Getting a 'Techie Brekkie" up and running at your school

So the concept is simple and definitely not one that I can lay claim to.  Put on a nice breakfast and invite teachers to come and learn short bites of information they can begin using in the classroom the same day.

The 'Techie Brekkie" has become a popular way for ICT, Learning Technologies or whatever you want to call it to claw back some professional learning time from the heavy after school meeting schedule which is mainly dominated by literacy and numeracy.

This presentation below outlines some of the key things you might want to remember when running a techie brekkie that make it different from a traditional professional development session.

I am sure that many of you may have run a session of your own and I would love to add a comment in the section below that might help others even more.  Enjoy.

Google docs still disappoints iPad users

I work with a large number of schools who have 'Gone Google'.  As it is an excellent platform freely available to teachers and students which works on all devices.

The difficulty I have with the wording of the second part of my opening statement, is that you could assume it would not only work on all devices, but would also be useful and productive.

Unfortunately, if you are an iPad user ( As a huge proportion of students and teachers are. ) you will be sorely disappointed with Google Docs on the iPad, as it increasingly becomes a very poor cousin to the productivity offerings from Apple and Microsoft.

Earlier this week Google released what we could assume an 'Upgrade' to the existing Google Drive app by individually releasing Google Docs and Google Sheets as standalone programs.

Both of these standalone apps offer no functionality over the existing Google Drive app and are clearly an attempt to compete with Microsoft's awesome Office Apps and Apple's equally impressive Pages, Sheets and numbers.

If you wish to create a document that contains images or tables of any description you'll have to stick with the Microsoft and Apple options as this is simply not an option for Google Docs.  A deal breaker for anyone wanting to create a document more appealing than html code

Don't get me wrong I love Google Docs and promote it every opportunity I can.  But if you are an iPad user the experience will definitely underwhelm you in comparison to the desktop version.  Hopefully Google will lift in this area and we will see an iPad solution that live's up to it's users expectations.

I am confused as to whether they are simply trying to highlight the stark difference between using Google Apps on a Chromebook which is excellent versus a tablet, or whether this is simply not a seen as a priority.

A fun way to teach your students how a computer works

Computers are everywhere!  And, while, most students grow up using computers in their homes and at school, they may not know what the different parts are called.  Additionally, they may lack knowledge of how these parts work together to give us the ability to compute.  Students will love the opportunity to combine creativity with acting in this engaging lesson that brings computer hardware to life – literally!

Click here to download this fun lesson plan which gets your students to role play the various components and functions of a computer.

Teaching Decimals, Fractions and Percentages

 Thanks to Scott @ mytopten.com.au

Plan a Park(by theBBC SkillwiseTeam) is a fantastic game for the children to play to learn about Fractions, Decimals and Percentages.

Use it in your class to teach your children about the 100 parts of a whole. Describe to your children what the percentages mean and have them look at what happens when they add parts to the park. They will notice that all percentages change, but all add up to a total of 100% (or 1 whole park).

This game also work with fractions and decimals and is a great way of teaching the children the equivalent decimals and fractions to the percentages.