Provides practical ideas for using ICT in the classroom. The website is accompanied by the book Innovate with ICT: enhancing learning across the curriculum, as well as a series of interactive tutorials on how to create resources with many popular software e.g. Movie Maker, Adobe Flash and PowerPoint.
Showing posts with label innovate in teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label innovate in teaching. Show all posts
The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths...What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?
Read interesting post by middleclassgirl hereabout using Second Life in the classroom. Look forward to seeing where she'll take it. I will certainly be checking back often.
We just uploaded a new tutorial on how to use Adobe Flash to create your own Interactive Diagrams. Please visit the site to find out how to make your own diagrams which you can use with students.
Just updated Staffroomproject with a bunch of the resources mentioned in the book. Feel free to download them and use them with your classes - drop us a line to say what you think of them and the website : )
Flip Video Camera is quite possibly the most convenient mini camcorder available today. I have just bought one and the quality is good, sounds great and ridiculously easy to use!
Blurb:
* Simple to use, pocket-sized camcorder with one-touch recording and digital zoom * Holds 60 minutes of full VGA-quality video on 2GB of built-in memory; no tapes or additional memory cards required * Convenient USB arm plugs directly into your computer for easy viewing and sharing * Built-in software lets you easily e-mail videos, upload to YouTube and MySpace, and capture still photos from video * Watch videos instantly on TV with included cable
Grab your GPS and get out of the car. Look at it. It still knows where you are, right? Walk to the end of the parking lot. When you get there — instead of Turn left or Turn right — you'll discover a whole new dimension to reality.
Mediascapes are rich in interactivity — full of sound and music, images and text, videos and animation, narrative and dialog, all embedded in the space where you’re standing.
Mediascapes offers a free service where users can create an added experience to GPS e.g. if you are visiting a historic site with your students, switch on the GPS and launch your Mediascape to see film footage and listen to music, poetry and narration about what happened there.
I just came across a website called Mobile Study where you can create quizzes for your students which they can download and install on their mobiles. I am still somewhat unsure about the some of the security elements, but will report back as soon as I know. You can also embed the quizzes on blogs etc using their widget. Looks very promising!
Drag and Drop tasks are fairly simple to create but can become powerful teaching aids if planned carefully. Thinking Skills Mysteries, matching tasks as well as more complex teaching ideas can easily be produced using this Adobe Flash tutorial.
Gimmicky? Perhaps, but at the same time this is also an opportunity to move away from the iPod Zombies (Neal!). Podcasting is useful and hopefully these examples will show you how simple they are to use with the help of online tools and how effective they can be to use with students.
How to use Podcasting and RSS
We will post a mini step-by-step tutorial later but for now watch these brilliant videos by Commoncraft:
and What is RSS?
Gcast.com
You have probably gathered that podasting is more than simply creating an MP3 file and uploading it online; that it enables you to set a channel using RSS to share your creations to anyone that subscribes and that they will receive all the updates automatically when they connect. Gcast.com is a free service where you focus solely on creating the content e.g. a discussion, monologue, interviews, jokes, poems and music, then will Gcast.com finalise all the technical issues for you. Another great thing about this site is that it also has a music website Garageband.com which seamlessly integrates with Gcast.com which means that you can import fantastic music into your podcast at the click of a button. The music you store on 'MyPlaylist' can be accessed on both sites - simple!
In a nutshell:
register with Gcast.com
register with Garageband.com
upload your creative MP3 files or record content via phone (oh yes, you can do that- great for 'Last Minute Ideas' channel!)
select the order of tracks including music added from Garageband.com
click create podcast
Real example: the A-Level class
This example was used with an AS class (16-17 years old) of 18 students. It is a mixed ability ranging from grades A-D. They are used to different approaches to teaching e.g. creating movies, presentations, teaching mini-lessons and using peculiar 'games' for improving communication skills. They had just completed the first half of a History course and the intention behind creating a podcast, a radio show, was to encourage students to consider what they had been taught over the past couple of months.
I taught in an inner city comprehensive where many of the pupils were not particulary driven or scholarly.
Initially I offered one lesson in the middle of the pre exam holiday to my A level pupils, partly because I thought it would be good for 'morale', and partly as I thought it would nudge them into working together with each other to revise outside the session.They nearly all turned up and there was a good 'mood' to the session, and they appreciated that I had given up a bit of my spare time.
This led me to experiment with offering an 'early start' lesson to my GCSE group on the morning of the exam.
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