Posts made in January 2nd, 2008

Talking Photo

Posted on Jan 2, 2008 in Digital Media, Games and interactives, Useful Links, Web Tools | 0 comments

This is rather bizarre, and quite cool. Make your photos talk. More info here.

Conference Season

Posted on Jan 2, 2008 in Conferences | 0 comments

January always brings with it the two main conferences that I go to.

This week its the ASE conference where I am hoping to find out what’s new in the world of Science education. My focus this year is going to be Primary Science and I’m on the lookout for new software and resources. I’m keen to see how much visualisers and digital microscopes are these days. I have a cheap Digital Blue microscope and its quite nifty.

Next week its the BETT exhibition, this is the best time to see what the big IWB developers are up to – Smart 10 should be on show as well as Turning Point 2008. I’m also interested in trying to see what software developments the other IWB companies are producing and see if I can blag any demo copies to play with.

Hopefully I’ll come back with loads of new ideas and a list of great stuff to share with you.

Interesting Sites

Posted on Jan 2, 2008 in Useful Links | 0 comments

I’ve been going through my old bookmarks and been updating my del.icio.us list with many of these sites. I’ve been making a list for my Science ITT students by tagging them with PGCE, but any sites that are good for Interactive Whiteboards have been tagged with IWB. The IWB list will also appear to the right of this blog. I like the idea of del.icio.us since it makes sharing addresses of good sites really easy. Given the fluid nature of the Internet its much easier to maintain a dynamic list of addresses than just give out printed pieces of paper which very quickly get out of date or are missing new additions.

There are quite a few sites that I’ve added that are also worth a mention here.

One good site is ICT Games, which has many interactive flash games for Numeracy lessons. Since they are in Flash they can be used on any interactive whiteboard, or even used just with a projector.

An old favourite of mine is the Gorilla game. Hurl bananas at your opponents gorilla before he gets you!

For Science, there is a really nice free Diagram maker provided by the Association for Science Education. In addition Chemistry Diagrams gives a wide selection of clip art that can be captured and put onto your IWB presentations. Some nice animations too.

I’d also like to put in a plug for a website by a colleague of mine. Ros Milner has produced an excellent website for Art teachers called the Virtual Artroom. There are resources that cover the whole range of art teaching, but the Interactive Whiteboard area is well worth a visit to take a look at the case studies she’s written.