Sharing the Addiction

I was visiting this blog by Michelle Morley and enjoyed her post on making visual representations of class rules and publishing them on Slideshare. I have done a similar thing around values in a school where children explored different images I had collected to see how messages can be conveyed in pictures and then planned and photographed their own scene to depict a value. This is the class rules example that Michelle had on her blog:

Only geeks that are interested in CSS and hex codes read below
Yesterday, I spent some time working on the design of the Learning@School conference site – I changed the header to stretch right across the page and I changed the navigation menu colours and design. I couldn’t figure out which elements of design the different hex codes in the code were referring to. I first of all used a handy Firefox extension called Firebug to help me ‘inspect’ different sections of the page to tell me the code that was behind them. Then I needed to be able to do a search by the hex code so that I could find out what colour it was referring to. Once again, I turned to the wonderful Colour Lover site for a solution. You can do a palette search by hex code and you can even add a Colour Lover hex code search to your Firefox browser search options. Color Schemer Online Version 2 is also another good option when searching by hex code.  Then I sampled the colour codes from the header image by running it through the Image Palette Generator and changed the template to hex codes that matched with this image. The whole process would have been a LOT quicker if I knew all about CSS!!

Tags: colour, visual_language

Twitter always sends me to interesting places and one of the last sites it sent me to was one called Tutput. On this site, you can sign up for a teacher account and then set up a registration for children to sign up with that will make them part of your online class. Then the children can play games against children all over the world who are logged in at the same time. I pretended to be a kid so that I could test it out and felt bad as I was teamed up against what were probably real kids somewhere else. Still, I soundly lost the first match. Of course, I selected the hardest level of multiplication just to see what this looked like and my first question was 49×27. I was busy trying to work this out in my head rather than on paper and in the meantime my component had solved three questions!

I then tried a couple of easier level activities and soundly walloped the poor children I was against (sorry kids but you’re got to learn to toughen up in life!) I think this would be VERY popular in the classroom and each time you win, a summary of the game gets put onto your win wall. There is also a graduation board which shows you which game levels you have completed. As per usual, all of this makes me wish I had a class to try this with!

Tags: Games, tutpup

Well, I’ve been rather quiet recently as the Year Group meetings take quite a long time to put together. Stil, I have been finding some very interesting bits and pieces as I prepare for them and I have also been making some handouts for workshops that others might be interested in.

OK – here is a list of things that may or may not be useful to you.

List of links for different year groups.
http://zerototwo.wikispaces.com/Great+links+for+Juniors
http://threetofour.wikispaces.com/Yr+3and4+Links
http://fivetosix.wikispaces.com/Yr+5and6+Links (still being worked on)
http://seventoeight.wikispaces.com/Yr+7and8+Links

When you on each year group space, you will notice in the left hand navigation menu that there are also pages for great use of ICT under different currciulum headings. I have started to add to these but this will be an ongoing project.

Here are the links to some of my latest software wiki resources

• A huge bank of sites to find film resources and short films that you could use in the classroom.
• A restructuring of my large wikis page into smaller pages with two new downloadable tutorials added to the Wikispaces page.
• Two new downloadable tutorials on my Powerpoint page about adding audio and about customising backgrounds of slides.
• Much prettier and easier to use index pages such as this one for online tools.

I have also found a really great resource on the Google Educators page with this unit on using Google Docs for revision of writing. There are a number of downloadable worksheets to support the unit. There are a number of other resources on the Google Educators page so it is worth checking out.