The Whiteboard Blog » Useful Links

Safer Internet Day 2012 Esafety Resources

Danny — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 11:47:50 +0000

Safer Internet Day (SID) aims to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people across the world. Safer Internet Day 2012 will take place on Tuesday 7 February 2012, centred on the theme “Connecting generations and educating each other”, where they encourage users young and old to “discover the digital world together…safely!”

The Safer Internet Day website contains teaching ideas, posters and lesson resources for teachers who want to cover internet safety with their classes, for both primary and secondary schools.

You can also find some very useful resources to help teach SID on Promethean Planet website: These include some exclusive e-safety quizzes from Millionaire for Schools, fun flipcharts for use with 2–9 year olds from Hector’s World, and advice for educators from the Teachers TV archives. You can find out more at the Promethean Planet Safer Internet Day page.

For more information about Safer Internet Day, visit the SID website : http://www.saferinternetday.org and also the Insafe website: http://www.saferinternet.eu

Also check out this post from last year with some very good esafety videos and this post about internet safety and social networking for trainee teachers.

You can also find some great resources, and links, on the TES Safer Internet Day page.

Safer Internet Day 2012 Esafety Resources The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

Explania – instructional animations

Danny — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:52:59 +0000

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.

Explania – instructional animations The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

The Ed Tech Blog Carnival 2012 #1

Danny — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:35:13 +0000

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!

So that’s it! Thanks to all the contributors who have written some excellent posts for this carnival. I’d like to make this more than an annual event, so if someone wants to host another one, say in April, then let me know and I’ll help promote it here and on Twitter etc.

If you’ve written a blog carnival piece and I haven’t included it here, please let me know and I’ll add it. Make sure you include a link to this blog post so your readers can find the other blogs that make up the carnival.

The Ed Tech Blog Carnival 2012 #1 The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

ICT Reviews for Schools – Whiteboard Guide

Danny — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 09:19:22 +0000

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.

ICT Reviews for Schools – Whiteboard Guide The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

Adobe Education Exchange – resources for teachers

Danny — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 06:49:32 +0000

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.

Adobe Education Exchange – resources for teachers The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

Dumpr – fun with your photos

Danny — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:03:58 +0000

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!

Dumpr – fun with your photos The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

Video – Inanimate Alice BETT 2012 Presentation

Danny — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:06:57 +0000

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:

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

Video – Inanimate Alice BETT 2012 Presentation The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

An Ed Tech Blog Carnival 2012 : Call for submissions

Danny — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:01:24 +0000

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

An Ed Tech Blog Carnival 2012 : Call for submissions The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

Inanimate Alice Presentation from BETT

Danny — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 11:24:00 +0000

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.

Inanimate Alice talk @ Bett 2012

View more presentations from Danny Nicholson

Links

http://www.inanimatealice.com/education

http://aliceandfriends.wikispaces.com/

https://www.facebook.com/InanimateAlice

http://bit.ly/alicetips

Inanimate Alice Presentation from BETT The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

Photo Pin : a creative commons image search tool

Danny — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:05:12 +0000

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!

Photo Pin : a creative commons image search tool The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom