Sharing the Addiction

Well, people might be forgiven for thinking that I had dropped off the face of the earth with me putting very little out into the cyberverse recently. Basically, I started working for CORE education full time at the beginning of June and I had to hit the ground running with Milestones from clusters to read and respond to. I have now finished working my way through those and am now doing some work on building up resources in the ICT PD Online area. There is a section in ICT PD Online to collect and organise cluster and school internet spaces and links. If you are a New Zealand school or cluster and have any that you would like me to add in, either leave me a comment with the address or send an email to me at suzievesper@gmail.com. If you want to give me any feedback on how the section of links could be better organised or what you think is missing, I’d also like to hear from you.

As part of my work on ICT PD Online, I have been brushing off my GIMP skills considerably and trying my hand at some aspects of design. I needed some textures to add to some of my images and I have found some really useful sites that gave some to me for free that I thought I would share with you. These are:
ImageAfter
Texture King
CG Textures (where I got these lovely bones from).

Another thing to report on is my recent visit to schools in Auckland with my old cluster. This was an excellent trip and I got heaps out of it! There is a page on Teacher Portal where I have uploaded my notes and the schools that went are all supposed to add to (hmm…..haven’t seen evidence of this just yet!). Thanks to Lenva for showing me http://glogster.com and http://www.circavie.com/ which I plan to have a good play with when I have a spare minute.

Tags: cluster links, School Visits, textures

Today I have been working at Muritai School. I have been working with all the teachers from one syndicate at a time which has meant that all of the teachers in the syndicate get a chance to have the time and space to discuss how to best use ICT and they all come away with the same message which I think is a really good way to do things. This obviously requires a lot of relievers so has its drawbacks but is a really useful way to work.

We focused on using ICT to support both the Yr 3/4 syndicate and the Yr5/6 syndicate. The year 3/4 group are planning to focus on dinosaurs looking at how the changing environment effected them. I suggested one great website could be ‘The Earth Floor‘ which has a great section on how why we no longer have dinosaurs.
There are also other dinosaur links on my website. The syndicate are planning to use Kidpix to illustrate dinosaur poems. As the focus is on oral not written English, the children will illustrate poems by other people and record their voices onto the slides.

The Yr 5/6 syndicate looked at how ICT can be used to support their upcoming ‘Take Action for Air’ topic. The syndicate decided that they wanted to use mindmapping tools for the children to collect and organise their information onto during the course of the unit and then use video to film the ‘Take action’ part to make into a movie. We explored using an online mindmapping application that is extremely easy to use and can be accessed from anywhere called ‘Mindomo‘.I think this application has a LOT of potential and is something I have just discovered recently.

The teachers felt that they really needed to teach the kids how to search the web so have decided to teach structured lessons in the suite on this. Stu Devenport had some excellent posters for working with kids on search tips and evaluating websites (which he has offered to let me have a copy of and I’m sure he’d let others have them as well).

Other good places to get tips on searching are: the Google help centre, Berkeley University (not very kid friendly but very detailed) and Fact Monster (designed for kids)

Want a list of great search engines to try? Check out this exhaustive list. Other interesting search engines other than Google to try are Clusty which organises your search results into topic areas, Librarian’s Internet Index with reliable and safe links, or Ask for Kids for searches guaranteed to be safe for kids. Dogpile says it takes the best search results from a number of search engines.

Sites that give advice on evaluating websites include the Berkeley university site.