Sun Motion Simulator

Just a quick one that I stumbled across -

http://astro.unl.edu/naap/motion3/animations/sunmotions.swf

This a a great simulator that has animation and a range of variable to caculate the angle of the sun at any time or place on the earth.

This is great for science and SOSE classes.

Making your own iwb content

Seems I've taken a holiday from my blog...

Unfortunately I wasn't on holiday... I've been working harder than ever before at my current job as well as a few home projects which I'll show later when I get them a bit further along.

I had an author contact me recently - she was looking for a way to create here own interactive whiteboard resource to go with some picture books that she has written.

Now back in the day I used to use Authorware, Director and Flash to generate interactive multimedia, but that is now over 10 years ago and I have not kept up my skills.

So I went on the hunt for easy to use cheap/free tools to create stand alone multimedia packages that included basic computer based training stuff like quiz es, cloze, matching and drag and drop type activities.

So here is what I found

CourseLab - This is the system we are going to use. Nice interface, no coding if you don't want to and easy to use. Best of all it's free.Image via Wikipedia

LAMS - more server based but again easy to use and set up - Free too

Xerte - More coding than what I would like - but would be really good once you get your head around.

eXe - Easy to use but not enough "fun" stuff for our purposes (storybook), but for secondary and tertiary courses this is very quick and easy. Again free.

Massive Digital learning Repositories

Good afternoon -
I hope you`are feeling better than me at the moment - Burning the candle at both ends this week - work all week and then exhibit and present at a conference over the weekend, and another conference tomorrow.
Anyway still found some stuff you should know about.

Scootle - the learning federation (Australia) is a licenced product for all schools in Australia - most people have access to it from their department portal if they work for Government schools - for all others there is scootle. You have to look at this - thousands of great videos and interactive digital tools for teachers - Free for you (if you live in Australia and are teaching)


For everyone else in the world - there is FOSSWEB - FOSS (FULL OPTION SCIENCE SYSTEM) Web
is the official site for the inquiry-based FOSS science curriculum.
A place for support, resources, and fun activities.

A new way to storyboard

When I was teaching digital media and we got to digital video or animation I would always make the students storyboard their ideas for planning purposes - plus we only had one camera so it got them started and through natural selction the ones who worked quickly (but up to standard) got hold of the camera first.

I've always thought of storyboards as a low-tech solution... It is hard to imagine how a film will come out just by looking at the storyboards. What if you could put in the scene, characters, script, camera angles and gestures in and see what it would look like...

xtranormal lets you do just that. Currently in beta it allows you to stage manage two characters of your selection.

Language and Maths activities for your IWB

With NAPLAN coming up soon there are teachers looking for the edge so they can give their kids that extra oomph in the tests.


Spellingcity
If you are using spelling lists and an IWB this is perfect. Simply put your wordlist into the home pages and it automatically makes 11 different flash spelling games from your list - saves on a whole lot of work. You can also do it to automate your spelling tests as it says the word and puts it in a sentence. There are also a whole bunch of premade lists.

You need to online for this gem.

2+2
This is a downloadable program for lower school maths. With over 20 different activities (many that you can do with your IWB) 2+2 math for kids is a program aimed to help children's education in the area of basic mathematical skills.

It's biology man!

I have been asked several times for biology interactive software... I'm still looking. In the mean time I have found a couple of lists of interactive webpages.

edinformatics - lists of good biology and chem interactive animations and tutorials.

The University of Arizona - the Biology Project.

Biology in Motion - a small range of applets for lower secondary biology.

Lone Star College - a veritable motherload of interactive biology bits.

There you go - as always there is room for more so if you find something good send me a line.