Having heard quite a bit about geocaching over the last year, I thought I would give it a go this summer holiday. I had watched a few presentations on it at various TeachMeets, followed a few tweets about it and spoken to a few friends about what was required. The whole concept is quite exciting [...]
I have just completed the most interesting and varied year of my career to date and now that it’s summer, I can finally get off the rollercoaster and enjoy a few weeks of calm. I have been employed for two days a week as acting head of ICT in a secondary school. Not to go [...]
The DFE recently announced new legislation concerning school websites which comes into effect for the 1st of September 2012. In summary, the new legislation is removing the requirement for schools to provide a paper prospectus and is instead requiring schools to have all of the information available online. Is your website ready? Do you have a description [...]
Reach into the Toolbox #9 The Photosynth tools from Microsoft allow you to create visually stunning photographs from single images which are then ‘stitched’ together. The example below was taken by my colleague Steph as we left the BETT show in January 2012. A view of BETT 2012 on Wednesday evening as the last visitors were leaving. [...]
Reach into the Toolbox #7 The Teacher Training Video website has been created by Russell Stannard, a principal teaching fellow at the University of Warwick working in the Center for Applied Linguistics. He has created a wide range of videos to help students and educators learn how to use new technology tools and apply them in the [...]
Reach into the Toolbox #6 I must begin with week’s blog with a confession – I am absolutely rubbish at art or anything remotely artistic, I know nothing, I am completely incompetent. At primary school my teacher had to salvage all of my efforts to make them look like something recognisable. My secondary school art [...]
Reach into the Toolbox #5 I know this is old hat…..I know Photostory has been around for years…. but I absolutely love this free download from Microsoft. This simple wizard based programme allows you to upload and edit images, add text, narration and music as well as play with image transitions and effects. The resulting effect is [...]
The credit-card sized computer designed to help teach children to program code has gone on sale today. Raspberry Pi is a low-cost, simple computer created by a small group of people from the education world and the UK tech industry. It is sold uncased without a keyboard or monitor, the Pi has gained much interest [...]
Reach into the Toolbox #4 Wordle allows you to create “word clouds” from text that you provide: just copy and paste some text into the text box and press Go! Wordle uses the number of times a word appears in a text to determine its relative size – the more frequent the word, the larger it [...]
Reach into the Toolbox #3 This week’s offering from Education Reach is a website called Ideas to Inspire which highlights not just one tool, but a variety of tools and ideas about using ICT in the classroom to enhance, inspire and motivate (you and your pupils!). Contributions to each category have come from teachers all over the [...]
