Rockfig – ‘Pininterest for Education’

Rockfig has been described as a ‘pininterest for learning’ (@merlinjohn) as it enables you to collect together lesson resources and media in a single location. The Rockfig website also enables you to browse resources sets put together by other users making it a great tool for quickly identifying useful resources for your subject area. Everything is organised by age, National Curriculum subject and topic making it quick and easy to use.

You can create your own collections as well as store your favourite collections from the user community and you are also able to share Collections on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and by Email. Subjects currently supported are, Chemistry, Biology, Chemistry ,Physics, ICT, Computing and Maths with more subjects coming soon.

How to view a collection in Rockfig

How to create and share a Rockfig collection

Dream Teachers Competition

Seen the TV programme? Now enter the competition! YouTube and Jamie Oliver are looking for Britain’s Dream Teachers in their competition in which they are looking for teachers to help explain the concepts that students find hardest. Through liaison with a major exam board, they have come up with some of the topics that students find hardest in seven topic areas: Maths, English, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography and History. All you need to do is video your idea for teaching the concept and upload it to the competition website!

The Prize?? There is prize for the best video in each of the subject categories – £3,000 for the teacher and £7,000 for the school!

Interested? See the website for more details and to see which topics for your subject area you need to base your video on. Full competition rules are also available on the site! Go for it!

The only problem is the deadline is very soon – all entries need to be uploaded before Tuesday 5th April!

ICT Support on Teachers TV

Teachers TV is an excellent source of inspiration for ideas for using ICT in the classroom and has many excellent programmes which can be watched online. There is useful search function on the website. The videos can be played directly from the website (see screenshot) or downloaded. Below are just a few examples of some of the fantastic videos available:

General Videos linked to use of ICT

• Using ICT to engage parents
• Online Social Networks – Friends or Foe
• E-Assessment – Where next?
• Mobile Phones, Mobile Minds – mobile phones and potential impact on education
• Hi-Tech Transition – easy the tradition between schools for students
• PDAs and Webcams – use of PDA’s on fieldtrips and the use of webcams for animation
• Blogs and Wikis
• Enhancing Visuals (Using Digital Videos) in PE (Use of Digital Video)

TOP 10 ON THE WEB SERIES – For subject specific areas – a series of programmes based on secondary subjects and websites that can be used to support teaching and learning in these subjects:

• Secondary Art
• Secondary Music
• Secondary Citizenship
• Secondary Maths
• Secondary ICT
• Secondary Science
• Secondary Geography
• Secondary English and Media

Hard to Teach:

• Secondary Science – Using ICT
• Secondary English – Using ICT
• Secondary Maths – Using ICT

Games for the IWB

A quick reminder as we start the new year of the value of interactive games in the classroom, particularly now all teaching rooms have access to IWB facilities. There are lots of free games aimed at particular subjects available on the web, however remember we also have access to software in school, including the Content Generator software (Penalty Shootouts etc.) to make our own games. For more details please see last years post on Using Games in the Classrom.

HOT POTATOES QUIZ SOFTWARE – Now free

You can find out more about what Hot Potatoes quiz software can be used for including examples in the using games in the classroom post. But you should be aware that the software is now freeware and therefore can easily be downloaded and used at home.

You can download instructions from the website – but if you come and see me I have 3 spare printed help guides.

Hot Potatoes have also now made their Quandary software free. This software enables you to create web based action mazes which can be used for problem-solving, diagnosis and surveys/questionnaires etc. Students are faced with a series of options – the option they then choose will lead them on a particular path for which they are then given further options. To get the idea – try out this Henry II and Thomas Becket history action maze from Andrew Field.

Here is a list of just some of the many websites offering online sources of educational games:

• Business Studies
• Interactive Games http://www.teachingbusiness.co.uk/index-12.html
• Geography
  Games4Geog http://www.games4geog.com/
• GeoBytes Games  (St  Ivo School) http://cgz.e2bn.net/e2bn/leas/c99/schools/cgz/accounts/staff/rchambers/GeoBytes/GeoGames/geogames.htm
• GeogOnlineGames (includes both Geography and History Games) http://www.geogonline.org.uk/GeogGames.htm
• English
• English Language Games http://www.lapasserelle.com/lm/exercices/games.html#contentgeneratormatching
• ICT
• Revise Computing  http://www.revisecomputing.co.uk/
• Revise ICT http://www.reviseict.co.uk/
• ICT History (History of ICT) http://www.icthistory.co.uk/?cat=12
• Maths
• Online Maths Games http://www.crctlessons.com/math-online-games.html
• Maths Games http://freemaths.net/games
• Maths Games (Congleton High School) http://clc2.uniservity.com/GroupHomepage.asp?GroupID=56757
• MFL
• Large number of Modern Languages Games (Thorpe St Andrews School) http://www.thorpelangsdept.info/interest.htm
• Includes Quizzes and Games (Notre Dame High School, Norwich) http://www.yjc.org.uk/
• SCIENCE
• Science Review Games http://sciencereviewgames.com/srg/
• RE
• Online Games (RS Revision) http://www.rsrevision.com/contents/games.htm

Remember there are also lots of templates for creating games using the Lesson Activity Toolkit in SMART notebook – I will be posting a reminder of some of these over the next few weeks.

Classpress.net – Daily news feeds for Curriculum Subjects

A great new free tool called classpress.net has been launched courtesy of Russel Tarr of Class Tools.net and ActiveHistory. It involves a generator which does an hourly run through web services looking for topic keywords associated with different subject areas. This creates an uptodate summary of key news articles for different subject areas and is worth a look. You can even sign up for an email newsletter version if you want! Worth a look!