The Whiteboard Blog

Creative Commons in the Classroom

bogge1 — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:29:53 +0000

I’ve written about good sources of creative commons images and sounds before. It’s very important to be aware of the conditions behind using any resource found on the web. Students should be getting out of the habit of just finding images on a Google Image search and dumping them into their work.

Here’s a very good presentation from Jessica Coates on Slideshare which explains more.

Creative Commons in the Classroom

View more presentations from Jessicacoates.

I’ve written a guide to Creative Commons, which you can download here. I’ve also collated some links on Delicious which might be useful.

Educational Blogging Platforms Compared

dannynic — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:18:19 +0000

When I run my Blogging training days, we usually focus on getting an account with Wordpress or Edublogs. Both run off the same backend, but Edublogs is tailored more for educators.

If you are interested in finding out about all the different platforms that are available, then Dodie Ainslie has put together a great overview of the various options.

You can find it here: http://djainslietech.wikispaces.com/Blogging+Platforms

Take a look at the Smartboard resource pages too – some good links there.

If you do go with Wordpress or Edublogs – then there’s a guide I have written here that should help you get started, and a presentation about blogging in schools.

SumDog – numeracy games for KS2/KS3

bogge1 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:43:56 +0000

Sumdog is a fun website for numeracy from the people behind Crocodile Clips and Yenka / Absorb Science.

Sumdog’s free maths games are designed to improve numeracy in upper primary and lower secondary (students aged 9 to 13).

Covering 100 fine grained numeracy topics, ranging from simple addition to square roots, Sumdog adapts to the skill level of each student, helping them to work through each numeracy topic comprehensively

Students and teachers can play the games for free. You can register, which is free, or play as a guest.

Sumdog has 10 levels. Students start at level 1 and progress upwards. In every game Sumdog will recommend a level for students to try. The levels are split into topics of roughly equal difficulty. There are 100 topics in total. Students can choose a whole level or a specific topic to practise.

As students improve, Sumdog will gradually paint over the topic on the graffiti wall until it is clean. When all the topics in a level are clean, the level is completed.

It’s a fun free resource, and is well worth a visit.

http://www.sumdog.com/

12 Art Resources for your IWB

dannynic — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:35:56 +0000

There’s nothing better than playing with an art program on an interactive whitboard and literally drawing with your finger. It really works like a massive graphics tablet. And there are some excellent, free, online drawing packages. Some are quite simple, and others really mimic real-world art materials.

For the entire list, check out my Delicious page under Art + IWB, but here are a few of my favourites:

Sumopaint: This is an excellent resource – a free, fully featured paint package in your browser.Very impressive.

Sketchpad : Another paint package demonstrating the capability of the new HTML5 – this doesn’t use Flash, which is quite interesting. If that last sentence made no sense, don’t panic. Just have a play and paint something!

Livebrush is another free paint package, that should work well on an IWB. The size of the brush stroke depends on the speed you drag across the page, the faster you go the broader the brush stroke. Needs Adobe Air, so check you can install it at school.

Dreezle: A simple, java-based paint application.

Aviary : A fantastic site. Aviary contains a stack of great free tools, it even has a sound editor!

Sketch : The brush tool gives a really realistic effect and you can alter lots of different variables if you want – or just paint away!

Crayola Digi-Colour: Choose from a variety of Crayola products including crayons, pencils and stamps. If you want to do something more off-line then there are colouring pages to print out as well. The Crayola site also has a lot of information for teachers including lesson plans here.

Bomomo : I love this. It’s brilliant for making abstract drawings. Some of the pens are really fun. Quite hypnotic to watch

Imagination Cubed : This has been around a while, but it’s still really fun. You can even collaborate with friends on a joint drawing.

Splashup : An online paint package very similar to Sumo Paint. ( There’s also a Lite version too for netbooks and less powerful computers)

Mondrimat : Create blocks of colour in the style of Piet Mondrian.

This is Sand : Another odd, but very hypnotic application. Make pictures by piling up sand. Fun.

As a bonus, check out Artpad - a quick and simple paint package. Share and see what others have painted in the gallery.

Have fun!

Primary Science Keyword Bingo Game

Danny — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:24:04 +0000

Heres a link to a great lesson starter/plenary idea from the ICT Games website. Science Bingo. It uses the Primary Science vocab words from the Kent Scheme of work, which will suit most Primary Science classes.

Download a pack of Bingo cards to photocopy for the children – then use the Word generator to select words to cross off the bingo grid.

It’s a simple, fun idea to help with keyword recognition.

Thanks to Jason Dilling (@jasondilling) and James (@Wigglemyears) on Twitter for coming up with the resource!

