Teaching and Learning at KHCTC
I’ve had a little play with Video Spin today, it is a free slim down version of Pinnacle. Much easier to use than Windows Movie Maker, but less presentation tools, there is an option for upgrades. The interesting utility is the range of export formats, flash, Real Player, wmv, ipod and Sony psp. The last two formats might be particularly useful for student revision videos. The programme will even upload your video straight to sharing sites, such as You Tube.
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Thanks to the individuals 103 individuals that have downloaded the Cyclone Sidr resources, a special thanks to those that have said ‘thanks’ and Alan for his efforts in advertising them over the last week. I will leave them for another week.
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As part of my International study visit to Bangladesh, one of my targets was to produce an educational resource. This is now complete.
The resource is based on Cyclone Sidr and is aimed at Key Stage 3, it consists of six lessons and forms a complete case study.
Continue reading ‘For teachers: Cyclone Sidr resource’
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As reported on the B.B.C. , Google Earth now allows you to view the night sky from your position on the Earth, it requires an update, perhaps this would be useful to our science colleagues? I had a good exploration of the sky.
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Inspired by Noel Jenkins, I’ve been having a play with Google Maps for a couple of projects I want to work on over the coming year. The maps are now embeddable, you can add images and videos as well. Here is an example of a Berlin walk from the MFL-Humanities visit, including a video from student blogger Stringy, it took me around twenty minutes. Direct link.
View Larger Map
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I’ve been having a play with Animoto this evening, it allows you to produce impressive looking videos of your images. You only upload images and if you wish music, the website does all the hard work mixing the final product. I uploaded from my flickr account and used the music available. Short movies are free. This video shows images from our Japanese Exchange.
Hat-tip Justin Medved
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Received an emailed from Is Allen, communications coordinator at Oxfam .
Oxfam has three new education resources available for teachers to tackle issues that are in the news.
FREE ONLINE NOW!
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
Mid-Point Poster Competition Make posters - win prizes!
Schools are invited to take part in our MDGs mid-point poster competition and win books, a poster set, and a visit to Oxfam HQ in Oxford! Use our great resources about the MDGs to help pupils design their own posters encouraging world leaders to work harder to meet the MDG targets to halve poverty by 2015.
If you or your pupils were involved in Make Poverty History and want to know how world leaders are doing on keeping their promises to reduce debt, make trade fair, and increase aid, these resources will help you. Link your teaching to the current G8 summit, taking place on June 6th, and explore the issues behind the headlines.
AVAILABLE FROM FRIDAY 1st JUNE
Climate change ‘Summer Week’ activities.
Stuck for something to keep your pupils interested after SATs? Our Summer Week activity Climate Chaos: Exploring the Human Cost of Climate Change is here to help. Bring this hugely important global issue to life using our series of lesson plans that are designed to work as a week of cross-curricular themed activities, but can also be used separately.
Aimed at 9-11 year olds, Climate Chaos investigates the causes of climate change, the impacts - particularly on those in developing countries, and how young people’s own choices can make a difference.
Be the first to find out about new teaching resources from Oxfam - sign up to our termly e-newsletter.
Let me know if you use any of these…
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I’ve enjoyed playing with Picture Dots today, basically an online website that allows you to produce your own dot to dot puzzles. It’s easy to use and when finished you can download a PDF of your creation. Here’s an example of one I created. Which country is this?
How could be use this? It could make a fun little starter, I’ve copied my image and pasted it into PowerPoint, a kind of mystery starter for a country study, a student could come up to the IWB and solve it, alternatively they might like a fun little exercise for revising diagrams. How about getting students to create them?
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Rob has just finished a brilliant mini-unit on Israel for us, his first task for students is a jigsaw puzzle of the main geographical features of the country. He has used a piece of freeware called Formulator Tarsia, from the Hermitech Laboratory, originally designed to create maths problems, but it has a number of cross-curricular applications.
Once downloaded and installed, it is relatively simple to use, it took me about twenty minutes to get the hang of it, you can choose from three types of puzzle, jigsaw, dominoes and card.
When you have chosen your puzzle type, you can type in the contents for your puzzle, this is in the input screen, when you have completed one field, click on the next number in the sidebar and a new input field will appear.
You can check your puzzle contents by clicking the table tab at the bottom of the screen.
Clicking on the output tab will reveal the puzzle that students will be given, of course, you could cut these up before the lesson, but the puzzle will already be unsorted.
Clicking on the solution tab will reveal the solution to your puzzle; particularly useful if you don’t want to solve it yourself, or want to provide students who are struggling with the finished answer.
You can print off the pages, with the exception of the input page, I haven’t got a printer so I use Primo PDF to print to a PDF file , this means I can print it later, as well as saving an electronic copy in this format.
You can save your puzzle by pressing the disc icon, but you will not be able to open these on a College computer, this file will only be recognised by the Tarsia programme, hence the need to print a copy.
This is an example of a parquet jigsaw of 12 pieces that I produced on European capitals, of course this is the solution!
What I really like about the programme is that you can insert images, here is an example of an 8 piece dominoes activity solution, that I produced using Ordnance Survey map symbols.
To insert images, in the input screen, click on the image icon at the top of the screen. The image is automatically resized for the puzzle, so you need to think carefully about the quality of the image you use.
I think this has legs, it could be used to produce simple a starter or plenary exercise, alternatively a more complex puzzle could be produced as a mini-topic review.
Let me know what you think…
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Thanks to Helen, for directing me to the Ethnic Minority Attainment website, a great wealth of practical information here, including a developing section of resources for different subjects.
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