Science TV and the Cheltenham Science Festival
The Times Cheltenham Science Festival is a five day celebration of science, engineering and the arts, with a reputation for getting the best brains in the country together to probe the most topical issues. It takes place in June every year.
Each year, film crews capture the best demonstrations from the extensive schools’ programme and bitesize versions of the most popular talks. These videos form part of these resource packs, which are designed for use by teachers, and are now available for download in school-friendly formats. These videos are made available via the Science.TV website
The first set of resource packs includes:
- The Big Bang with Maggie Aderin
- Herpes Virus – Friend or Foe? with Mark Lythgoe
- Chemistry with a Bang with Mik Jacobs
- The Art of Muscles with Alice Roberts
- Climate Change – Controversies and Consensus with Jonathon Porritt
The videos are hosted on YouTube, so you will need access to YouTube in school if you want to view these direct from the site within class. If you register and download the resource pack it does contain a windows media version of the video to play offline, along with a pdf pack of worksheets.
You can access the resource packs here.
There are many other videos and resources on the Science.TV site. You will need to register to access all of it, but registration is free.
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A guest blog from Angie McGlashon
Hey Danny…fancy letting the girls take over your whiteboard blog while you are out ogf the country! Very risky! We wanted to turn it pink and fluffy but just couldn’t do it to you.
I am Angie McGlashon, long term friend of Danny’s and an ICT adviser for Essex LA for 4 days and a free lance ICT consultant for the other day. I specialise in technologies that support ICT and SEN ad there is no better place to start than Sally Paveleys Plasma Screen and Whiteboard Room. What a fantastic and growing resource full of downloadable basic skills resources that have been sent in by interested parties. Plasmas are a great way to get IWB technologies to people who are limited in mobility because they can be altered in height and pushed up close to a wheelchair or bed. Lots of powerpoints here but a lot of Notebook resources as well.
Talking about Powerpoints….don’t run away too quickly before you have a look at what Pete Wells has done with his sensory stories! Not a place to go if you are squeamish about bogies and snot….but really funny and go down really well with older pupils with SEN….oh blow the SEN bit…all kids like cheekily disgusting examples now and then don’t they? I point you in the direction of Gobbin Hood and his Merry Phlegm: www.petewells.co.uk
There is a lot more here…definitely worth a look and he is just as funny as his stories!
Finally, there is another great website that is great for cause and effect and single click type activities. Take a look at:
http://www.educationict.org.uk/ictsan/mt
for the Moving Targets website. Have a go at the fireworks…its always good to finish up with fireworks I think!
Thanks for the opportunity Danny…think I’d better stop before I think of another resource………..
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Red Fish!
My first blog post here – thank you to Danny for inviting me.
I like to see children using Interactive Whiteboards (IWB). Not just coming up to the front to point at something or move it, I mean really ‘using’ them. Some of the best use of IWBs I have seen by children has been in EYFS and KS1. Here I’ve seen children encouraged by their teachers to ‘play’ with the board during group activities. I have witnessed children engrossed in activities, using the IWB software, recording sound, pretending to teach and using interactive sites.
My favourite website for EYFS has to be the amazing Poisson Rouge (my CSE grade 1 French enables me to translate this to ‘red fish’!). What do I like about this site? Well for a start there are very few words – everything is picture driven. So starting on the first page what happens if I click on a mobile hanging from a shelf? Well I’m taken to a new screen which enables me to match small pictures into a bigger one. How do I return? I simply click on the red fish. What happens if I click on a picture on the wall? It takes me to a room with a table and shelves with all manner of exciting things. What can I do here? I can drag the pictures at the bottom and find the same thing on the desk.
There are too many things to list here so I recommend if you haven’t seen it go click around for yourself. Small children love clicking around finding out what happens when… This is the ideal site for it.
Fit the pieces on the bottom onto the space picture.
Can you drag the pictures at the bottom to the correct place?
Laura O’Halloran
Independent ICT Consultant
lauraohalloran@me.com
07549 937 079
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Teacher 2 Teacher Smart Notebook Files
I had an absolute blast at the Teacher2Teacher conference in Bow Island, Alberta this week. It was fantastic to meet so many great educators who up until now I had only contacted via Twitter. There was such a great buzz around the school – it was brilliant.
I’ll write more about the conference soon – but for now, I just want to put this post up quickly because I told the delegates I would.
(EDIT – I’ve taken these files down for now…. If you attended the conference you can still get them via the Prairie Rose file area)
Links to the websites I mentioned in the sessions were all tagged with the T2T tag on delicious, so you can find them all here : http://delicious.com/dannynic/t2t
Thanks to the everyone involved in the conference for making me feel so welcome! Hope to see you next year too!
