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I came across this website and thought what a great way to engage some of our students with learning German. It would have been nice if they also had the audio for the German so you could also hear what it sounded like.

The World Cup in Germany this Summer could provide an ideal opportunity to engage young people in language learning.

Has anyone already taken this onboard and produced any materials based around the World Cup?

Class 2 of Hope CE Primary School are the winners of our digitalbrain Christmas animation project, with their fantastic angel animations, created in Macromedia Flash. You can view the animations by visting http://hope.shropshire.digitalbrain.com and following the links from the front page.
The school wins a Flowgo box, which will be presented early in the new year.

Originally posted by Andrea

Wild things
This is a free CAD program from Wild Ginger, which provides configurable and printable patterns and sewing instructions for a wide range of textile products, such as waist wallets, slippers, sun hats, aprons and shawls, as well as any number of bags. You can even add an embroidery design onto the pattern, although this cannot be saved, but can be printed.

Blockcad
Another free program, based on Lego – in fact, the only thing that the author requests is a gift – one piece of Lego sent to his home in Sweden, via snail mail!!
Read the rest of this entry »

The logic of education systems should be reversed so that the system conforms to the learner, rather than the learner to the system. This is the essence of personalisation. It demands a system capable of offering bespoke support for each individual in order to foster engaged and independent learners able to reach their full potential.

The ‘Personalisation and Digital Technologies’ report moves the personalisation debate forward by focusing specifically on the potential of digital technologies in four key areas: enabling learners to make informed educational choices; diversifying and acknowledging different forms of skills and knowledge; creating diverse learning environments; and developing learner-focused forms of assessment and feedback.

Sometime ago I came across references to developments in wired and wireless broadband in the Giga bits per second range. Apart from being of interest to some colleagues, it occurred to me that it was a useful leading edge development for students at A-level and possibly KS4 to know about or do further research on. On this basis you or they may like to find other references to the project and create a comprehensive picture e.g starting with:

http://www.physorg.com/news7976.html
http://www.ist-gandalf.org/

Of course this type of work offers a rich experience in “filtering” - which bits are germane? appropriate? require further explanation? or further research? etc. I don’t think it would be any bad thing to take something like one of the public documents in the last reference and set as a comprehension excercise - or to create a glossary for the lay reader from - or to get students to prepare a briefing to peers on etc.
Now would that be in the syllabus/programme of study? would it be ICT? would it be learning? or would it be just being a NERD? ;D

All Shropshire schools will be receiving a free licence for Kar2ouche Composer, primary schools will each get a 15 user licence and secondary schools will receive a site licence.

All Shropshire primary schools will receive site licences for the following Logotron products: Thinking with Pictures, Junior Viewpoint and Magic Forest.

Further details can be found by following the link above.

The website www.poissonrouge.com/ is a delightful website focusing on letters, numbers and mouse control in French and English. Explore and smile, giggle or laugh.

Originally posted by Steph Woods

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I saw Mark speak in Bristol about 2 years ago and I found him inspirational. Here you can watch his keynote speech from this years, 2005, SETT festival.

Mark has written many articles, many of which can be found here. I would be interested to hear anybody else’s thoughts about his writings. Mark’s blog can be found here.

From Spiritual Weightlifting I found out about Ze Frank. The guy’s uses of ICT are so refreshingly playful and challenging to the normal things out there…well, you just have to take a look. I’m not sure which is my favourite activity but they have had me falling off my chair laughing, gazing in wonder at why it would have been created in the first place, and my son has played with some of what I considered to be uninteresting toys but he loved them and stayed entranced.

Post a reply when you try it and find a use for the things.