TeacherLED resources

Thanks to Jim over at Teachers Love Smartboards for reminding me about the Teacher LED site.

If you haven't seen it before, there are some great Flash resources on there. Mainly for Numeracy, but also a great little scrollable world map for geography.

There's also a nice Flash version of the Blockbusters game show. Very nice, and more interactive than my static version. You need to read out the questions yourself - but you could just use the glossary from any textbook or a list of subject keywords. The quiz can be adapted for any subject you want and would make a great lesson starter or plenary.

It's a great little resource, and well worth a visit: http://www.teacherled.com/

Making Video Screen Shots

I've written about this before, but it's something that gets asked a lot when I am doing IWB training, so I thought it was worth flagging up again.

If you want to make screen grabs from some Windows Media videos, you may find you get a black box rather than the screen shot you were expecting. To make the computer render the video so that you can actually capture images from it, you need to make a quick change to the video player settings. Once done, you shouldn't need to change it again (hopefully).

I've produced a short worksheet which I have uploaded to Scribd, hope it's useful.

Changing Video Settings to Take Screen Shots

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Education Course Material iwb video iaw whiteb

You could also watch the video demonstration of this here.

Primary Science Lesson Starts

Just wanted to point you in the direction of a very nice video that's available on the Teacher's TV Website

It's aimed at Primary Science teachers, and gives 7 different lesson starters to use on your Interactive Whiteboard.

All the starters are in one file, so I would suggest making a note of the time that each clip starts (or download the timings file from the downloads page) so when you use it with your class you can jump to the required clip using the video player slider.

You can view the video here: http://www.teachers.tv/video/28260

There are also some associated documents to go with the video in the Downloads page.

There is also a similar video for Primary Maths, which you can find here: http://www.teachers.tv/video/25557 as well as some Primary Literacy Story Starts here: http://www.teachers.tv/video/23316

A few of my favourite things

Just jotting down my ideas for the mirandamod conference tonight. I plan on showing a few of my favourite tools, and probably the Flip video and USB tuner.

I don't think I'll fit it all into five minutes, but I'm going to list the sites I'd like to show below. One so I can find them later, and two for the benefit of anyone who's reading this after the conference. I have also tagged them as Mirandanet on my delicious stream.

Twitter

Qik - streaming video

Classtools.net

ToonDoo

Animoto

Timetube

Tag Galaxy

Zattoo

Compfight

Possibly Seesmic too!

Not sure how long this will work, but you can see the conference online here.

Flickr and Twitter Guides

I've been playing with lots of online tools recently, but the two that are my current favourites are Twitter and Flickr. I want to use this blog post to promote two great guides that fellow educators have put together for these tools.

I've been on Flickr for ages and it's a great way of sharing your photographs, and also finding great images from others.

Susie Vesper has put together an excellent guide to the main features of Flickr and how you can make good use of it in education. There's lots of ideas there to inspire you. You can read her guide here.

If you do get into Flickr, send me a Flickrmail. My flickr screen name is dannynic

Another tool I've been making use of in recent weeks is Twitter. Essentially Twitter is a micro-blogging tool, but it has become a thriving community of educators and web2.0 fans who are all sharing and swapping ideas with each other. I have lost track of the number of excellent websites I have found about because someone on Twitter posted that they'd been using it. It can be hard to keep up with all the chat, but it's something I dip in and out of when I get the time.

Twitter's been struggling a little recently as more and more people use it, but hopefully it will sort these load issues out soon.

If you would like to find out more, then Tom Barrett has written an excellent guide on using Twitter as a teaching and learning tool. It's a pretty comprehensive guide and well worth a visit. You can read it here.

If you do get into Twitter, get in touch. My twitter name is Dannynic. (like most of my screen names!)

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.

PowerPoint

Just a very quick post to point you towards an excellent article by Ewan McIntosh explaining some ways to improve the use of PowerPoint

http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2008/06/why-would-you-u.html

Some very good points there.

Class Tools

I may have mentioned Classtools.net before, but I've been using it a lot recently so it's worth another mention. There are lots of handy flash tools on this site, but these two are my favourites.

