Newly qualified teacher Tim Handley (@tomhenzley on Twitter) has put together an excellent guide to surviving your PGCE year. It’s a crowdsourced book, pulling in the experience of Tim’s PGCE year as well as a wealth of information shared by experienced teachers via Twitter. Inside the book you will find 143 pages full of hints, [...]
Smart have had a redesign of their website. As a result, it’s bloody hard to now find the tutorials and guides that are available on the site. If you didn’t know they were there, it would be hard to track them down. If you want to access them, try this link: Smart Notebook Help Files [...]
A few years ago, the government agency for ICT in Schools – Becta – produced a series of guides on the use of Interactive Whiteboards in secondary teaching. Each document containsed a set of subject specific advice, guidance and examples to support more effective use of ICT in the teaching and learning of science. There [...]
The Whiteboard Challenge – set up by Jess McCulloch is back, and better than ever Are you new to using an interactive whiteboard (IWB)? Have you used one for ages but want some other ideas? Are you using an IWB regularly but know you could use it better? Then you are invited to join The [...]
Just a quick post to link to some of the resources to support yesterday’s training workshops at North Devon College / Petroc. The Smartboard sessions went really well. My guides to using Smart Notebook can be found here. Official Smart helpsheets can be found on the Smart Website. A version of the “Getting the Most [...]
Quite often I find myself in schools with quite old versions of Smart Notebook. Or the technicians have only installed Smart Notebook and not installed the full Gallery or Lesson Activity Toolkit. This is a real shame as, especially with the Gallery and Lesson Toolkit, you are missing out on a lot of content that [...]
Here are two very useful websites to bookmark if you are looking for basic computer help on a variety of different topics. Chris Thomas has put together iPrimary : www.iprimary.co.uk which features video tutorials he has produced to support teachers who wish to develop their ICT skills, and extend the use of ICT within their [...]
Interesting news from the Creative Commons Blog today that they have produced an education-focussed area with its own landing page. http://creativecommons.org/education Its goal is to quickly introduce visitors to the vast number and range of Open Educational Resources available for use as well as the role of Creative Commons licenses in enabling OER to reach [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]