Awen Media

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.

You can access the free resources here.

Free Teaching Resources

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.

Teachable

When I went to the ASE conference in January I was given a demonstration of an excellent website called Teachable.

Teachable.net is a high quality resource sharing website for teachers, where you can browse, download and adapt Powerpoints, worksheets and other interactive material for your class. All the files are contributed by other teachers, and have been quality-checked and tagged under easy-to-find categories.

There are over 1000 different lessons to download, ranging from high impact KS3 starters, to in-depth interactive A-level worksheets.

Unlike some other sites, Teachable is not free. Access costs from just £15 for a 10 file bundle, or there is a special offer for schools for access up to 400 files and get some training bundled for free. Charging does mean they can employ people to check the quality of the uploaded resources, which is fair enough.

Alternatively if teachers submit their own resources to the site they can get credits which they can spend on download other resources. And if your resources sell to other teachers then you will get a cut of the proceeds as well. So there is a benefit to sharing your materials with the world! Here's a list of the types of resources they are looking for.

You can preview everything before you download the full version, and when you do download the full version they grant you a Creative Commons license the right to copy and share the resource (for educational use).

At present the site deals mainly in PowerPoints and Word files. There's no facility to upload Smart Notebook or Promethean files. I discussed this with the representatives of Teachable at the time and they say they've had no call for this facility yet. Teachers are sticking with PowerPoint. While a lot of the powerpoints I saw were interactive with the use of Macros and suchlike, this did seem like an opportunity missed.

So, if you do have any high quality Smart Notebook files or Promethean flipcharts then I suggest you get in touch with Teachable to create some demand. In the meantime check out the bank of resources that are already there and perhaps share some of your good work too.

Teachable also runs a cool blog that is also worth adding to your RSS reader. From a post recently here are 10 Top Physics Videos. Well worth a look.

Bomomo

I'm always a fan of online paint packages, especially when they try to be a little different than the standard painting tools. Bomomo is an interesting way of making abstract pictures. The various tools use moving pens that follow roughly where you are clicking, but which move around that point in different ways, and with changing colours.


That's a really bad way of describing it, but have a play and you'll get the idea: http://bomomo.com/

Jeopardy

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.

http://jeopardygame.wordpress.com/

Right, I'm off to BETT. Hoping to report on some nice new stuff when I get back.

Halloween update

As a follow-on from the Halloween post, I got a comment from a chap from TeqSmart promoting their halloween word bucket for Smartboards. It's a flash game similar to the Lesson Toolkit which if you open it will put itself straight into your My Content area.

Taking a look around the rest of the site, there are some useful resources for Smart Notebook users to download. It's well worth taking a look at the site; http://community.teqsmart.org/download.php

Oh and nothing to do with whiteboards, although personally I think it's a nice scary thing for halloween, check out http://www.palinaspresident.us/ :)

Crickweb

Here's a great site that all primary/elementary teachers who use interactive whiteboards should have bookmarked.

A former colleague of mine, Dan Bunker, has produced a fantastic library of Flash resources for many curriculum subjects plus some generic fun Flash games. There's over 160 resources on the site available to use.

There are also 16 Promethean flipchart files that ActivPrimary users can download and use on their whiteboard.

There are resources for Early Years classes as well as Key stages 1 and 2.

I thoroughly recommend the Crickweb site, there's certainly a lot of resources there and you should find plenty of things that you could use as lesson starters or as part of a plenary.

Promethean moves into a new orbit

Promethean has launched an enhanced version of its online teaching community, Promethean Planet. The site has been transformed to offer improved functionality and content.

A 'best practice' section is just one of new additions to the teaching community, which offers advice from top educationalists on implementing interactive technologies in the classroom. In addition, the new version of Promethean Planet provides improved search facilities, a dedicated 'Activtips' area containing bite-sized clips of popular software functions, as well as a new 'theme' section, which features free downloadable resources on current topics and events.

