Posts made in June, 2009

Diet Coke and Mentos 09

Posted on Jun 28, 2009 in Science Resources | 2 comments

My PGCE Scitt Science Class of 09′s (almost) Organised Display of Diet Coke and Mentos….

The Science Bit can be found here.

Comments disabled due to comment spam…

Coke Bottle Rocket

Posted on Jun 28, 2009 in Science Resources | 0 comments

A simple rocket made from a coke bottle, 1/4 filled with water and powered by a bicycle pump. (Can buy the kit from Hawkins Bazaar for about £12.99 here)

Great for talking about Forces. Make sure you do it somewhere where there’s a lot of space

Primary Science Smartboard Files

Posted on Jun 26, 2009 in Interactive Whiteboards, Science Resources, SMARTboards | 0 comments

I demonstrated some of these files with my PGCE students today and they wanted the links, so thought it was worth reposting here.

I have a batch of my Smart Notebook files up on my Think Bank website for anyone who wants them to download. These are all Primary files, but you can also get plenty of Secondary Science files from the Think Bank website too.

Best thing to do is to right click and “save target as” since Smart sometimes gets confused.

Fishing Rod Keyword idea

Skeleton

Pulse Rate Fair test planner

Generic Post It Planner

Living or Non Living

Food Chains

Flowers

Body Parts

Plenary for Space

Plenary for Electricity

Plants and Flowers

Weather Forecast

Frog Life Cycle

Properties of Materials anagram activity (includes countdown themetune)

There are also a few Literacy and Numeracy Smart Notebook files on the site as well as some simple Flash activities on the site as well.

Smartboard Smart Notebook Maths Beta

Posted on Jun 24, 2009 in Numeracy Resources, SMARTboards, Software | 0 comments

Smart today announced that their new SMART Notebook Math beta is now available to download. This is a plugin that adds additional capability to your existing Smart Notebook 10 installation.

To quote the Smart press release:

SMART Notebook Math extends the capabilities of SMART Notebook software with a dynamic set of math-specific tools and features, so when you create and explore lessons on your SMART Board interactive whiteboard, you only need one application.

Designed specifically for middle and high school math classrooms, SMART Notebook Math has built-in features such as an equation editor and custom graph builder. You can manipulate shapes, use interactive measurement tools and even launch your Texas Instruments brand emulator from right within the software. SMART Notebook Math is also the first interactive whiteboard application to have handwriting recognition for mathematical symbols.

Try the beta today, and you’ll discover that everything you need to make math more interactive is in the software you already love. The beta ends October 1, 2009, and the Microsoft Windows version will be available to purchase in fall 2009.

Featuresof Smart Notebook Maths:

Equations:

• Handwriting Recognition for Mathematical Symbols
• Equation Solving
• Equation Editing

Advanced Shape Creation and Manipulation Tools:

• Regular Polygon Tool
• Irregular Polygon Tool
• Advanced Shape Manipulation

Measurement Tools:

• Ruler
• Protractor
• Compass

Graphs

• Dynamic Graphing
• Custom Graph Builder

Texas Instruments™ Emulators

• Launch and operate TI-Nspire™, TI-SmartView™ 84 and TI-SmartView 73 software from within SMART Notebook.

More on these features can be found here.

From the Smart Maths FAQ there is two important bits of information that you should know if you want to try this Beta out:

Do I need to uninstall SMART Notebook 10 to install SMART Notebook Math?
No, you do not need to uninstall SMART Notebook 10 software. However, it’s important to note that SMART Notebook Math is an extended version of SMART Notebook and will replace SMART Notebook 10.

When the beta has ended, do I need to uninstall anything?
Once the beta ends, you will need to uninstall the SMART Notebook Math beta, and reinstall and activate SMART Notebook 10 software.

So you can use it until October 1st 2009. Once that date is reached it will stop working and you will have to uninstall and reinstall Smart Notebook 10 (and reactivate it).

Smart has not yet mentioned how much the full version will cost when it is rolled out in November. I do hope it’s not too expensive.

