Posts made in February 23rd, 2009

Awen Media

Posted on Feb 23, 2009 in Interactive Whiteboards, Resources | 0 comments

Bit of a rush of websites to share today. I stumbled upon this one in a teachers magazine while waiting in the staffroom this afternoon for a training session to start. I think I may have bookmarked it before, but don’t think I’ve blogged about it.

Awen Media is a Cardiff-based multimedia publisher specialising in the creation of fun educational interactive programs for children.

Awen’s range of software is popular in primary schools and homes with parents, teachers and children alike. The products are designed to assist teachers and parents in the teaching and learning process, while keeping things fun for the children. All of their products are produced in both Welsh and English versions.

As well as the software you can purchase – they also have a number of fun, free activities that you can download and run offline on your own computers. They are simple flash exe files so there’s nothing to actually install – as long as you’re allowed to run them

These include a fun fridge magnet letters and numbers tool, a sudoku generator, a numnber spinner and a bubbles game. There’s also a wordsearch generator.

You can access the free resources here.

Free Teaching Resources

Posted on Feb 23, 2009 in Resources | 0 comments

I’m always a fan of free resources. I always avoid spending money when I can avoid it So I was pleased to discover Free Teaching Resources this morning.

This website could potentially help you save hours of time searching for lesson plans, worksheets, assessment, tutorials, workshops and assemblies.

The site covers all curriculum subjects, plus teaching ideas for areas such as literacy, numeracy, sats, gcse revision, gcse bitesize tips and many more educational resource tips including interactive resources.

Evolution Animation

Posted on Feb 23, 2009 in Science Resources | 2 comments

Here’s an excellent animation that shows the history of the Earth, and evolution in all it’s glory. I’m a science teacher, so I love stuff like this.

It’s produced by John Kyrk and his website is packed with even more great flash animations for teaching GCSE and A Level Biology. Including meiosis and mitosis, cell structure and photosynthesis. Thanks to Clay Burrells blog for the link to this site.

And while on the subject of Evolution, and not really enough to justify a post of it’s own, here’s some cool Darwin/Obama mashup images from Mikero.com

More on his site, and you can buy Tshirts too! Proceeds go to the National Centre for Science Education in the US.

Five Card Flickr

Posted on Feb 23, 2009 in Digital Media | 2 comments

Here’s another nice idea for using the internet as an inspiration for creative writing; Five Card Flickr.

Five Card Flickr draws from nearly a thousand photos on flickr tagged with “5cardflickr”

You are dealt 5 random photos from Flickr and you choose one to add to your story. You then repeat this 4 more times until you have 5 photos that you can then use to tell a story.

You can then write your story on the blog itself, or you could display them on the IWB for students to write their own stories individually.

If you have photos on Flickr that you’d like to add to the pool of images used, then just tag them with 5cardflickr.

The 5 Card Flickr idea is based on a game called 5 Card Nancy where you create a 5 frame story using old comic strips. Here’s an online version of that game which you might also like to use. Or if you’re looking for a non-ict activity and have a stack of old comics or magazines, then here are the rules on playing it for yourself.

A related, but slightly different way of doing things, is the “Tell a story in 5 frames” group in Flickr. Take 5 photographs to tell a story. Again this could be a nice activity to do with students and some digital cameras.

If you are looking for new ways to use technology to tell stories, then here are 50+ Ways to tell a story, collated by CogDogRoo.