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Huge collection of Interactive Whiteboard Activities

Kevin Cummins — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:53:37 +0000

Phillip Crammond has compiled an extensive bank of interactive resources across all the major curriculum areas. The site is easy to navigate and full of content that is applicable to all year levels. I don't have much more to add to this except that is brilliant and definitely worth a look. Check it out here.

Atlapedia - A nice alternative to Google Maps

Kevin Cummins — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:42:57 +0000

Google Earth and Maps are brilliant classroom tools and you can find some great ideas for using them in the classroom here but Atlapedia is a nice alternative for geography students who wish to view traditional maps and explore countries around the world.

Atlapedia Online is a great reference for students to use by themselves, or educators to use in the classroom. It contains full color physical maps, political maps as well as key facts and statistics on countries of the world.

Check it out here.

Brilliant Online Multiple Intelligence Test

Kevin Cummins — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:48:25 +0000

It has been claimed by some researchers that our intelligence or ability to understand the world around us is complex. Some people are better at understanding some things than others.

For some of us it is relatively easy to understand how a flower grows but it is immensely difficult for us to understand and use a musical instrument. For others music might be easy but playing football is difficult.

Instead of having one intelligence it is claimed that we have several different intelligences.
These are listed below:

Body Smart
Word Smart
Number Smart
Intrapersonal
Visual / Spatial
Interpersonal
Musical
Nature Smart

What special intelligences do you have? You can find out by answering a few simple questions

The Birmingham Grid for Learning Multiple Intelligence Test is quite simply the best online test of its type I have seen it caters to multiple languages is very easy to understand and produces a very simple to read radar outlining your strengths and weaknesses in each of the intelligence areas.

This is a brilliant task to do as a class to identify your learners at both a whole group and individual level not to mention it is totally free.

How can I use this in the classroom? I always get my students to get a screen grab of their final radar and make notes regarding whether or not they agree or disagree with their radar and justify why?

Check it out Here

FUSE offers over 10,000 free teaching resources

Kevin Cummins — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:38:47 +0000

FUSE is a portal to high quality teaching and learning resources
for schools. It enables teachers to Find, Use and Share Education
resources. It is open to all teachers anywhere in the world and is 
located at www.education.vic.gov.au/teacher

It is free to use and managed by the Victorian Education 
Department in Australia.  The Victorian Education Department
is recognised as one of the best ICT focussed Educational groups 
in the world.

FUSE connects teachers to resources from across the world, Connect, 
Digilearn, Knowledgebank, the Learning Federation content and 
thousands of web resources recommended by Victorian teachers. 
In addition, it contains new resources provided by trusted education 
partners such as National Gallery of Victoria, the State Library, 
Museum Victoria, and Zoos Victoria.  There are also access pages for 
students and early childhood children.

Tutorials on how to use FUSE are available within the portal.  FUSE
 has been developed as part of the KnowledgeBank: Next Generation
Project. This project conducted research in hundreds of classrooms 
across Victoria to investigate how web 2.0 technologies can enhance
teaching and learning, and established appropriate usage policies for 
these technologies.

At this time Victorian Government teachers can login to access extra 
resources (Inc the TLF content), create new resources including rich
media and upload them to FUSE to share. FUSE includes web 
conferencing and teacher blogging. Access will be built up throughout 
the year to provide full access to other teachers. FUSE will be the 
content library for the Ultranet.

1500 Free Online Teaching Resources

Kevin Cummins — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:21:40 +0000

I must forewarn all non US teachers that FREE is very focussed on catering to the US curriculum but none the less it is definitely full of relevant content to international teachers. FREE makes it easier to find teaching and learning resources from a number of federal government departments.

More than 1,500 federally supported teaching and learning resources are included from dozens of federal agencies. New sites are added regularly.

FREE was conceived in 1997 by a federal working group in response to a memo from the President. The site was launched a year later. It was redesigned and relaunched for the first time in November 2006.

FREE is among the most popular K-12 websites maintained by the U.S. Department of Education because of the many great resources being offered by contributing federal agencies.

FREE is very easy to naviagate and contains a wealth of great resources. Check it out here.

Detailed Lesson Plans to accompany hundreds of films.

Kevin Cummins — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:19:44 +0000

Awesome Stories contains a great deal of educational content related to all areas of the curriculum and is definitely worth a browse to find something that floats your boat.

What impressed me about Awesome Stories was the lesson plan section which had detailed and insightful lesson plans on hundreds of films. These are great resources for those interested in visual literacies and films are added frequently for all age groups and audiences. Here is a look at Inglorious Basterds.

Next tme you intend to watch a film with your students be sure to check out awesome stories.

Create online picture Story Books with Story Jumper

Kevin Cummins — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:48:08 +0000

What is it? StoryJumper is allows students to create their own books. Users can easily create cover pages, add text, upload drawings or photos to illustrate their story or use the StoryJumper clipart gallery also.

Stories can be viewed online for free or ordered as a professionally published hardback book!

How can I use this in the classroom? This is a greaet writing tool for juniors who wish to turn their narratives into something a bit more advanced than a word document or handwritten piece of work. It would definitely be the final phase of their publishing process. At the end of the year you may choose to combine a number of these stories into a hardcover book for parents to purchase.

Jenny Eather's Writing Fun - Brilliant Text Teaching Tool

Kevin Cummins — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:59:27 +0000

I have been using this site for a number of years now regularly to teach my students about different text types and share examples with them and just realised that I do not have it up on Edgalaxy.

Jenny Eather's Writing Fun is a brilliant tool for any English teacher. It contains step by step instructions on how to construct all major text types such as persuasive, explanatory, narrative and so on and has loads of examples from students to share on your interactive white board.

It also contains a range of planning tools and aids to help your stuidents get the most from their writing sessions. Quite simply this is my number one pick for writing resources and I strongly recommend you check it out here.

Interactive Learning Resources from Magic Studio

Kevin Cummins — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:03:51 +0000

Magic studio has been developed in conjunction with museums, publishers, teachers and pupils to provide an easy to use and highly engaging approach to visual, web based learning.

There are two parts to Magic;

The Magic Content Exchange combines content and resources from museums, archives and publishing houses with resources built and shared by other teachers. It is can be searched via the web or directly from a schools learning platform. Resources in the Content Exchange can be used in the classroom, free or on a pay as you go basis from a very affordable price.

Magic Studio gives access to a number of simple to use web-based tools to either customise existing resources or to build new resources using audio, video and pictures, either from the Content Exchange or your own personal media from Flickr, You Tube, Picasa or your home PC.

Individual users can get a free personal account at www.magicstudio.com. Magic Studio Pro is an enhanced, paid for service to schools and Local Authorities wishing to take advantage of cross-platform collaboration, sharing and community building amongst teachers, learners and parents.

To see how Magic works, please take a tour here.

Free Classroom Resources at Cyberbee

Kevin Cummins — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:39:50 +0000

CyberBee has been providing rich Internet resources to educators for over 12 years and has recently expanded their offerings to include online classes that are customized to meet your needs. Cyberbee has a range of curriculum ideas, research tools, web quests and plenty more activities for teachers and students that will surely meet some of your needs. Check it out here.