ideas for IT in teaching

Apologies for being so slow to post recently… exams and OFSTED make things run a little slow around here!

One thing I have been meaning to talk about is studeous. An amazing pupil communication site that I have been playing around with quite a lot and I will soon be inflicting on a few of my groups.  I have been really impressed with its ease of use and with its potential for being genuinely useful for my pupils in terms of them being able to get in contact with me, remember homeworks, join forums and post/download work. It is what our moodle site is definitely missing in my opinion – my moodle just ain’t as good.

So, check it out. you will need to request a beta login, but I think it is going to be great. I will keep you posted.

Fancy posting a quick quiz on your blog for your students?

Check out mystudiyo for free, amazing looking quizzes.

Have a look at this one to see what I mean.

Penguin have recently launched an amazing project – to have 6 modern authors rewrite 6 classic novels, using web 2.0 technologies to bring them alive for an entirely different audience.

Just an amazing use of technologies.

Thanks to ewan macintosh for this.

http://wetellstories.co.uk

One for the scientists!

Visible body is a site with fully searchable, 3D images of the human body, featuring:

• Complete, fully interactive, 3D human anatomy model
• Detailed models of all body systems
• Dynamic search capability
• Easy-to-use, 3D controls
• Seamless compatibility with Internet Explorer

Quizlet is my new favourite app for making vocab flashcards that my students can access online to help them with their learning.  It is free to get an account and dead easy to input the terms and definitions. Sure, at the end of the day they are only flashcards, but you know what they say – sometimes the old ones are the best!

Rainlender is a free calendar and organiser tool that can sit on your desktop and includes to do lists and upcoming events as set by what you input into your calendar. You can also set it so that it loads up automatically on startup, so if you put in all your tasks and appointments you should never miss another one again.

Damn, there goes my excuse.

Want to do a group project with some other people, or make a form/group space where people can work on things together?

Some time ago Google acquired the wiki site, JotSpot, and has been developing it ever since. Now it has been re-born within Google’s new application, Google Sites, which makes “creating a team site as easy as editing a document”. “People can work together on a Site to add file attachments, information from other Google applications (like Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube and Picasa), and new free-form content. Creating a site together is as easy as editing a document, and you always control who has access, whether it’s just yourself, your team, or your whole organization. You can even publish Sites to the world. The Google Sites web application is accessible from any internet connected computer.” Google Sites is available from within Google apps Each Google Apps account receives at least 10GB of storage in Google Sites.

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