If your school is a Promethean school then a visit to Promethean Planet is essential.

Flip Video Test

Hurrah. The postman has just arrived with my Flip Video I blogged about a few weeks back.

First impressions. It looks good. Is a little bigger than I imagined, slightly larger than my digital camera and my N95. But it feels quite sturdy and I'd be happy to put this in the hands of students to film stuff with.

Only gripe is that I'd like it to have a lens cover perhaps. It takes regular batteries rather than has its own rechargeable battery like my camera does. I'll reserve judgement on that until I've seen how long it goes on a single pair of Duracells.







Here's a test video, and another on my N95 to compare. I actually think the quality is slightly better on the flip video, but that may just be the way flickr processes mp4 files.

Flip Video Test:




N95 Test:

Judge for yourself!

Personally, I think the Flip video is great to put into the hands of students. The N95 is for me to use for those moments when I want to take photos or video - it means I always have access to a good quality camera. But I wouldn't want to give my phone to anyone else to use.

At £99 the Flip Video is pretty good value, and I could easily see a few of these being bought so several groups could use them at the same time.

Digital Blue Movie Cameras - your days are well and truly numbered. (although the choice of name has always amused me!)

update: other reviews of the flip video on Terry Freedmans blog, on Joe Dales blog and on Mark Warners blog.

Electricity and Circuits Ks2

Here are some handy links for teaching Primary Electricity on an IWB

This is something I haven't seen before. Looks quite fun

The Blobz Guide to Circuits

I used to use a great piece of free software called Crocodile Elementary, from Crocodile Clips. It seemed to have gone but I think I've found it again. It's been rebranded as Yenka Basic Circuits, and you can download it from the Yenka website here.

From the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/scienceclips/ages/6_7/electricity.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/science/activities/conductors.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/science/activities/changing_circuits.shtml

Other Links

Make an Electric Circuit Online

BBC Learning Zone - Electricity Videos

PhET Circuit Builder

Cleo Circuit World

For a quick 10 minute preview, that explains some aspects of circuits. Go to Furry Elephant, and choose series or parallel circuits. It literally only allows you 10 minutes though.

Link to other Links Pages

E=TC3 6G Changing Circuits Page

E=TC3 4f Circuits and Conductors Page

TopicBox - Electricity

TeacherLED

Here's a nice site for teachers with lots of Flash resources to use on your Interactive Whiteboard.

They are produced by a classroom teacher, and focus mainly on Primary Maths resources at present. It's well worth a visit.

The address is http://www.teacherled.com/

Smart Lesson Toolkit

A while back I wrote about the beta version of the Smart Lesson Activity Toolkit, which was a fantastic way of adding interactive elements to your Smart Notebook page.

Well, with the release of Smart Notebook 10, the full version of the Lesson Activity Toolkit has been released.

If you don't yet want to upgrade to version 10, but want the new Lesson Toolkit, then you can download it separately via this page. Installation instructions can be found there too as well as some videos on how to get the most out of it.

Science Notebook Files

Two years ago I produced a pack of Smart Notebook files for Steljes, the distributors of Smartboards over here in the UK. They formed part of a teachers pack that was distributed to schools around the UK.

The files were also available via the Steljes Software site. For now, that site is no longer up, and the files are no longer available online.

I have copied the files onto my Think Bank website so that Smartboard users can still access them. Each file has a corresponding teachers' guide in pdf format.

The six lesson packs cover the following topics:

• The Blast Furnace (KS4)
• Cells (KS3)
• Forces (KS3)
• Metals (Ks3)
• Muscles and Joints (KS4)
• Reflection and Refraction (KS4)

To download the files, and the corresponding teachers guide, click here.

Yenka Science and Maths Resources

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.

The whole library is going to be a subscription service, but on release they have produced 700 resources which can be used free-of charge.

These resources cover aspects of science and maths and should work very well on an interactive whiteboard. Well worth a visit.

