Lots of stuff means lots of work....

I have been bookmarking some sites - I should do it through delicious but... oh well here are a few sites and programs I have been looking at lately. Some of these will be put into the Keepad Interactive WA website. in the links section.

Draw Anywhere - a web based diagraming solution, you have to sign in but it looks great, and you can collaborate on diagrams in real time. http://www.drawanywhere.com/

Learner.org - great web based interactives for maths, science, social studies, history and art.

Sandfields - a bunch of primary based flash resources. All are downloadable. some are subject speciafic others are adaptable to any learning area. Dowload them and put them into your ebeam scrapbook flash resources. http://www.sandfields.co.uk/games/games.html

Nickpower - A great site for primary science teachers - interactives and links as well as some nice tools on his tools page that help with setting up experiments.

Teach ICT - A British based ICT site with all the ICT courses and resources for high school. A great place for multichoice questions to put into turning point.

Have fun with that lot - Piles more to get through this weekend.

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TurningPoint Quick Start Guides

I have been getting a few phone calls and emails from my presentation at Edith Cowan University. Mostly about TurningPoint and how to get started...
Luckily Turning Technologies have a great quickstart guide on the the website.

Scroll down to the bottom of this page to the supplamental documents ad grab one of the "basics of working with TurningPoint" PDFs.

This should get you started and then if you need to have a look at the user guide for more indepth information.

Learning to use IT in the classroom

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I visit a lot of schools during my working week for both demonstration and training. One thing that always crops up is the percieved lack of ability of anything tech based. There is certainly the desire to use it (either push or pull), but there is not a lot of training opportunites for teachers in the use of IT. There are paid services out there but most schools don't think of investing in them because, well the roof is leaking and the fence is broken and there is just not enough money to go around. If you do have money to throw at it go and get Atomic Learning from my friend Bryn Jones - a brilliant concept with a huge bredth and depth of IT in education training for both teachers and students.

Here is a free one I will be passing on to those teachers who are at the beginning stages of integrating IT into their classroom but need the extra confidence gained from more formalised training.

LearniT-TeachiT http://www.nortellearnit.org/technology/

Videos and best practice to help teachers make confident steps in using IT in their classrooms.

Thanks to Larry http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org for the tip.

One for ECU Students

I was at ECU on Tuesday - did a record 7 presentations in one day and hopefully entertained some undergrads for a while. I did promise them two links that I have talked about before but I thought I would put them up again just so they are at the top of the page.

Hamilton Trust - http://www.hamilton-trust.org.uk/

This is a site that has hundreds of term plans, weekly plans and lesson plans all derived and related to the UK national curriculum. some are free but 10 pounds gets you everything.

Lesson Writer - http://www.lessonwriter.com/default.aspx

This converts any text into a lesson plan, work sheet and graphic organiser in minutes - absolutely brilliant for directed teaching.

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New PowerPoint Resources

Powerpoint Palooza is a collection of over 220 educational powerpoints ready to download. They are all based on history so useful for S&E as well as ESL.

Because they are powerPoints you can turn them into interactive TurningPoint presentations in a snap by adding interactive question slides.

2 new downloadable programs

Well My feet have finally hit the ground this Sunday. It has been a very busy week, with lots of presentations and stress.

Scitech Had some issues with their new Office 2007 presentation that needed to be fixed pronto. For those of you who use Office 2007 be aware that it doesn't like external links to media files from the presentation - especially if you are using 3rd party add ins like TurningPoint. So embed your media files to avoid the crashing Powerpoint syndrome.

My GF asked me if I knew of any free/open source stop motion animation programs. I said I'd look so went down to my favouite open source store - Sourceforge - and have a look around.

I found one that looks suitable - and seems to be very popular - StopMojo. It even does onion skinning and is cross platform. Looks like I'll download it because I am sure I can see some use for it at work.... hmmmm.

While I was there I found a new (to me) brainstorming / concept mapping program that looks like it work great on an IWB like eBeam. Again I will have to download it and have a go at work.
It looks a little easier to use compared to Freemind.
xmind -

I'm Back!

Hi - sorry for being away so long but I was on holiday and had no access to email or blogger for that matter. Where in the world would I go that I couldn't access email? Africa, specifically I was on a camping safari.

I'll put up some photos as soon as my feet hit the ground.

First thing when I got back was a Speech and Language conference for two days so that was my main priority.

Take care in the new term.