.

This little detail is indicative: a semi enclosed circualr space, with wrapping projector and screen and great acoistics (sound is beamed firmly down not not outwards) makes a wonderful space to provoke, debate, reflect and learn.

So much more detailing - see http://www.tasbcl.com.au/ for more details.