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Guest Blog Posts this Week
As I may just have mentioned once or twice, I am flying out to Canada this week for the Teacher2Teacher conference in Bow Island, Alberta.
While I am away, I’ve asked a few good friends and colleagues to write some guest posts on this blog.
I’ll leave it to them to introduce themselves. I’m looking forward to seeing their posts.
If you are at the Teacher2Teacher conference I look forward to meeting some of you. Make sure you say Hi. I’ll be posting the Smart Notebook files from my sessions on the blog at the end of the week.
See you when I get back.
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Creative Commons in the Classroom
I’ve written about good sources of creative commons images and sounds before. It’s very important to be aware of the conditions behind using any resource found on the web. Students should be getting out of the habit of just finding images on a Google Image search and dumping them into their work.
Here’s a very good presentation from Jessica Coates on Slideshare which explains more.
I’ve written a guide to Creative Commons, which you can download here. I’ve also collated some links on Delicious which might be useful.
Update – Another great guide to CC can be found via this blog post by The Clever Sheep.
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Educational Blogging Platforms Compared
When I run my Blogging training days, we usually focus on getting an account with WordPress or Edublogs. Both run off the same backend, but Edublogs is tailored more for educators.
If you are interested in finding out about all the different platforms that are available, then Dodie Ainslie has put together a great overview of the various options.
You can find it here: http://djainslietech.wikispaces.com/Blogging+Platforms
Take a look at the Smartboard resource pages too – some good links there.
If you do go with WordPress or Edublogs – then there’s a guide I have written here that should help you get started, and a presentation about blogging in schools.
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SumDog – numeracy games for KS2/KS3
Sumdog is a fun website for numeracy from the people behind Crocodile Clips and Yenka / Absorb Science.
Sumdog’s free maths games are designed to improve numeracy in upper primary and lower secondary (students aged 9 to 13).
Covering 100 fine grained numeracy topics, ranging from simple addition to square roots, Sumdog adapts to the skill level of each student, helping them to work through each numeracy topic comprehensively
Students and teachers can play the games for free. You can register, which is free, or play as a guest.
Sumdog has 10 levels. Students start at level 1 and progress upwards. In every game Sumdog will recommend a level for students to try. The levels are split into topics of roughly equal difficulty. There are 100 topics in total. Students can choose a whole level or a specific topic to practise.
As students improve, Sumdog will gradually paint over the topic on the graffiti wall until it is clean. When all the topics in a level are clean, the level is completed.
It’s a fun free resource, and is well worth a visit.
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12 Art Resources for your IWB
There’s nothing better than playing with an art program on an interactive whitboard and literally drawing with your finger. It really works like a massive graphics tablet. And there are some excellent, free, online drawing packages. Some are quite simple, and others really mimic real-world art materials.
For the entire list, check out my Delicious page under Art + IWB, but here are a few of my favourites:
Sumopaint: This is an excellent resource – a free, fully featured paint package in your browser.Very impressive.
Sketchpad : Another paint package demonstrating the capability of the new HTML5 – this doesn’t use Flash, which is quite interesting. If that last sentence made no sense, don’t panic. Just have a play and paint something!
Livebrush is another free paint package, that should work well on an IWB. The size of the brush stroke depends on the speed you drag across the page, the faster you go the broader the brush stroke. Needs Adobe Air, so check you can install it at school.
Dreezle: A simple, java-based paint application.
Aviary : A fantastic site. Aviary contains a stack of great free tools, it even has a sound editor!
Sketch : The brush tool gives a really realistic effect and you can alter lots of different variables if you want – or just paint away!
Crayola Digi-Colour: Choose from a variety of Crayola products including crayons, pencils and stamps. If you want to do something more off-line then there are colouring pages to print out as well. The Crayola site also has a lot of information for teachers including lesson plans here.
Bomomo : I love this. It’s brilliant for making abstract drawings. Some of the pens are really fun. Quite hypnotic to watch
Imagination Cubed : This has been around a while, but it’s still really fun. You can even collaborate with friends on a joint drawing.
Splashup : An online paint package very similar to Sumo Paint. ( There’s also a Lite version too for netbooks and less powerful computers)
Mondrimat : Create blocks of colour in the style of Piet Mondrian.
This is Sand : Another odd, but very hypnotic application. Make pictures by piling up sand. Fun.
As a bonus, check out Artpad - a quick and simple paint package. Share and see what others have painted in the gallery.
Have fun!
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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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