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

SMART Exchange (Beta) – Finding & Sharing Resources

The new SMART Exchange has been set up to enable teachers to quickly search and find SMART related resources many of which have been produced and shared by other teachers. The new SMART Exchange streamlines the way in which you can search for resources, enabling you to browse via subject and also via subject-correlated standards – i.e. KS2, KS3, KS4. The search engine directly links resources to areas of the National Curriculum (see Science example below) enabling a focused search and providing a valuable and time-saving source of resources.

It is also possible to search across different areas, the link above will take you straight to the ‘England’ area site but this can be easily changed to search other areas and associated curriculum resources e.g. USA, Germany etc.

The whole idea of SMART Exchange is that it is a community for teachers using SMART resources and as well as contributing to the community by sharing your own resources (an easy uploading system is available on the homepage) you can also join the discussion forum in the ‘Connect with Teachers’ section to connect with other teachers from around the country.

The following video from the SMART exchange team provides a guided tour of the new SMART Exchange facility.

YouTube Videos for Teachers

SmartTeaching.org have published a list of 100 of the best YouTube videos for teachers. A number of subject areas have been covered and the YouTube video links are organised on this basis. As well as videos for use with students there are some useful videos to support professional development, including the use of technology in the classroom and classroom management. Although really aimed at higher education, YouTube have also released YouTube Edu – where college and university video channels have been collected together in one place.

Although it should be possible to use YouTube in the classroom, if you are having problems accessing it or would like to insert YouTube videos into SMARTnotebook so that you can annotate them, don’t forget zamzar is an excellent tool for downloading the videos (instructions can be found in this post).