Great Fake Websites to Help Teach Students About Digital Literacy
A lot of us take anything they read on the internet at face value. A simple Google search brings us the correct answer to any question we have. Or does it? An internet search might be a good place to start to find out about something, but we shouldn’t just trust the first website result we find. This is especially true when using the internet for research with students. How can you teach them digital literacy and critical...
Pobble 365 – A Photo a Day to Inspire Creativity
Pobble 365 provides you with an engaging photo every day to inspire creativity in your classroom. Every day, you can find an interesting picture to spark a lesson. Scroll down to find additional writing prompts and philosophical questions that you can use with your students on your interactive whiteboard or printed out from the provided PDF file. There’s a calendar so you can explore past images too. Use Pobble365 as a story...
Exploring the Universe in No Man’s Sky
As you may have noticed from the lack of blogposts, I’m having a bit of summer downtime. And inbetween long bouts of sitting in front of the Olympics (go Team GB!) I’ve spent the last week exploring the universe in No Man’s Sky. No Man’s Sky is a new game for PC and PS4. In it you take the role of a nameless space traveller, zooming around the universe. The game is huge, there are over 18 quintillion planets...
Little Alchemy : A fun little problem solving game
Little Alchemy is a curious little game that invites you to experiment and explore. You start with 4 basic “elements” – air, earth, fire and water, and mix these together to find interesting and surprising combinations. For example earth plus air produces dust. Earth and Fire makes lava. Lava plus air makes stone, and so on. There are over 500 elements to discover. I’ve been playing for a few hours and am on...
Talk for Writing in the Early Years : Pie Corbett and Julia Strong
Pie Corbett is a trainer, poet and author of over 250 books, including the bestselling Jumpstart!: Literacy and Story Ideas iPad app. A former head teacher, lecturer and English Inspector, he is known for developing the transformational ‘Talk for Writing’ approach. Storytelling is central to Pie Corbett’s ground-breaking Talk for Writing approach, and has already been used successfully by thousands of schools nationwide....
Karaoke Learning with The Literacy Jukebox iPad App
Here’s a very different idea for an iPad app from Mr A, Mr C and Mr D Present. The Literacy Jukebox app is new resource which uses catchy and fun songs to help support the teaching and learning of literacy in the curriculum. Each song has been written and recorded by primary school teachers Mr A, Mr C and Mr D. Their aim is to engage and motivate children in learning key literacy concepts through their passion for alternative...
App-vent Day 20 : Help Children Read with Our Story
Our Story has been developed by child psychologists and other specialists at The Open University to enable young children to take part in fun games which can help develop interests and skills that will be relevant to them when they start to read. This app allows you or the children to create simple stories. You can create stories from your own photographs as well as include video recordings. Photos can be imported from the camera roll...
Night Zookeeper Classroom – Storytelling and Writing Lesson Resources
Night Zookeeper Classroom is a new website designed for teachers that are looking to inspire and motivate their students using storytelling and technology in an incredibly straight-forward manner. Night Zookeeper resources have been used by teachers to inspire children to produce their best writing. They have been shown to raise the level of engagement in even the most reluctant of writers. In the Night Zookeeper Classroom, the magic...
Room Recess : Educational Games for Primary Numeracy and Literacy
RoomRecess is a free website which provides flash-based games for Primary/Elementary age children. RoomRecess.com was developed entirely by an elementary school teacher with the goal of reinforcing fundamental learning concepts in math, reading, spelling, language arts, and basic problem solving. The games are fun and engaging. Although I wish there was a way of turning off the rather annoying music! A full-screen option would also be...
The Star Wars Crawl Creator
Here’s a different way to present your lesson objectives. The Star Wars Crawl Creator lets you turn any piece of text into the scrolling text seen at the opening of the Star Wars movies. Simply enter your text, then hit preview to see your text, complete with the famous theme tune. The site provides an embed code and a direct link so you can access your crawl in the future, or embed it into a blog or other website. (Update...
Collins Big Cat Story Creator Apps for iPad
The Collins Big Cat Series is a popular reading scheme used by over 9000 UK primary schools, as well as English-speaking schools all over the world. The books are now available as award-winning iPad apps, produced by the wonderful people at Shoofly Publishing. These apps provide a great way to develop essential literacy skills and transfer good reading to great writing. They recently won a Bett Award for Primary Digital Content. The...
Teach Your Monster to Read with this great Phonics Website
Teach your Monster to Read: First Steps is a new, free game to help children practise the first steps of reading with fun phonics games.. The site combines fun games with essential learning. The game is built on the principles of synthetic phonics and follows the teaching sequence of the Letters and Sounds programme. It has been assessed by reading experts at the University of Roehampton. It’s a fun looking site with some lovely...