Posts made in February 25th, 2009

Make a Monster

Posted on Feb 25, 2009 in Games and interactives, Interactive Whiteboards, Literacy Resources, Resources | 3 comments

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.

Physics Games

Posted on Feb 25, 2009 in Games and interactives, Interactive Whiteboards, Science Resources | 2 comments

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.