Monday 30 July 2012

10 top tools for teaching ICT in Primary School

Whether you want to make music, edit photos or create a game, ICT guru and author Ian Addison recommends his favourite online tools for getting creative in class.

Tuesday 17 July 2012

The power of TED

Good quality,relevant and attractive resources for young people can sometimes be hard to find on the internet, nevermind accessing them in a format where you can tailor them to fit the needs of your face to face classroom. However TED of TED talks fame have solved all that with their new bespoke website for education - ed.ted.com - "lessons worth sharing". Over 90 videos are currently available - these are either taken directly from the TED talks site or they are animations of talks given by other experts. Each video is supported by a quiz, questions to get students thinking and then some even deeper questions to provoke further thought and discussion - remember Bloom's Taxonomy! However TED-Ed takes it all one step further by allowing you to "flip" the material - you can edit it to suit exactly what you are teaching. You can even go one step further and use the website to take any useful video from YouTube, add quizzes and extended questions and once you have saved it to your personalised account you can keep track of which students have used the material.

Monday 16 July 2012

Open Education for a Global Economy

If you or your kids have taken an online lesson at the Khan Academy (3,200 video lessons, 168 million views), been enlightened by a TED Talk (1,300 talks, 800 million views), watched a videotaped academic lecture (Academic Earth, Open Courseware Consortium, Open Culture), enrolled in a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course, now being offered by companies like Udacity and a growing list of universities, including M.I.T., Harvard and Stanford), or simply learned to play guitar, paint a landscape or make a soufflĂ© via YouTube — then you know that the distribution channels of education have changed — and that the future of learning is free and open.(Article by David Bornstein)
Read More