An Old New Beginning… Week 1 Term 4 2014

Megan’s Present / Hand by Aeioux
Attribution-NonCommercial License

Right then…here are few websites and resources worth a look. They are all reasonably interactive and all pretty cool. Check them out and have a play.

Maths:

Number Cruncher http://sciencenetlinks.com/interactives/number.swf – Cool little flash based game that would work well on your SmartBoard pretty self explanatory.

Math Continuum http://www.learnalberta.ca/content/mec/html/index.html – Canadian Maths site with flash absed activities that could be used on your SmartBoard to reinforce certain skills.

Wolfram Demonstrations http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/index.html – Awesome Maths resources developed by the genuis’ at Wolfram – You will need to download the Wofram CDF player but it is well worth – most activities would work well on your SmartBoard

Music

iNudge http://www.inudge.net/ – Interactive music creator – recommend turning the volume down – could be good reward game.

Isle of Tune http://isleoftune.com/ – Interactive music creator – build a town add in houses, plants etc and drive a car around to create music – pretty easy and pretty cool – check out the examples.

Writing

Home of the Book Genome Project http://www.booklamp.org/ – Help you new books by comparing the content of the books themselves, similar to the way that Pandora.com matches music lovers to new music. Very cool site!

StoryJumper http://www.storyjumper.com/ – interactive book and story creation, would work well on your SmartBoard. Probably better suited to low level writers but looks very cool with some awesome results.

Mish Mash

A bit of a mish mash of resources here that other awesome educators have created and I am going to point you in the direction of…

Interesting Ways Series – (http://edte.ch/blog/interesting-ways/) created and facilitated by Tom Barrett. There is just about everything here from tips for classroom iPad implementation to tips for using Google Earth in class. Some absolutely awesome lesson ideas all tested and reccomended by other teachers.

101 Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers You Should Know About – (http://www.goedonline.com/101-web-tools-for-teachers) a post created by Erik Schreefel in Educational Technology, Web 2.0 Tools. Some of these tools are really great and are pretty easy to use in your class. Check out: Animoto is avery simple way to create visual presentations using your own photos – great way to show camp and trip photos. Prezi an alternative to Powerpoint and Keynote which is cloud based and allows you to zoom in and out of your presentation. Plus some of the other 99 tools suggested.

Six Great Ways to Publish Student Work – (http://historytech.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/tip-of-the-week-six-great-ways-to-publish-student-work/) from HistoryTech: Tip of the Week by glenw. Six very awesome Web 2.0 tools for showcasing student work online. Each of this tools could be played with in class and then used as a tool throughtout the year for project, publishing or portfolio like tasks.

5 Things I want my Teachers to know about me …

This post originates from a very talented educator who actually started me on the road to ‘geekness’. She introduced me the concept of developing a ‘Personal Learning Network’ of global educators to learn from and with to better my practice. Allanah King is based in Nelson and works both as a teacher of Year Four students and advises teachers and schools in practical implementation of IT within classroom and whole school programmes.

This post has featured on a number of other blogs (I’ll post some of the links here so you can have a look if your keen) and has fuelled some pretty powerful and rather cool discussion.

At the end of last year Allanah asked her class what 5 things they wanted their new teacher in Year Five to know about them. And the results were pretty neat. It would be interesting to see what your kids would write at the start of the year about what they want you to know about them.

One of awesome things about this I believe is all of the comments and subsequent discussions by other teachers based around ‘5 things I would want my teachers to know’… I would be very keen to know what you guys think ‘what are the five things that you wish your teachers knew about you’ and what do reakon are things that are important to our kids.

Here’s how I answered the question:

When I was a wee tacker I wish I had had the ability to let my teachers know…

1. If I have that slightly glazed eye look about me, but I’m not dribbling, then I am well aware of what is going on around me – I am just processing the information you have given me and am trying to work out how I can use it.

2. I love the past – civilizations, cultures, people and events that have shaped the world I live in. Supply me with little snippets of information and let me fill in the gaps and maybe even share the stuff I’ve found. Help me become an expert.

