Useful Links

Explania – instructional animations

Posted on Feb 3, 2012 in Digital Media, Tutorials and Guides, Useful Links | 4 comments

Explania is a website which contains loads of animated explanations, interactive tutorials and instructional videos.

The site covers a wide range of topics from “What is Twitter?” to “The Human Heart” as well as software guides for MS Office and more. For example How to apply conditinal formatting in Excel 2007

It even tries to explain the offside rule in football:

What is offside in football? – Explania

It’s rather a strange mix of videos, some will be useful for teachers, whilst others might want to be avoided. But it is worth a look and you might find a few gems in there that you will find useful. Videos are pulled in from YouTube so if you school blocks YouTube you won’t be able to access the videos.

Thanks to Richard Byrne at Free Tech for Teachers for the link

Take a look at Explania and let me know what you think in the comments.

The Ed Tech Blog Carnival 2012 #1

Posted on Jan 29, 2012 in Conferences, Interactive Whiteboards, Useful Links | 2 comments

A few weeks ago I asked for educational bloggers to share some of their posts as part of a Blog Carnival. The idea would be that they would write about aspects of technology in education,  and I would then collate into a single post that points to them all. Hopefully you the reader will discover some blogs you haven’t seen before.

So here’s the posts that make up the first Ed Tech Blog Carnival for January 2012:

To start, I’ll point to a post by me about the options available to use interactive whiteboards without the software.

Expat Educator Janet Abercrombie has written a great post about using student news videos as an alternative to newsletters. Learn the process of creating a classroom video news report.

Stephen Lockyer has written about some of the best iPhone apps that he uses in school. Some very useful recommendations.

Kevin Hodgson has written a post entitled: “Considering Mentor Texts 2: The Evolution of an Idea“. Exploring the ways that Make Your Own Adventure novels/stories might be used in the classroom with students, with wikis as one platform for writing and then with YouTube annotations.

Chris Coleman, a grade 4 teacher, has written about using the Pearltrees website to create a bookmark web to embed, share and collaborate

Tyson Seburn introduces the pros and cons of 3 different ways to use Google apps for scheduling with students.

Student teacher Dr Jo Badge has written about Blogging, Tweeting and Being a PGCE Student.

Greg Russell has written about his thoughts on the current state of using e-books for learning.

Seth Dickens gives the first in a series of 5 video interviews he did at BETT 2012, approaching his favourite stands at BETT and asking them why they come to BETT and what are they doing to make teachers’ lives easier. Interesting stuff.

Brad Patterson gives 4 key factors that are changing the business of ELT learning.

Doug Peterson gives his first look at the LiveBinders iPad application which lead to LiveBinders supporting the Ontario Curriculum.

Tom Hesmondhalgh writes about using Google+ to Help Improve Your Teaching. Google+ has generated its fair share of hype since its launch, and while it’s still officially in beta it’s growing at an incredible rate. Tom describes how teachers can harness some of the unique features of Google+ to help improve their practice.

Lisa Butler has written a post about trying a different approach with students and copyright – give them responsibility and ownership and take away the grade.

Terry Freedman gives 4 reasons why the ICT Programme of Study “had” to go. Interesting stuff with some excellent points about the state of ICT teaching in our schools right now.

And finally, Jen Deyenberg has written about creating your own geocaches featuring some of her students’ fabulous creations!

ICT Reviews for Schools – Whiteboard Guide

Posted on Jan 24, 2012 in Interactive Whiteboards, Promethean, SMARTboards, Useful Links | 0 comments

You may not know this but PC Pro magazine produces an occasional supplement for education called ICT Reviews for Schools. The free guide is packed with buyer’s guides, reviews and features to help schools spend their IT budgets wisely.

Issue 4 is just out, and this time features a very interesting article written by Terry Freedman entitled “Getting the most from your interactive whiteboard”.

The guide also includes head to head reviews of a Promethean and Smart whiteboard as well as a great guide to 10 free online tools.

It’s well worth a look. It’s a free download, and you can get hold of a copy here.

Adobe Education Exchange – resources for teachers

Posted on Jan 23, 2012 in Resources, Software, Tutorials and Guides, Useful Links | 0 comments

The Adobe Education Exchange hosts a range of free, peer-reviewed teaching and learning resources, developed by Adobe Education Leaders,  educators who are already integrating technology in to classes with great success who also use the Exchange themselves to find inspiration for creative teaching activities.

For example the site contains guidance on teaching code for games design and app development which supports collaborative learning, or lesson plans for effectively teaching photography students panoramic techniques.

For more information or to sign up to the Adobe Education Exchange visit: http://edexchange.adobe.com.