If that hasn’t put you off, then you can download Smart Notebook Maths Beta here.

Let me know what you think of it!

Powerful Images to Give Lessons Punch

Posted on Jun 23, 2009 in Digital Media, Interactive Whiteboards | 1 comment

One of the benefits of having an Interactive Whiteboard in the classroom (or even just a data projector) is the opportunity to display full colour high quality images instead of grainy acetates or posters. With a powerful image you can really add some “punch” to your lesson. Put images up while students are coming into the room – use them as part of a lesson starter – stimulate questions.

What is going on here? Why is the astronaut wearing that suit? Why is it white? What would happen if he/she wasn’t on that robotic arm? What do you think it would be like to be up there? What do you think he is thinking? Should we be sending people into space? What is keeping him up there? What do we mean by Orbit? etc etc.

The Big Picture

One of my favourite sites for these kind of inspirational images is The Big Picture from the Boston Times. Every few days they post another set of images which never fail to make me go “wow”.

Here is just a selection of the great images that you could use in different curriculum areas:

For Science; Mercury Images, Robots, Hubble Images, International Space Station, Earth and Environment, Animals, Zoos, Swine Flu.

For Citizenship powerful images of the protests in Iran, and here. Also Life in Iraq,

For Geography – images of Cyclones, Earth Observed, Hurricanes from Above, Hurricane Ike

For RE – Carnival, Easter, Holy Week, Hindu festival of colours, The Haaj, Christmas,

For Art – La Princesse, Festival of Lights,

For Literacy – any and all of them could have a role in stimulating story writing, or class discussion on different topics.

And there are many more, plus its growing every week.

In a similar vein, The BBC website also has an “In Pictures” section which covers events in the news. As does The Times, The Telegraph and The Guardian. All worth bookmarking and checking from time to time.

Remember to attribute the source of these images when you use them in your lessons. These are still the copyright of the photographer so you need to be careful how you use and distribute these images.

Flickr

For those of you who are into photography – Flickr is the YouTube of photographs. Several thousand photos get uploaded to Flickr every minute. The quality can be patchy, but there are thousands of excellent photographers sharing their works on Flickr. (and a few dodgy photographers, like me!)

What makes Flickr useful is the ability to add a Creative Commons licence to your images which says how they can be used. Many people allow their photos to be used anywhere, as long as you attribute them as the source of the image. Many will also let their images be used commercially in this way as well. In my presentations I now use a lot of images from Flickr and always link the image back to its original Flickr page by way of acknowledging the photographer.

Flickr also has an area for Public Photo Collections which you can search here.

To help find creative commons images, there are several tools now which will let you search Flickr for CC images. My Favourite is FlickrCC- enter a tag to search for and it will return 36 thumbnails. Click on a thumbnail to see more information and to visit the original page on Flickr.Other tools include; Compfight, Flickr Storm, and Simple Flickr CC Search.

The Creative Commons website now also provides a CC search engine for images and other resources as well as listings of tonnes of CC Image sites.

If you want to know more about Creative Commons, I have written a short guide which you can read on Scribd.

E2BN Gallery

Another useful gallery is the E2BN Educational Gallery of images. It’s not anywhere near as comprehensive as Flickr, but some schools may block access to Flickr since there are adult images on there.

Google Image Search

It would be wrong to talk about image searching without mentioning the Google Image search, which I use quite a lot. The drawback of the images it produces is that on the whole they are usually copyrighted images, or that the copyright of the image is unclear. This makes them tricky to use in educational resources that you want to redistribute.

A new addition to the Google Search is the ability to select the colour you are looking for. So instead of just looking for Flowers, you can look for only red flowers… It’s a neat addition.

In summary, there is a wealth of image sources on the Internet that you can use to provide punch to your lessons.

Remember to not to choose images that are too small, or that look blocky when stretched to full screen. Test them out before the lesson to make sure they look OK. Show them as big as you can for maximum impact. Think about how you want to use them – what questions could you ask to stimulate your students thinking processes?

For example, as a leaving thought – How could you use this image? What does this say to you?

