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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