NeoK12 Educational Videos

Danny — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 08:43:03 +0000

NeoK12 is a very useful site that catalogues thousands of educational videos for teachers and students to use. They are grouped by topic – with a particular emphasis on Science, but also Social Studies, Maths and Literacy.

There are also links to images and quizzes which could prove handy.

Many of the videos come from YouTube, so you will need to have YouTube access in your school to use them. The benefit of using them from here is that they videos have been vetted by teachers and approved for the site, and because they are embedded into the NeoK12 site there are no problems with comments or adverts that you would get with YouTube.

There’s no videos here that you can’t find elsewhere, but they have done some of the hard work in collating them into one place for easier use.

http://www.neok12.com/

The Great Wordle Crisis

Danny — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:26:15 +0000

I’ve mentioned before that I am a big fan of Wordle. It’s a fantastic tool for making word clouds – and as such can be used for text analysis (try it with some written work and see what words you over-use) or just for fun image creation.

There was a ripple of outrage yesterday on Twitter when it was discovered that Wordle had been taken down, apparently over a trademark infringement involving the Wordle name.

Luckily, after a brief outage, the site was back up and running yesterday evening, but this does demonstrate the need when planning to use any web tool in the classroom to have a “Plan B”. Just because a website was working when you planned the lesson, does not mean it will be working when you actually deliver it. Free web apps can be quite transient and may not always be there when you need them. ( I have also had a few issues in schools where the Wordle java code gets blocked, so an alternative is handy that actually works in that school)

I’m really hoping that the chap behind Wordle gets the trademark issue sorted, so that Wordle does not get threatened again. It’s good to have some alternatives bookmarked just in case though.

By way of an alternative – here are a selection of other Word-cloud generators – none are anywhere near as good as Wordle, but they might fill a gap should the site go down again.:

I’ve collated a list of these sites on Delicious here: http://delicious.com/dannynic/wordle. Some are better than others, but most don’t quite do what Wordle does so well.

Here are just a few ideas on how you could use Wordle in the classroom:

Use to introduce a topic – pupils could guess what they will be learning about.
Comparing different newspapers – look at the same story in a Broadsheet and a tabloid newspaper (website) and compare the wordle clouds produced – how do the words used differ?
Self-reflection on work – as Wordle makes a word larger the more frequently it is used, pupils will be able to see at a glance which words or phrases they are over-using. Are they using the word Nice or Good too often?
Use to analyse the content and gist a longer written text, especially with exam or higher level groups
To introduce new vocabulary or to memorise new vocabulary/vocabulary lists
Revision of key topics and vocabulary – pupils can create their own worldes or they can be given them to use
To give presentations without reading from a sheet and just using prompts
Encouraging creative writing from a selection of key words from a word cloud
See results of a class survey visually – maybe use an Etherpad to collect the text first, then paste into Wordle

Here are some more great ideas for using Wordle in the classroom

23 Ways to use Wordle in MFL – from Language Resources Blog

10 More ways to Use Wordle – from Wordle users group on Google

43 Interesting Ways to use Wordle – From Ideas to Inspire

Five reasons to use Wordle by Terry Freedman

How to Change the Default Font Style in Smart Notebook

Danny — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:41:30 +0000

I’ve had quite a few requests recently about how to change the default fonts in Smart Notebook. A lot of teachers do not like the font choices that you get by default and would either like to make the fonts larger, or use more school-friendly fonts like Sassoon Primary.

I’ve produced this quick helpsheet that should show the steps you need to do to change the default font options. Hopefully, if Smart Notebook is set up correctly, it will remember these changes for next time.

How to Change the Default Font Style in Smart Notebook

Of course, anyone changing the font to comic sans will be shot….

Science Storybooks

Danny — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:25:30 +0000

Just a quick post to flag up this fun little resource site for Science called Science Storybooks.

It contains a stack of Flash animations that can be used to introduce many different science concepts, some include songs that would provide a fun way to start a lesson.

The resources are completely free, and also contain links to lesson notes and other information. Well worth taking a look at.

Thanks to the iLearn Technology Blog for the heads-up on this resource.

Vancouver 2010 Photographs

Danny — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:07:07 +0000

I love Canada, I love the Olympics, and I love The Big Picture website. So when you get all three combined, it’s just fantastic

The Big Picture have produced 45 excellent photographs from week 1 of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

Some of these would be excellent to use in Science lessons to illustrate forces and friction, but also obvious links to PE.

Some of this images are just awesome, would make great discussion points when displayed on the IWB. Go take a look. If you like those, here are some from the Opening Ceremony too.

Part 2 will follow next week after the closing ceremony. Update – They’re now up.

Only one British medal so far, but we’re not greedy