Bit of a rush of websites to share today. I stumbled upon this one in a teachers magazine while waiting in the staffroom this afternoon for a training session to start. I think I may have bookmarked it before, but don't think I've blogged about it.
Awen Media is a Cardiff-based multimedia publisher specialising in the creation of fun educational interactive programs for children.
Awen's range of software is popular in primary schools and homes with parents, teachers and children alike. The products are designed to assist teachers and parents in the teaching and learning process, while keeping things fun for the children. All of their products are produced in both Welsh and English versions.
As well as the software you can purchase - they also have a number of fun, free activities that you can download and run offline on your own computers. They are simple flash exe files so there's nothing to actually install - as long as you're allowed to run them :)
These include a fun fridge magnet letters and numbers tool, a sudoku generator, a numnber spinner and a bubbles game. There's also a wordsearch generator.
I'm always a fan of free resources. I always avoid spending money when I can avoid it ;) So I was pleased to discover Free Teaching Resources this morning.
This website could potentially help you save hours of time searching for lesson plans, worksheets, assessment, tutorials, workshops and assemblies.
The site covers all curriculum subjects, plus teaching ideas for areas such as literacy, numeracy, sats, gcse revision, gcse bitesize tips and many more educational resource tips including interactive resources.
Yesterday, Google announced the launch of Google Earth version 5, the brand new version of the already excellent Earth viewing tool. For those of you that have never played with it, I can highly recommend it. It's free, and you can download it here.
As an application to use on your interactive whiteboard, this really is an essential piece of software to have. Combine it with your desktop capture/camera tool and you can grab images from anywhere in the world and annotate over the top.
The obvious use would be for Geography lessons - it gives you an amazing globe at your fingertips which you can spin, zoom and see pretty much everything on Earth. The search facility lets you find a place almost instantly. You can also add weather information, radar images and recent cloud cover information. One of the new features is an ocean view where you can explore the sea floor and obtain information files about ocean life.
History teachers might want to take tours of Rome, or Athens and see where the monuments are. Many famous buildings are rendered as 3d structures. Street level view even lets you take tours of some of these areas from a visitors eye view - visit the Colosseum from the comfort your classroom!
For Science teachers I love the Sunlight feature, where you can view light/dark areas over time. Drag the slide to change the time and see how the area of light and dark moves. This is really nice for showing how we get night and day (use alongside a demo with a torch and a football/globe)
For some inspiration on how to use this feature here's an excellent idea from Tom Barretts blog. He used his Twitter network to tell his class where they were in the world. The students then had to find where they were using Google Earth and to then use the shadowed layer to find the length of the day at that point. This was a great way of making the search relevant since they were looking for places that real people had suggested.
As well as views of Earth, Google Earth also has a detailed map of Mars which can be explored, as well as a fully featured Sky mode which lets you explore the universe. Again it's fully searchable and perfect for Earth and Space or Our Place in the Universe areas of the curriculum.
Another new feature is Historical View which lets you view past images of an area, if they exist, to see what it would have looked like in the past. This works better in some areas than others and does depend on how many times that area has been photographed. For example the area where I live has been surveyed last year, and in 2005 so I can toggle between seeing how my house looked before and after I moved in ;)
A quick post about a free resource that will be of interest to anyone who likes to use quizzes as lesson starters or as a plenary.
Stu's Double Jeopardy is a free piece of software that will run on any computer and can be used with any IWB or even just with a projector. It allows you to build your own versions of the Jeopardy game show based on your own subject to use with your class. The game allows you to customise all the questions, and to have up to 6 teams playing at the same time.
You can use the built-in question editor, or even produce the questions in an Excel template and paste them into the question editor.
A really nice touch with the latest version is that you can even install the software onto a USB stick so you can play it on any computer just by plugging your USB stick into that machine. This is great for those of you teach in many different rooms - you dont have to install it on many different computers (or who have computers that are locked down by the IT technician)
Stu's Double Jeopardy looks like a really useful resource and again, like all my favourite resources it's free (but Stu does accept donations if you like it!)
You can get the latest version, and find out more about the software, here.
Yenka is a new resource from the people who produced Crocodile Clips. It's based on their Absorb range of online teaching materials that originally were released alongside Crocodile Physics and Chemistry.
My name is Danny Nicholson and I am a freelance educational consultant. My main speciality is the use of Interactive Whiteboards, but I am interested in lots of different bits of tech that are now being used in schools. Email me here
