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We spent some time in the tutorials defining users, user classes and personas to help in the process of designing the documentation. The feeling was that there might be the following users and user classes:

young children aged 6-9. Primary direct users of the software. However, writing for this age group would be tricky becuase of their reading level. Perhaps we could assume teachers would act as intermediaries?

young children aged 10-12. Primary direct users of the software. More likely to be working autonomously.

teachers - primary direct users. This is probably the core user group for the documentation.

school technicians - someone in each school will need to install, uninstall, download, upload and generally fix things when they go wrong. Not all teahcers will need to get involved in this.

parents - may find the software on the Web. can we safely assume they have much the same needs as classroom teachers?

We decided to make some personas for core user groups (these some combined versions from the ideas of the two tutorial groups):

Mikel - he's a primary school teacher from St Jean Pied de Port, in the French Basque country, responsible for ICT use in his school, which is a monolingual Basque primary school. He's 30, keen on walking and cycling and a keen rugby player. He is married and has a son, aged 7.

Morwen is a Welsh teacher at a primary school in Abergevenny. She herself is from Welsh speaking parents, but none of her pupils speaks Welsh at home. They've been learning the language with her since the age of 4-5 but they're only at the stage of knowing common nouns, colours, days of week and so on. Morwen has no computer at home and is really quite nervous about having to include ICT in her classes. She feels she has more than enough to do without this new stuff which  she can't really relate to. 

Owen is a pupil at Morwen's school. He's 10. He loves rugby and anything mechanical. His Welsh is pretty basic - nobody speaks it outside his school - but he sometimes watches children's programmes on Welsh language TV and he aspires to seeing his TV image in his debut for the Welsh international rugby team one day, and he's sure he'll need to be able to sing the national anthem fluently for that great day. 

Here is Mairead, who is 10 and attends Irish language primary school on the island of Inish Mor, off County Galway. She likes reading and writing and is very keen on Irish dancing - she's won medals for this. Cycling is her favourite activity out of school, plus watching TV.

Josep is pretty much bilingual in Catalan and Spanish. He's 7 and attends a Catalan langugae school in Sitges, near Barcelona. He's not quite so literate in Spanish as in Catalan, which is his home language. He loves football - Barça is his team - and he's keen on hockey too.