Links Roundup

A quick round up of some of the sites I've added to my del.icio.us feed this week

Adobe Photoshop Express
An free online photo editor from Adobe.
https://www.photoshop.com/express/

Timelines
Televised history documentaries for free on the web.
http://www.timelines.tv/

Viscosity:
Create Abstract art
http://windowseat.ca/viscosity/create.php

NCEF Resource List
NCEF's resource list of links, books, and journal articles on the educational use of interactive whiteboard
http://www.schoolfacilities.net/rl/interactive_whiteboards.cfm

World Wide Telescope
Virtual Telescope. Not yet launched totally, but promises to be a very useful resource when it does.
http://worldwidetelescope.org/

Anibooms Shapeshifter
Make simple animations
http://www.aniboom.com/ShapeshifterAnimachine.aspx

Footprints Science Animations
Some good free examples here. Buy the rest if you like them.
http://www.footprints-science.co.uk/

Getting Started with Smart 9.5
Excellent manual for Smart 9.5 users produced by Oxfordshire County Council

Whiteboard training day - links

A big thanks to those who came to London today for the Lighthouse IWB training day. It was good to meet you all. I hope some of you are now checking out this blog.

I'll put in this post some of the links that cropped up on the day.

How to save YouTube videos
A good guide on how to do it from Teachers Love Smartboards
Video Downloader for FireFox
ZamZar.com

Saving Flash Animations
SWF catcher for Firefox
Flash Saver for Firefox
Flash Saver for Internet Explorer

Smartboard Training Materials
Printable Materials and Two Minute Tutorials here.

Promethean Training Materials
Training Manuals from Promethean
Top tips on using Promethean boards

Getting Smart Notebook 9.7
Smart Download Page

Getting ActivStudio 3
Guide on how to get it

Health and Safety Guidance
Links to Becta and HSE

IWB Links
My del.icio.us links for whiteboards

Thanks again for attending the day. And please get in touch if you have any other questions about your boards that you think of in the weeks to come.

Friday Links Fun

A couple of quick links for a Friday.

Firstly - if you haven't already gone there, check out Teachers Love Smartboards. James has some great posts about using Smartboards in the classroom. He also posts links to some excellent websites that can be used on any board, not just Smartboards. One of my favourites from his recent posts has been this link to a great animation tool called Kerpoof! It's well worth a visit.

Also, via the TES forum I found a link to a great resource for secondary Science called Freezeray. The site has plenty of interactive activities that cover various aspects of Biology, Chemistry and Physics and would be great for some extra reinforcement during a lesson. Again, since they are written in Flash they will work on any IWB.

The BBC have produced a great site to accompany a forthcoming TV show called The Brainbox Challenge. Plenty of interactive Flash games that will work well on any IWB.

For an online Brainstorm tool, check out Bubbl.us this will allow you to create brainstorms/mind maps/concept maps on your IWB. If you register you can save and recall previous diagrams and best of all, its all free!

And finally - for Geography teachers, Oxfam have an education area on their website containing the marvellous Mapping Our World resource. This resource works with maps and globes to transform pupils’ understanding of the world it allows pupils to flatten a globe, turn a map into a globe, and merge different map projections. It's suitable for students age 8-14 (KS2/KS3). Mapping Our World has won several awards, and it's not hard to see why.

Three Quick Links

I'm full of cold and losing my voice here. So just a quick post today.

Three quick links that I should have mentioned earlier, all of which have some good advice and ideas for using the IWB in the classroom.

1. The Smartboard FAQ written by Jim Birney

2. 50 Things to do with an Interactive Whiteboard

3. The Busy Teachers Guide to Interactive Whiteboards

OK, back to bed and dosing myself up with Lemsip and Strepsils....

Art Attack

The other day James, over at Teachers Love Smart Boards, linked to a great online drawing package called Imagination Cubed. Basically its a drawing program that runs in your browser. This is great as it can be used on any brand of IWB irrespective of the software you use on your board.

I'm a scientist, not an artist but I've always enjoyed using art packages on the IWB. I used to play with packages like Painter and Photoshop. Drawing with a mouse, or even a graphics tablet, is a real pain and it is so much easier to be able to paint with my fingers! After all an IWB is only really a HUGE graphics tablet!

A quick trawl around the web led me to a few other interesting drawing packages. There are a lot of them out there covering a range of painting styles. And the best thing is they are free! I love Photoshop but it is rather pricey!

A really nice one is Brushter, which is an abstract painting package. You can choose from a wide range of brush styles and different paint effects. Autocolour chooses a different colour paint each time, which should sound annoying but actually can give a nice abstract effect. You can even click an Auto button and have Brushter generate an abstract image on its own while you watch! Here's a little something I knocked up:

Another one I quite liked is ArtPad. It's much simpler than Brushter and only gives one style of paintbrush. You can choose colours, size and opacity though. Like Imagination cubed you can replay your painting from start to finish.

Finally, there is the much simpler online Colouring-in pages at TheKidszPage.com. You can choose from a range of different line drawings to then colour in. Again this is not as powerful as the Brushter one, but foundation pupils will love colouring in the pictures with their fingers!

Interesting Sites

I've been going through my old bookmarks and been updating my del.icio.us list with many of these sites. I've been making a list for my Science ITT students by tagging them with PGCE, but any sites that are good for Interactive Whiteboards have been tagged with IWB. The IWB list will also appear to the right of this blog. I like the idea of del.icio.us since it makes sharing addresses of good sites really easy. Given the fluid nature of the Internet its much easier to maintain a dynamic list of addresses than just give out printed pieces of paper which very quickly get out of date or are missing new additions.

There are quite a few sites that I've added that are also worth a mention here.

One good site is ICT Games, which has many interactive flash games for Numeracy lessons. Since they are in Flash they can be used on any interactive whiteboard, or even used just with a projector.

An old favourite of mine is the Gorilla game. Hurl bananas at your opponents gorilla before he gets you!

For Science, there is a really nice free Diagram maker provided by the Association for Science Education. In addition Chemistry Diagrams gives a wide selection of clip art that can be captured and put onto your IWB presentations. Some nice animations too.

I'd also like to put in a plug for a website by a colleague of mine. Ros Milner has produced an excellent website for Art teachers called the Virtual Artroom. There are resources that cover the whole range of art teaching, but the Interactive Whiteboard area is well worth a visit to take a look at the case studies she's written.