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Shropshire LA have purchased Comic Life for all schools in the authority.  Further details about the software along with the registration code and download details can be accessed here: www.shropshirelg.net/resources/lasoftware/Pages/comiclife.aspx

It would be great if schools could share how they are using Comic Life either on this blog or on the discussion board within the learning gateway.

The Great Fire of London is a topic in some of our primaries right now.  A great interactive resource produced by the Museum of London can be found by clicking this link.  It involves working through an amount of historical evidence and deciding which is relevant to finding out about the fire, as well as learning through the experiences of people who were actually there. There’s a quiz here too (at funtrivia).

Looking for new online resources for the children to use in your classroom? Have you tried Sherston’s free online Activity Site? There is a wide range of activities covering ICT, Basic skills, Literacy, Numeracy, Geography and a new selection of Science materials.

 ICT activities include typing practise, mouse skills, instructions on using a spreadsheet or tying in a URL, directional language and ‘Modelling and Changing Variables’. In the Literacy section there are reading and listening activities, an Adjectives Grammar show and many other ideas. Explore a map with Barnaby Bear in the Geography section or get familiar with the British Isles Map. In the science section you can practise your circuit skills, investigate forces and friction and find out about life processes or materials. There are sample activities for children aged 3 to 11

http://shop.sherston.com/freebees/

Following the success of last years Create It Awards, this year we will be altering one category and adding an additional category.  As with last year there are four age groups: KS1, KS2, KS3 & KS4+

The categories are as follows: Animation, Video, Podcast (new), Computer Game (KS3/KS4+) or Interactive Story (KS1/2) & Interactive Teaching Resource (produced by a teacher).

The deadline for submission is February 27th 2009.

The awards will be presented on the evening of the 26th March 2009 at the Albrighton Hall Hotel.

There is a £50 Amazon voucher for each winning entry, maximum number of 3 students in a group and 3 entries per category at each age group per school.

For further details email steve.beard [at] shropshirelg.net

Drove down to Stratford today to see Mr Tennant playing Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost.  On the journey my partner asked my daughter and me to imagine a villain-line across the windscreen and place characters from Shakespeare along it.  We soon had Richard III beyond the central reservation!  Were we right?  Next came heroes and heroines.

Great idea, but not her own.  On Friday she was at a ‘Shakespeare’ day in Dudley with the RSC Education Department (need to get one in Shropshire) and the idea for the villain-line came from ‘Shakespeare for all ages and stages’  published by DCSF.  This contains ideas and guidance for teaching Shakespeare from Foundation Stage to KS4. 

DCSF are also offering Primary Schools a free copy of Shakespeare Animated Tales and Secondary Schools can download podcasts of the Globe production of Much Ado About Nothing.

For Shropshire schools there is a resources section devoted to Shakespeare on the Shropshire Learning Gateway.

There are a number of on-screen physics simulators that can be used to discover properties of materials.  Learners can use the computer to investigate the way things move and inter-react, generating questions and providing the means to find answers.  Using this genre of software there are opportunities for developing writing and visual creativity through storytelling and pictures, expanding young minds and getting them thinking.

  Moovl is a Futurelab-sponsored development that has been around for ages and has huge amounts of resources accompanying it. It requires a subscription of £100 a year but the learning gains for active imaginations can be immense.  There’s a wealth of discovery through experimentation to be had.

John Rowe from St. Mary’s Primary School, Albrighton, showed me Phun yesterday and  after five minutes I was hooked.  “What if I put a spring here?  What if I move this?  What happens if….????”  Within a remarkably short space of time I was seeing how things worked by creating my own machines on-screen.  Phun allows fluids to be modelled and is a bit more complex than Moovl, yet it’s free software and there is a community of users who post on a forum.  Users can  upload their creations to an online space.  If you can get access, there are a number of videos on YouTube showing how to use it and some examples of what can be done.

Please let us know how you get on with these (or other) tools - there’s no substitute for having exciting examples of work from the classroom.

Got a pile of art work that needs assessing? Sort it into groups of about 6 and spread out on the table. Make a set of individual name cards for your whole class - big enough to show up in a digital photograph.  You might want to use different coloured cards for your groups so names can be found quickly. Cards will last longer if you laminate them . Put  a name card next to each piece of work and take a clear photo.  You will only need about 5 photos for your whole class and you have a record of their work in minutes. You can also use it to record model making and you can use the cards again and again. You may want to share the photos with the class or with parents.

Got a display or classroom layout that really works well?  Photograph it and put  away in your planning folder for next time.

Flash is the ultimate tool for creating animations that are easily transferred to the web.  Even though it is industry-standard it can be used at any level and we’ve seen some superb examples from people of all ages and abilities.

Web 2.0 applications are catching up though, and here’s one I found that looks as though it is going to give plenty of opportunities for developing simple animations.  Called AjaxAnimator it is still in Beta (but so are plenty of other everyday applications) so expect a few bugs.  It’s great fun to play with though, and certainly gets the principles of animation over without having to install costly applications on a computer.  All you need is a browser (they suggest Firefox is best) and you’re set to go.

Despite the obvious learning opportunities it offers, sometimes it’s difficult to justify buying a digital video camera for everybody.  There are limitations to using a DV camera; usually you need to connect the camera to the computer to get the video from it, and it’s unlikely that there will be enough for the whole class to use anyway.  What’s needed is a quick and easy-to-use portable device with removable storage, so while one pupil is editing their video, another can be using the camera.

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With the expanded ICT/E-learning team now in place and with a poke from Dale I have created an it4L account on Twitter, all posts from this blog will be tweeted via the it4L account. To follow it4L tweets, go to http://twitter.com/it4L and if you have an account click the ‘follow’ button.  More information on twitter can be found here.