I was
really privileged to get an opportunity to speak to the Edinburgh University
PGCE Students today about ICT. Although I still have concerns that the only
compulsory 1 hour ICT lecture is left until over two thirds of the way through
the course!
Anyway, feedback
has been really positive and I hope that some of the audience might follow this
up with emails or comments here.
I referred to the following
links during my presentation:
1. Generators:
The Generator Blog – 100’s of generators to make learning tasks fun!
2. Search Engines:
Google – The biggest search database on the planet. Always
use the Advanced
Search function and remember that a Google
Advanced Search can return searches for specific file types (including
PowerPoint and flash animation).
Google News – Searches the latest and historical news on
the web.
Google Scholar –
Searches academic journals and papers.
Searchmash – A Google Side Project that shows normal search
results but also image results, blog results, video results and Wikipedia
entries all on one page.
Qunitura – A visual search – great for project work.
Clusty – specialises in searching the deep web.
Everything
that you need top know about images including some flickr tutorials can be
found here
and as a video
tutorial here.
4. Presentation Tools
For every thing that you need to
know about PowerPoint and other presentation tools (including Captivate) visit SWict.com.
Death by PowerPoint is not an uncommon
phrase in schools and conferences these days. PowerPoint is a powerful
presentation tool but you need to be careful how you use it as a teaching
resource.
Remember to involve pupils in the
design and aesthetics of slides. What might look great to you might look awful to a 14 year
old. After you have shown a presentation to a class gather some feedback on it
(see idea 15 or idea 2). Ask pupils what they though of the presentation, not
the topic. Was there to much text, what did they think of the pictures, what
were the animations like etc...
In the past I have given students
PowerPoint presentations to take home and edit for me.
Use flash animation in your
presentation.
As long as your computer is connected to the internet you can get flash to play
directly from a web site to your PowerPoint presentation. Click
here for tutorial telling you how you can do this. Now all you have to do
if find some animations on the web, below is a summary of some good places to
start looking.
- The Guardian’s Education website offers a whole
range of excellent ‘Interactive
Guides’ which include flash animation http://www.guardian.co.uk/interactive
- The BBC News also offers some good flash resources.
- For S1, S2 and beyond try Brainpop. You can get
a free 14 day trial for this excellent resource.
You can search on for Shockwave
Flash Files on the web by putting the subject you are looking for into the
search box followed by a space then filetype:swf. For example try typing
Hurricane Katrina filetype:swf into Google.
There are also a number of
commercial resources available which include flash files. Check out Boardworks and order a
free sample CD.
Include catch up slides (if getting
students to copy things down from the board) and think about using PowerPoint for
differentiation.
Link difficult words and terminology
to sites like wikitionary.
This can also provide useful tangents and discussion points.
BBC Picture of the Day is a useful
resource, ‘The
Day in Pictures’
5. Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a fairly new term that describes some of the recent changes
to the World Wide Web. Traditionally the web was a place where people could get
information it was ‘read only’. However in the last 5 years the web has
developed. Now as well as being able to read information it is also possible to
write to the web. Its two way, read and write. Wikipedia has a good article on
web 2.0 and you can find that here. I would also
recommend the ‘Coming of Age’ a free
on-line book which talks about the new World Wide Web. Some people including Will
Richardson prefer the name the read / write web.
Some of the Web 2.0 tools that we have available to us as teachers are
Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts.
1) A blog is an on-line journal at can allow people
to comment. They can be personal or public.
2) A podcast is an on-line radio programme that
anyone can download. You can subscribe to podcasts through sites like itunes,
which mean that new episodes instantly get delivered to you when they are
produced. Ewan Macintosh once described this to me as
the difference between going to collect your paper and having it delivered to
your house.
3) A wiki is a web page that anyone can edit and
up-date. Wikipedia is the classic example of this. Why
not get your students to create, edit and maintain a page?
Most students have
mobile phones these days. To find out different uses for mobile phones in the
classroom have a look at this
article that I wrote as part of the 50 ideas presentation.
7. Internet safety
Think You Know – Useful
information on Internet safety.
I’ve been
doing a lot of work on Internet Safety recently and I think it should be the
responsibility of all teachers and school staff. If your interested you can
find more information here.
8. Other related posts:
Good Luck with your last placement!
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