Countdown Timer

This is a cute little tool that allows you to set the class a time limit for a given task, and then count down the time left with some fun background music. There are 10 tunes included, ranging from a 30 second Countdown theme tune, 57 seconds Hawaii Five-0 or a 7 minute piece of Mozart. If you want you can even upload your own mp3 file to use instead.

This was a fun alternative to the built-in Promethean and Smart timers, and would also be very useful for users of other whiteboards who don't have access to a timer in their own software.




Name Picker

There are several different ways you can use the name picker, and they don't all involve names!

This tool lets you input a list of names/text and then go to either a fruit machine or typewriter view. Names are then picked at random.

I've used it when getting students up to speak for a presentation - giving me a random way of choosing the order. I've seen this used by Ewan McIntosh at TeachMeet in the same way. Clicking the "remove" button will take the chosen name out of the list so they do not appear twice.

It could be also used with keywords or a topic heading. In typewriter mode one word at a time will appear letter by letter (and they dont get to see the other words). Students could then have to give a definition of the word, or one student with their back to the board has to guess the word from the descriptions given by other students. There's many ways this tool could be used.

This can be run in full screen mode or embedded into your blog, and you can even save this to your computer to run offline.



There are many other tools on the classtools website -including Timelines, Venn Diagrams and Fishbone diagrams. It's well worth taking some time to look at them all and see which ones could be used well in your subject/year group.

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

Doctor Who Trailer Maker

Doctor Who has been a part of my life since I was a kid, hiding behind the sofa when the Daleks came on the screen. The "new" series is now on Season 4 and I've been really enjoying it so far, even if it does have that awful Tate lady (TATL) as an assistant.

The BBC have embraced a lot of the interactive features of the Internet, and their Doctor Who website is no exception.

The Comic Maker was pretty cool but I really like their Trailer Maker.

It allows you to make a 30 second trailer using clips, music and sound effects and then save your effort to share with others. It's great fun and has great potential for using with a class.

You can see my quick effort here. It's not much, but gives you an idea of what you can do with it.

I have a feeling the site won't be accessible outside the UK I'm afraid. But for UK teachers - get your class creating!

Magic Pen Game

No, not related to my earlier post about the Smart Magic Pen, but more related to my post about Phun the other week.

Thanks to Science Punk for linking to another fun little Real Physics application called Magic Pen.

Magic Pen is like Phun in that you use a crayon to draw objects that then behave on the screen as if they were real. Balls roll, oblongs topple down under gravity etc. This time, there's an actual objective. You need to get the little ball to the flag. You might need to just roll a ball into it to make it move, or you could build a more complex solution.

It's very neat, and would be great on an IWB as a lesson starter activity.

Play Magic Pen here: http://magic.pen.fizzlebot.com/

Animoto Education Program

I've talked about Animoto before in the last few months(here and here), and I think it's a great way of producing professional-looking slideshows.

Even better now is the announcement of an Animoto Education Program. This is great news and means that educators can use Animoto with their classes for free!

Contact Rebecca at Animoto via the address on this page to find out more.

In Plain English

Here are some great videos to watch because a) they use plain English and b) I love the clean presentation style. They cover some of the new Web 2.0 tools that have really enhanced the way people use the internet in the last few years.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English



Podcasting in Plain English



RSS in Plain English


You can find all their videos, covering Twitter, Social Networking, Photo Sharing and, erm.. Zombies on YouTube here. Or go to the CommonCraft site to download high res versions to use elsewhere.

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.

Download YouTube Video

I've given a few links before to sites that allow you to download YouTube videos.

Well now I have another one to add to the list. This Script can be added to the toolbar of the Firefox web browser. When you see a video you want to save, click the button and then the page changes to allow you to save the file as an .mp4 video file.

All the instructions are on the page and it seems relatively straightforward. The thing to remember is to change the filename from .htm to .mp4 when you save it.

Obviously it goes without saying that you need to be aware that you may be infringing copyright by storing these clips - but this does provide a good workaround for those teachers who want to show a YouTube clip in a lesson where the school have blocked YouTube access.