Yenka via kwout

Heart Animation

As a former Biology teacher I am always interested in nice animations that can be used to demonstrate biological processes.

Thanks to Science Video Resources for posting this article about a nice heart animation. You can see the animation here.

Looking at the site that hosted this animation, I tracked back to the main teaching resources page. It's worth taking a look at that too since there are links to some other interesting Biology animations and movies such as Mitosis and meiosis.

On a related note, Science Video Resources also posted another link to a resource that shows circulation in different vertebrates, that is also quite interesting.

Weather Kit

A quick post from the ASE conference to take advantage of the free internet in my hotel room.

I saw quite a lot of "interactive resources" today, but one resource I really liked was the Interactive Weather Presenting Kit from the Met Office.

It's not online, you need the CD-ROM. But you can apply for your own copy of the CD via the Met Office website.

This highly package is designed to consolidate weather and climate throughout Key Stages 2-4, and provides an ideal opportunity for the use of ICT in Geography. and Science. It uses Microsoft PowerPoint and comes with a range of master slides, four weather symbols sets, an image library and links to current weather data.

Just visit http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/education/resources/interactive_kit.html and fill in the form to get your own copy sent to you.

Clipbank

As well as being an Interactive Whiteboard trainer for Smart/Steljes I also train for other educational companies. One of those is Espresso, which for those that don't know is an excellent library of video clips, news articles and Flash activities for Primary Schools. I have been training for them for about 18months and I love the product. The quality of the videos is very good and Espresso quite deservedly won a BAFTA last month.

So I was very interested to see their secondary product, Clipbank, today at a session designed to get us up to speed with the product to be able to deliver training to schools next year as they buy into it.

Espresso acquired Channel 4 Learning earlier in the year, and Clipbank was one of the products they inherited. They've spent a lot of time tweaking the product to be delivered on a server in-school in the same way as Espresso and the new-look version will be on-show at Bett next month.

Like Espresso you get a very simple user-interface that gives easy access to a wealth of video clips (currently over 2000 clips) for 8 subjects. The quality of the clips is excellent, as you would expect for a company with their media experience.

The potential for using resources like Espresso and Clipbank on the IWB is huge. It means teachers can use short video clips to introduce a lesson or as a way of summarising the main points. Whiteboard tools such as the camera can be used to grab screenshots from the video and bring into the IWB software for annotation. A sequence of screenshots could even be taken and then used as a sequencing activity.

So a great resource, and I look forward to getting stuck in delivering training in Clipbank next year.

The other excitement from the day came from the fact that Espresso headquarters is at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. This is also a working TV studio where the likes of Doctor Who and TFI Friday were filmed. Today they just happened to be filming the Top of the Pops Xmas Special. Apparently the likes of Girls Aloud and the Kaiser Chiefs were in the building. There were huge bouncers on the door and paparazzi hanging around outside. I did see quite a few hairy types carrying guitars and stuff wandering around the canteen but if they were famous I didn't recognise them. It is definitely a sign that I am getting old(er) in that I wouldn't recognise a Kaiser Chief if it came up and kicked me in the backside.... I know their songs but couldn't point one out in a line up.

The Proclaimers were also there apparently, and I'd have much more chance of spotting them, had I managed to see one.

But I didn't. Which was a shame.

Whiteboards on Teachers TV

If you haven't already been there, you can access videos from Teachers TV via the magic of the Internet. I must admit it is somewhere I keep forgetting to access but it has a wealth of ideas for teachers.

If you do a search for Whiteboards you will get a whole host of programmes that have been produced to show good practice for using Interactive Whiteboards in the classroom for a range of subjects.

For example here is a 15 minute video that gives you some Top Tips for using an interactive whiteboard.

Not all of the videos on Teachers TV are available to visitors outside the UK due to copyright issues, but hopefully there is still enough there for overseas visitors to see how we are using IWB's over here.