Dumpr – fun with your photos

Posted on Jan 19, 2012 in Activity Ideas, Interactive Whiteboards, Useful Links, Web Tools | 1 comment

Dumpr is a great little website that has lots of tools for doing creative things with your images. Simply choose an effect from the 21 on offer, upload your photograph and Dumpr will do the rest. You can then save your image to use elsewhere.

For example, turn an image into a Rubiks Cube:

This is a great way to create avatars images for social media, or present your images in creative ways in blog posts or student presentations. The site is free to use. Take a look at : http://www.dumpr.net/

And if you like Dumpr. also check out Big Huge Labs which has some other fun tools.

Thanks to Jan Webb (@janwebb21) for the link.

Got any other sites like this you can recommend? Share them in the comments!

Video – Inanimate Alice BETT 2012 Presentation

Posted on Jan 18, 2012 in Conferences, Digital Media, Games and interactives, Literacy Resources, Other Subjects, Subject Resources, Useful Links | 0 comments

Here’s the video of my Inanimate Alice presentation from Friday. This formed part of the TeachMeet Takeover event at the BETT Show 2012. For a copy of the presentation itself, check here.

Links from the Video:

• Inanimate Alice Trailer
• Inanimate Alice Flipchart and other files on Promethean Planet
• http://www.inanimatealice.com/education
• http://aliceandfriends.wikispaces.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/InanimateAlice
• http://bit.ly/alicetips
• Presentation as a downloadable slideshare file

Thanks to Emily at Promethean for filming the presentation, and thanks to Selda for letting me use the Promethean stand to give the presentation.

An Ed Tech Blog Carnival 2012 : Call for submissions

Posted on Jan 16, 2012 in Conferences, Site Stuff, Useful Links | 15 comments

Update – the carnival post can be found here

After running an Education Tech Blog Carnival last year, I put the idea on the back burner for a while. Having met up with a few bloggers over the weekend I’ve decided to have another go.

So here’s the idea:

Any blogger who is in the field of education (teacher, librarian, adviser, consultant etc) and is interested in technology writes a blog post about something related to technology in education to be part of the carnival. Please add a link to this blogpost and say it’s part of the Blog Carnival – that way your readers can find other posts in the carnival

They then email me (danny at think-bank dot com) with the URL of their blog post and a sentence to describe what it’s about. Or you can leave a comment below this blog post with the same information.

The blog post could be about a tool you’ve used, could be some tips, could be a reflection on the state of technology in education or a prediction of the future, or could be sharing good work that your pupils are producing. Anything you feel like sharing! This doesn’t have to be a major blog post, but it should be more than just a collection of links or a plug for their own product.

When I’ve added the carnival post – please amend the link in your blog post to point to that carnival post so that your readers can see the other posts taking part in the blog carnival.

The closing date for URLs is 12 Noon GMT Sunday 29th January. So you’ve got two weeks to have a think about something you want to share and write about. Which should be plenty of time, I hope.

I will then write a blog post that links to all the blog posts in the carnival and promote it on Twitter etc. Hopefully our readers will discover new blogs they hadn’t seen before. Here’s how it worked last year.

Next time, someone else can “host” it and receive all the urls.. and so on. We could do this monthly, or quarterly or whatever.

Let’s try this and see how it goes.

Update – the carnival post can be found here

Inanimate Alice Presentation from BETT

Posted on Jan 15, 2012 in Interactive Whiteboards, Literacy Resources, Other Subjects, Presentations, Promethean, Useful Links | 2 comments

Here’s a copy of my Inanimate Alice presentation from the BETT show on Friday as part of TeachMeet Takeover. Thanks to all those who came to watch, and thanks to Promethean for letting me have some time on their stand.

English and MFL teachers should definitely check out the Inanimate Alice resource – it’s free so go take a look!

The presentation was videoed too, you can see it on YouTube here.

Photo Pin : a creative commons image search tool

Posted on Jan 10, 2012 in Digital Media, Useful Links, Web Tools | 0 comments

PhotoPin is another great search tool that lets you search for creative commons images to use in class projects and blogs.

Simply search for any topic using the search box , preview the photo, and click “get photo” to download the photo as well as the code with proper attribution link. If you prefer to pay for your photos rather than linking to it, the results at the top will take you to a stock photo site where you can buy photos instead (currently fotolia).

Check it out at : http://photopin.com

If you want other search tools, check out this blog post from 2009: Creative Commons Image Sources for your IWB which has several of my favourites listed.

Thanks to Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers for the link.

Let me know what you think of PhotoPin in the comments below!