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Inspired ICT

15 Jan

After the tribulations of the Gove announcement this week, I came across this great example of what students can really do with ICT with the guidance of an inspirational teacher.

She is an AS student at Wallace High School and is obviously very talented. The equipment used is a Wacom Bamboo tablet, along with Photoshop Elements that came with it and After Effects to compose the film. The background music really complements the work.

The technique is called rotoscoping and it takes a LOT of work. This one took around a thousand drawings to complete.

The Sketchbook from Wallace High on Vimeo.

 

 
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Posted in Animation, Education, Video editing

 

Teaching teachers

28 Oct

There has been plenty of efforts to create virtual environments for students. But what about making an environment where teachers can learn and practice the skills they need for the classroom?

 

Teaching teachers virtually

Enter an University of Central Florida project called TeachLivE™. This is a virtual class room in which a teacher can practice new skills. It is used by pre-service and in-service teachers in ten Universities across the United States.

“We developed a synergistic research agenda across the ten  universities, with a focus on supporting new and practicing teachers; using our “virtual classroom” to target effective teaching behaviors.  ”

A research project called ‘Measures of Effective Teaching’ supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is used to help create a template for the environment.

Maybe we will see it travel to the UK sometime.

 

 
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Posted in Education, Virtual & augmented reality

 

Using iPads and wireless in the classroom

20 Apr

Gradually, many schools are taking on board wireless technology. This may change the way students interact in the classroom and with each other.

Article here

Changes include

  • Portability: Instead of the traditional rows of students facing a whiteboard, wireless devices encourages the classroom to be more group orientated, with clusters of students carrying out work and research in small teams
  • Less paper: These devices can easily hold a complete set of e-Textbooks. This will cut down on storage, having tatty dog eared books to use and perhaps less printing
  • More convenient: Textbooks are heavy to carry, thus tablets will lighten the burden
  • Multi-purpose: A tablet machine can hold many useful applications, including e-reader, calculator, organiser and so on.
  • Multi-media: Creative applications include painting apps, video editing apps and so on. Thus offering a chance for classes to make exciting new ways of learning
  • Electronic marking and submission: Many schools now use electronic marking. So why not complete the whole workflow by having students submit their work wirelessly as well.

That is the theory. But how does it work out in practice? Well, have a look at this pdf article about how Broadclyst primary school has been using wireless technology including tablets.

 

 
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Posted in Uncategorized

 

Novel use of Google Apps in education

26 Mar

Many of us know about Google apps in terms of shared documents, spreadsheet, calendar, gmail and so on. But Google Apps goes much further than that in terms of what it can be used for in education. This presentation is put together by Google to show some interesting and unusual ideas

Presentation here

Google Apps for education

Features include

  • Built in Flash cards
  • Motion Graphs to show things changing over time
  • Specialised forms to be used for plenary creation
  • 66 interesting ways to use Google Forms
 
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Posted in Education

 

Time to retire IE6

09 Mar

Internet Explorer 6 is now ten years old and yet almost one in four of people using Internet Explorer are still using that version.

We read about exciting new technologies such as CSS3 with its gradient and shadow commands, HTML5 with its animation and video tags and yet many users cannot take advantage of them. Moreover, web designers keep having to compromise their designs just to render their pages in IE6.

Microsoft have put together a site called ‘The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown‘ site to try and encourage people to leave the ancient browser behind and start using the latest standards comliant IE9

IE6 countdown

We wish them all success in retiring the old browser.

 
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Posted in Internet, Web design

 

The Drama Button

22 Feb

Ok, this probably isn’t the most useful resource that we have brought to your attention.  But when you are having one of those teaching days that just goes from bad to worst and all you want to do is get your ‘wonderful’ year 9 group to be quiet, you might just find a use for this little tool.

Give it a go, it is bound to make you smile. 

 Click here to access The Drama Button

Thanks to Mark Clarkson for the heads up about this.

 
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Posted in Behaviour

 

The future of …. credit cards

20 Feb

Credit cards have been with us for decades now and we all know their deficiencies, such as losing one or having it stolen. But new technologies are offering alternatives.

Idea 1: “Computer on a card”. A company has put together a complete computer embedded in the card along with touch buttons on the surface. One card can act as a number of cards. You have to enter a pin every time you use it, so if it gets lost or stolen it is just a dead piece of plastic.

Idea 2: Smart phone adaptor. With this you plug in a small device into the smart phone that is able to act as a credit card.

Idea 3: Bling tag. This is an electronic tag with a social network aspect to it. Say a cafe is having a slow day and they want to attract some more custom. They go into their Bling facebook account and make a special offer active for the next two hours – say 50% off everything. Anyone linked to the facebook page will see the offer – customer wins with a bargain and the cafe wins by not having to advertise in the traditional way.

This could be used to prompt a discussion in the classroom about the future of banking, ecommerce and mobile payments or how social networking can be used to promote products.  Perhaps students could conduct their own research and find out how whether their friends and family would be prepared to use some of the new features.

 
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Posted in Banking, Impact of ICT, Mobile phones

 

Computers: From 1939 to 2010

16 Feb

Students are usually fascinated to see how computers have changed over just a few decades. 

It always amuses me to see their faces when I show them a picture of my very first computer, a BBC Micro, and tell them about the amazing new games I could play on it such as Pong and Space Invaders.  I was well ahead of my time back then, being the only person in our village to own a computer.  For a long time we were one of the most popular destinations for after school visits from my son’s friends.

However, if you ask students nowadays to tell you a bit about earlier computers then they will most probably shrug and get that familiar glazed look which tells you that they don’t have a clue what you are on about. 

Now they will have no excuses for the next time you ask because the people over at the techking site have put together an amazing infographic detailing the history of computers from 1939 all the way up to 2010. 

The infographic is broken down into decades and contains clear images, dates and a short text snippet about each type of computer.  It would look great split into the different decades, printed out perhaps on photographic paper and used as part of an informative classroom display.

Access the infographic from here

 
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Posted in Classroom displays, Hardware, Infographic

 

Search Google by reading level

15 Feb

When students use Google to search for information they probably find that many of their search results link to pages where the language is above their reading level and difficult to fully understand.

Did you know that you can use the advanced search feature in Google to either show the reading level of all search results i.e. basic, intermediate and advanced?

Alternatively, you can choose a specific reading level for the search results you would like shown i.e. you can choose to only show intermediate reading level results.

This is a really simple feature to use and we have created a step-by-step guide that can be printed in A4 and laminated for use as a reference source in the classroom.

Access the full sized A4 guide here

 
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Posted in Classroom displays, Search engines

 

Wonderwheel and teachmeet

13 Feb

This is something we picked up from one of the teachmeet events (TES Article).

(here is a recorded teachmeet video).

It is a Google feature that has been around since 2009 and yet we did not know about.

You know the situation – you ask a student to do some homework on a fairly generic subject  such as ‘computing’. So they go into Google and type in the search term ‘computing’.

Result: 149 million hits.

Now one option is to use the ‘Advanced’ feature to refine the result. But did you know about the ‘wonder wheel’?

Open Google with Firefox and enter the search term ‘computing’.  As well as the usual list of hits, notice the items on the left hand side that include the clip below

Click on the ‘Wonder Wheel’ option and a mind map type of graphic appears that shows related search results. The student can then click on the branches to find more specialised results. It certainly seems a more user-friendly way of searching than the l boolean and other filtering methods of Advanced search.

Here is a Wonder Wheel of computing

 
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Posted in Internet, Useful websites

 
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