Update – Found this great blog post with a few more images sources: 7 Awesome Newspaper Photoblogs.

Google Squared in the Classroom

Posted on Jun 22, 2009 in Activity Ideas, Useful Links | 0 comments

Google have recently rolled out a new twist on their search engine in their continued bid for world domination – Google Squared.

Google Squared takes a category and creates a starter ‘square’ of information, automatically fetching and organizing facts from across the web and producing them in spreadsheet format. You can then add additional columns and rows to this grid of information (if more info is available)

To see how this differs from a normal Google search, try this search for Chemical Elements

How about just The Noble Gases, or Halogens, or Transition metals?

or Women Scientists , Black Scientists, Space Probes, and many more!

With my Science hat on, there’s loads of ways you could use this. Thinking of the whole curriculum there’s even more: English Kings, Capital Cities, US States, etc etc

It’s a really interesting way of displaying the results from a search and it could be very handy for quickly summarising data from any number of sources; including Wikipedia and others.

It would also be useful for comparing prices and spec on items you want to buy such as Digital Cameras or NetBooks.

Support Sites for Teaching Assistants

Posted on Jun 22, 2009 in Resources, Useful Links | 2 comments

Today I was delivering some training for Teaching Assistants. We wanted to give them the opportunity to try out some of the resources that are available on the Internet to use with students.

I put together a list of sites that we played with during the day. I’ve reproduced the list below.

A full list of all these sites (plus others) can be found at: http://www.delicious.com/dannynic/TA

Good SEN Resource Sites

PlasmaScreen and Whiteboard room : http://www.whiteboardroom.org.uk/

SEN Teacher : http://www.senteacher.org/

Help Kids Learn : http://www.helpkidzlearn.com/

ISSEN – SEN and Science : http://www.issen.org.uk/

Create your own characters – Stimulus for creative writing

http://reasonablyclever.com/mini/flash/minifig.swf

http://www.simpsonsmovie.com/main.html

http://www.buildyourwildself.com/

http://www.mrpicassohead.com/create.html

Interactive Sites for Support / Revision

Northern Grid Mini apps : http://www.northerngrid.org/ngflwebsite/miniapps/activities_1.html

NumberNut : http://www.numbernut.com/

Triptico : http://www.triptico.co.uk/

TeacherLed : http://www.teacherled.com

Wall of Words : http://fen.com/studentactivities/WallOfWords/wow19.html

Skool.co.uk : http://kent.skoool.co.uk/index.aspx

Quizzes : http://ThatQuiz.org

Oswego Numeracy Games : http://resources.oswego.org/games/

Fun Tools and Things to Try

Wordle : http://www.wordle.net

Word Sift : http://www.wordsift.com

Five Card Flickr : http://web.nmc.org/5cardstory/flickr.php

WallWisher : http://www.wallwisher.com/

PhotoPeach : http://photopeach.com/

Build your own Bayeux Tapestry : http://www.adgame-wonderland.de/type/bayeux.php

Bubbl.us MindMaps : http://bubbl.us

Computer Help

Technology Tutorials : http://www.bltt.org/tutorials/

Online computer tutorials with pictures : http://inpics.net/

5 Tips and Tricks for Smart Notebook 10

Posted on Jun 18, 2009 in SMARTboards, Tutorials and Guides | 2 comments

Thanks to Twitter I found this useful video on YouTube  just now:

Thanks to Scott Bellow for uploading those to YouTube, see more at EduTecher.

Thought for the Day

Posted on Jun 15, 2009 in Useful Links | 2 comments

This quote from Douglas Adams came up during a radio interview with Baroness Greenfield who has been currently wittering on about computers probably rotting our brains, albeit with a complete lack of evidence or research to back up her “chilling warnings”.

It’s from “How to stop worrying and learn to love the Internet”

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

And I think it sums up brilliantly the way a lot of people approach any kind of modern technology – including Interactive Whiteboards, online learning etc etc.

And if you’re interested, Ben Goldacre over at the brilliant Bad Science blog has a nice rebuttal of Baroness Greenfields warning.