Sumo Paint
Sumo Paint is awesome! I love online painting programs, and this one really impressed me.
Some of the paint packages I’ve found and blogged about have been fun, but you always feel like you are just playing with a cut-down web application- Sumo Paint looks and feels like a proper, fully-featured art program like Paint Shop Pro and suchlike.
It supports layers, shape tools, different brushes, ink, gradients and clone stamps. It really is a superb piece of software. And like all my favourite bits of software it’s free!
You can save images to an online gallery to share, or save them to your computer. There’s a community aspect to the software where you can share your images with others to work on – or work on pictures other people have produced.
This would be fantastic on an interactive whiteboard – it’s is after all just a massive graphics tablet – but this would be equally as awesome to use on regular computers as a cheap replacement for other graphics software. You will need to make sure that you have the most recent version of the Flash Player installed (Version 10)
More information about Sumo Paint can be found here, or you can launch it direct from this link: http://www.sumopaint.com/app/
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Digital Microscope
I’ve just bought myself a hand held digital microscope for training days (the one’s I’ve used before are owned by the Scitt I work for)
I bought a Veho from Amazon for about £45. I’m quite pleased with it, although the one annoyance is the software coming on a mini-cd which wont go into my laptop CD drive – I had to copy it onto a large CD before I could install.
It has a small stand, for hands-free operation, or you can detach it from the stand and hold it.
I’m starting to build up a bank of microscope images on Flickr. I hope to get more things under it soon!
I also forgot, when playing with sites like PhotoPeach, that you could make photo slideshows from your sets directly from Flickr itself. So here’s a slideshow of the images I’ve taken so far.
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E.gg Timer
Now my favourite online timer is still the fab music-playing one over at classtools.net, but I’ve just found a new one that is very cool because of its simple efficiency.
It’s called E.gg Timer and it can be set to whatever time you want simply by adding the time to the URL: http://e.ggtimer.com/
So if you want a 30 second timer, go to http://e.ggtimer.com/30
If you want a 2 minute timer go to http://e.ggtimer.com/2minutes
Or for a 1 hour timer go to http://e.ggtimer.com/1hour
It’s that simple.
The timer doesn’t play music, or tick as the time counts down, but you do get a nice simple count down with a beep at the end when the time is up.
This would be useful when giving students a set time for a task – and as it’s silent it would even be ideal for tests or exams.
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Wall of Words
A quick link to a fun activity for sentence construction and punctuation – The Wall of Words.
Pupils have to arrange the words into a sentence, and put the correct punctuation at the end. If they are right, builders add it to the wall, and they then get a new sentence.
It’s a nice, fun activity that could be used for a starter or plenary, or for some independent study. It’s a shame there’s no fullscreen mode, but that’s a gripe I have about quite a few flash games these days.
Word Wall is produced by Pearsons, and the link at the top of the page took me to a Pearsons links page that took me to two other Pearson sites I hadn’t seen before. FunBrain.com and Poptropica
FunBrain has a number of Flash games and online books and comics
Poptropica is a virtual online world in which pupils can travel around and play games.
Both look like they are worth an explore.
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Primary Maths Games
Thanks to Jonathan Lurie on Twitter who sent me some links to a collection of primary maths games hosted by Oswego City School District in New York. These are fantastic to use on the IWB for lesson starters or plenaries. Go here and add it to your bookmark list now!
The games are in flash format and range from simple resources such as Class Clocks for telling the time, to fraction painters, number squares and Ghost Blasters. One of my all-time favourites is Billy Bug. Lovely for teaching simple coordinates. Make sure you have the sound on. He’s so cute.
These resources are all produced by Mark Cogan. Mark produces several excellent websites over here in the UK which showcase the resources he produces for Numeracy (and now Literacy too). If you haven’t seen any of his stuff before then you are really missing out.
The main site is PrimaryGames.co.uk, but once you’re on any of his sites it’s easy to find the others. Check out Teaching Money, Teaching Fractions, Teaching Time and Teaching Measures. Each site features evaluation versions of the activities that you can try out – they are just watermarked to encourage you to buy the full versions (and I recommend that you do!)
Resources were originally sold on CD to run on your own school networks, but you can now also access all of them online (for a very reasonable annual fee) at www.interactive-resources.co.uk
All of these games would get my Fingerfriendly seal of approval! Highly Recommended.
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10 tips for the whiteboard
A very quick link to a great blog post I found today by checking some of the links back to this blog with the WordPress Stats package.
Rob Chambers Blog – ICT across the Curriculum has posted 10 Tips and Tricks to use on the IWB. There are some very useful ideas included there (and a video of a rather dashing chap too!)
There’s some other great stuff on the rest of the blog too, although it’s not been updated for a month or so. Check it out now.
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Helix Nebula
This is such an awesome photo, I just wanted to point you towards it. Certainly would provoke awe and wonder on the IWB. View the full version here.
More amazing space images from the ESO website here.
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Make a Monster
Yesterday I decided to dust off my rudimentary Flash skills and have a go at making a new flash resource to use on an interactive whiteboard with younger pupils.
I wanted to make something that could be used to stimulate writing or discussion like the Superhero generator etc. So I had a go at a Make a Monster activity. You can view it here.
Click on the icons at the bottom of the screen to change the face, eyes, nose and mouth. I’ve put the icons at the bottom of the screen to make it easy to reach.
Once you’ve built your monster you could use the IWB screen capture tools, or Print Screen button and paste a copy into your software of choice. Pupils could then write about the monster.
You could write key words to describe your monster on your page – then drag them to another page where you have a partially completed writing frame. If you have Smart Notebook you can view both pages at the same time by clicking the Dual Page button, but you could just drag the words onto the next page using the Page Sorter in both Smart and Promethean.
If you have any comments about the Make a Monster game, please let me know.
If you like this, I have made other games which you might also like to use. You can find them all on my Think Bank website.
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Physics Games
I’m delivering an IWB in Science day in London tomorrow and I have been looking around for any new science websites that I might have missed. So I was really pleased to have stumbled upon Physics Games.net this morning.
Physics Games.net provides nearly 50 different flash-based games, all collected onto the one site. A few of these games, like Magic Pen and Fantastic Contraption, I have seen before on other sites, but it’s nice to have one place to bookmark to get them all in the same place. There are quite a few games here I hadn’t seen before. Physics teachers should definitely add this site to their favourites.
Most of the games are puzzle-type games that draw on aspect of physics – many would be useful to illustrate forces or gravity.
The site also provides embed codes for the different games so you can embed them into your own school website or VLE. There are some fun games there, and even if you don’t end up using them in a lesson, there are some fiendishly addictive puzzle games there. Check it out today.
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About Me
Danny Nicholson : Educator, Science teacher, ICT Consultant, PGCE lecturer, Author and Web2.0 / SMART Masters/ Interactive Whiteboard Trainer. Contact me for any training requests. 
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