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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/

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.

Dear Steve,

Today, we’ve launched a new collection of free online whiteboard resources.  They are from our Absorb courseware, and offer a wide range of simulations, animations and models across secondary school science, D&T and mathematics.

You’ll find these resources at www.yenka.com/freecontent/

Teachers in your LEA can use them in schools and at home, and there’s no need to register - just search or browse for the content you want.

Celestia is a (free!) 3D space simulation, that enables you to virtually navigate around the solar system and beyond. You can travel at different speeds, zoom in and out and view information about the planets, stars and constellations. There is a ‘tour guide’ for easy navigation, a solar system browser and - a good place to start- an excellent demo (through ‘help’). You could use this in its most basic format to give children some idea of distances, speed and position  of planets in the solar system, or you could use some of the ‘add-ons’ for even more infomation. You can download Celestia from here (use the Kent mirror)