ideas for IT in teaching

Want to pick students at random, and get no comeback?

You need a random name generator

This is a really good one- my students love it.

If you want a copy, speak to me and I’ll pass it across – or else I will work out how to post it up here…!

The City of Vice TV series has just finished on channel 4, and last night, as the last in the series was broadcast, they launched the Bow Street Runner, an interactive computer game murder mystery for young people to learn about Georgian history in the most exciting, gory and ghoulish ways that 18th Century Covent Garden has to offer.

This is the first in a number of interactive games that channel 4 are working on to give us different, relevant and exciting ways to help people learn. Can’t wait to see what else there is coming up.

There is a load of great stuff on youtube for us to use, but unfortunately we can’t access it through the Wigan network, so here are some ways to get around it.

The videos on youtube are in a ‘Flash’ format. The normal software on your computer won’t play this, so you need to either convert it to AVI format so it can be played, or download an FLV player.

Here is a good video showing what you need to do to either convert or download the videos.

Unfortunately this download service is no longer running but the principle is the same for vixy.net – just paste in the web address of the video you want into the box and then convert it to AVI/MP3. This format can be embedded in powerpoint if you want.

youtubecatcher is another free site, but it won’t convert it to a windows-friendly video format for you, so you will need to download an flv player to your computer to play them.

The only problem with the free sites is that they can become so clogged up with users that it is impossible to use them, so if you feel you can afford £9 or so and you will use it quite a lot I would recommend naevius’ youtube converter software which is pretty neat and far quicker than a free web-based one.

Enjoy!

lingro is a new language learning site with a difference

lingro’s mission is “to create an on-line environment that allows anyone learning a language to quickly look up and learn the vocabulary most important to them”.

There are a number of things available at this site:

• The web viewer lets you enter the URL of a website, it then makes all the words clickable for definition and translation
• The free instant search dictionary also gives you a definition
• You can add words to your word list and play a flashcard game to learn them

lingro

To become a user you need to go to  www.edublogs.org and sign up for a username. When you have done that, post a message with your details and I will make you a user, and set up a link for you to be able to get into the blog area from.

Once that is done, you will be set to post away and let others know what you are up to.

The idea of this blog is to help us pass around anything exciting we are doing in terms of IT in teaching, so that others can see what we are doing and maybe use it in their own teaching.

If you are a user, post up anything interesting you come across, and feel free to add comments on any of the posts that go up.

It is collaborative INSET, so I hope you enjoy it.