Thursday 29 November 2007

Comic Life

Comic life is a wonderful new title from Plasq. It is a very simple comis strip creator which features a selection of comic strip layouts into which you simply drag and drop your images, speach or thought bubbles, action signs and text. A really simple interface and so quick to create a final product.

I love the fact that the title is available for free 30 day trail download. http://plasq.com/
This allowed me to show it to my staff really quickly at the end of a recent staff meeting. There were wowed and were quick to ask for a school wide purchase. Combine this with a reasonable price ( 25 seat license from £102.26 and 50 seat licence from £153.64 )- Top up licenses are also avaiable very reasonably to make up to the amount of licenses required in school.

We rolled out the software across the school yesterday and I will keep you up to date with our progress.

Personification in Poetry

Luxor Jr
















Having a wonderful time experimenting with personiciation in poetry at the moment with my year 6 class ( never thought I would hear myself say that- poetry is not my thing!). However any excuse you use animation in class - we have been watching Luxor jr (a short animation by Pixar) and we love it.


Please check out my blog for a fuller explanation and further ramblings as well as links

http://sandraict.blogspot.com/

Tuesday 20 November 2007

ICT Room Posters

Is your ICT suite looking a bit drab?
Do you need to badger your teachers into putting their coffees away and collecting their pile of print outs?

Yes !
Then visit http://www.teach-ict.com for a large range of posters for the ICT room

Thursday 8 November 2007

Key Stage 1 Course

There are still places on our Key Stage 1 ICT course on Wednesday 14th November @ the Redbridge Teachers Centre. The course is open to all Redbridge Teachers, Though if you are from Havering, then please contact Dave Smith who can arrange for you to get a place.

So don't forget:

Key Stage 1 ICT Course

Wednesday 14th November 2007- 9:30- 3:30pm

Including free coffee and biscuits and wonderful canteen and toilet facilities

Book by visiting Redbridgepdc

Subject Leader Support Documents

We unfortunately had to cancel the recent course for New Subject Leaders. If you are a new subject leader and you are looking for helpful support documents, you can get updates and network with others at our regular Subject Leaders Meeting. The next event is of course on the5th of December @ the Teachers Centre. Visit RedbridgePDC to book your place on this popular event.

Alongside the updates given @ the Subject Leaders events and on this (and related) blogs, I would recomend joining NAACE, the professional association for all those involved in ICT education. They produce regular weekly newsletters, hold regualr conferences and also provide members with discussion forums. Naace also help to shape ICT education policy, by compiling position papers for government advisers.Teachers and institutions can join NAACE by visiting their website.

A good publication for new ICT coordinators, is Implementing ICT, which though published in 2004, has relevant articles and advice for coordinators. It can be viewed and downloaded here.

A further helpful source of support is of course the LGFL and for anyone putting together Esafety documentation, then their safety section is brilliant, as it contains lesson planning ideas, policy chunk templates and posters.

I must also mention a good book that came out a few months ago by James Wright.'The Primary ICT and E-Learning Coordinator's Manual' is a great book that makes the coordinators tasks more manageable by giving a list of tasks to complete throughout each term. There is some good advice in this book, set out in the format of email conversations between coordinators and an ICT advisor, giving answers to some very common questions.

Wednesday 7 November 2007

A good reason (excuse?) for a PS3 in your school

I met with Anthony this morning, to be put through the embarrasment of recording my own voice in preperation for podcasting, and I mentioned to him a game called LittleBigPlanet. I've posted more on the HattonICT blog, but he requested I place the video here too. I like it for modelling, see what you think:

If you want more, youtube is your friend!

SMART vs Activ Again

I am not going to polarise the SMART vs ACTIV debate. I think they both do a good job, when facilitated by a good teacher,particularly this teachers who are keen to innovate with the board and move beyond annotation.

But there are two (of many) good features of Activ-Primary 3

The first is the opportunity to turn an object into a container, with attributes. So that if I add an object a positive or negative reward sound will play. So, I can make simple sorting activities as below.




The most exciting tool in Activ Primary 3 though is the Flip chart Builder. This would save lots of time as it enables the teacher to pull together pages from a range of locations to create a new flip chart. The templates will cut down the time it takes to create pages,while the tool also allows the user to import pages form other flip charts. This cuts down the searching , cutting and pasting. A bit like the slide sorter view in Powerpoint (but souped up)


Thursday 1 November 2007

SMART versus Activ

Nicholas has been learning Activ Primary, he has been a dedicated SMART user for ages, see what he says by clicking here.



I wonder if any other coordinators have tried both, and or have strong preferences towards one platform, if so why.