3. If I’m chatting to the people around me it might just mean that I’m talking about the same things you are – just in the language or context my friends and I relate to. Or I might just be chatting!

4. I respect you cause you are my teacher – valuing my input, being interested in who I am and where I come from and ‘liking me’ as a learner and a human being will maintain that respect…not…won’t.

5. Show me how important my classmates, me, my learning, your teaching and learning are to you and I will be prepared to follow you where ever you take me.

5 Part 2: Occasionally blow me away with some concept or idea so out there, so beyond my understanding that I want to find the answer or gain the understanding no matter how long it takes.

So this is the link to Allanah’s original post http://allanahk.edublogs.org/2012/01/28/what-i-want-my-teachers-to-know-about-me/

 

and here’s a couple of links to subsequent posts and discussions…

http://atthevirtualchalkface.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/what-id-want-my-teacher-to-know-about-me/

 

Apple Tips & Shortcuts…

Right this is probably one of the most useful pages I have seen in quite some time. DK (http://justadandak.com/who) posted a link on twitter to this the other day which was awesome. Some of the time saving shortcuts are awesome like command – delete and shift – command – delete to move stuff to trash and empty trash. Check out the other stuff on the page, there are some really great shortcuts here.

Mac OSX Keyboard Shortcuts http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Inspiration for Writing…

Sometimes thinking about a topic for personal writing can be a bit of a chore… but it can be made easier with some inspiration. Below are a couple of very cool websites that provide images that could make great writing inspiration. Hope they are of some use…

 

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/

Boston.com’s Photographic Section – New photos every week. Usually about something topical thats happening or has happened. Worth checking out first before showing the students as some images can be a little gory.

http://lightbox.time.com/2011/12/07/time-picks-the-top-10-photos-of-the-year/#1

The best images ranked or taken by Time Magazine. Again worth a look first.

http://newspaperblackout.com/

In a weird kind of way I guess this could serve as inspiration for writing or maybe just a cool way to present or start work.

 Just a couple of extras recently dicovered – Some more very cool images… but not subject or event/issue specific.

http://www.pxleyes.com/blog/2011/12/these-50-photos-will-blow-you-away/

http://www.pxleyes.com/blog/2011/12/50-more-photos-that-will-blow-your-mind/

 

 

Stuff for Maths

Just thought I’d post a couple of cool sites that relate to Maths this week.

 

https://www.xtramath.org/

The first one –  XTRAMaths is an American based online Maths tutor of sorts. Watch the videos on the home page and creat an account (its free) you can then creat accounts for kids so that log in and do the quizs. Would be really good for those kids who have low Number knowledge and need to work on the simple operations.

 

http://numberpicture.com/

The second one – NumberPicture is alittle more complex and is better suited to Stats. This site site allows you to choose form a variety of graph formats, enter your own data and an explanation and develop some very cool graphic represenations of your info. Heaps cooler looking than bar graphs. Checkout the example below. Could mean some pretty awesome graphs for Science and Maths Fair.

 

A must see video…

Having read all the tweets that came from Kevin Honeycutt’s keynote at Learning@School last year I couldn’t wait to see this video. It have been great to see his whole keynote but in itself this interview is a real eye opener to what could be in our classrooms.

Kevin Honeycutt outlines the key points from his Learning@School 2012 presentation in Hamilton, New Zealand. Kevin encourages teachers to become always-on learners, and he challenges educators to embrace new tools and tactics in their teaching and learning.

This video was filmed and produced by Core Education and was taken from EdTalks.org. Check out more of their EdTalks with a distinctively Kiwi education relevance at edtalks.org.

 

 

 

And so it begins…

Right then… part of my role at Highlands is to help facilitate the implementation of IT into teaching practice, and work with teachers so that they can better use IT to help make their jobs a little easier.

The aim then of this website is to post a link, resource, online tool, Web 2.0 App, or blogpost worth reading each week, that could be used in your classroom either by you and your students, just your students or just you.

The resources I put up here will have either come from the posts of other educators that I think are pretty cool or ‘Worth a Look’ or stuff that I’ve found and liked. Hopefully you’ll find some of the stuff in here useful and if not…