March 2006 - Posts
This contribution arrived while the blog was down - apologies to Heather for the delay!
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do
Poetry Archive is a world-wide collection of recordings of poets reading their work. You can listen, free of charge, to the voices of contemporary English-language poets and of poets from the past.
Poems are searchable by theme, poet, title, poetic form - it's excellent. There is a special
child-friendly section: http://www.poetryarchive.org/childrensarchive/home.do
Heather Leavers (Benenden CEP)
http://www.geograph.org.uk/
I found this quite by chance. The project opened a year ago with the aim of publishing a photograph to represent every square kilometre of the UK. 25% is already covered, and there's a clickable map to give easy access.
There is a Creative Commons licence on all images. This means that photographers grant the use of their photographs (provided they are attributed), while keeping copyright. Kent - particularly East Kent - isn't fully covered by any means, so why not contribute a photo of your school's locality?
Helen
Object Lessons is an online display of about 200 objects from Islington Artefacts Library. The site has high quality images and information on each object under the headings of childhood, work, health, clothes, homes, conflicts and cultures. A fantastic resource for history lessons.
http://www.objectlessons.org/
Mandy
Ideas for ICT Clubs will shortly be a new section on the Kent NGfL website. We would like to hear from schools about the kind of activities they are doing and what has been particularly successful.
Maybe you are using the Free Computer Clubs for schools?
(http://www.cc4g.net/)
Or using the time to practise touch typing using the BBC site or other software. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/typing/)
The Teaching Ideas website has an article from a school who has created computer games during their ICT club.
(http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/ict/creatingcomputergames.htm)
Mandy
Visit our main website at www.kented.org.uk/ngfl/
Just to remind you what a fantastic source of free graphics this is:
http://www.dorlingkindersley-uk.co.uk/
You can also go in via www.dk.com
'Free clip art' is the 4th section down, on the right. The categories and contents can easily be browsed by children, and there are instructions for copying an image.
Please add a comment to tell us your favourite sources of graphics to support cross-curricular work!
Helen
The Clicker 5 Additional User Licence offer has been extended until July 31st 2006 so that all schools in Kent get a fair chance to order at the special price of £15 per machine. Please note this only applies to Kent schools.
Keep an eye on our homepage for news of developments, such as Judith Adelsberg's excellent Clicker grids from Thanet's Hands On Support project: www.kented.org.uk/ngfl/software/clicker/resources.htm
Look out for Cricksoft's Community Learning Grids - we'll be implementing this as a county-wide service to enable you all to share your Clicker resources, complete with automatic screenshots, without having to send them to Mandy - I hate to deprive her!
Helen
There are many free tools on the internet which are are great to use in the classroom. Teachers Pet is one such tool. It is useful for using with interactive whiteboards or for making worksheets for Literacy and MFL lessons.
Teacher's Pet is an independent toolbar which runs within Microsoft Word. It is easy to install and the buttons on its drop-down menu allow you to create language learning exercises quickly and easily. All you need to do is highlight your text and in a few clicks, it is possible for example to remove words, vowels, punctuation and spaces. You can also jumble up the words in a sentence and do more amazing things too.
Please note:
Teacher’s Pet is a Microsoft Word template and the exercises are created using macros which perform a set of instructions in one click. For the macros to work, you need to open Word, go to Tools/Macro/Security/ and select Medium. This will mean that when you try and use Teacher’s Pet, a dialogue box will appear on the screen asking you to Enable Macros which you then select.
There are two methods to install the toolbar, depending on whether you want it to always be there in Word when you open it or if you want to launch it only from time to time.
I would recommend launching it only when you want it as it can be really annoying having to select enable macros every time you use Word.
Download the template to My Documents. Open Word and click on the Tools menu at the top of the screen then on Templates and Add-Ins. Click on Add in the Templates and Add-Ins window. Click on the drop down arrow in the Look in box and select My Documents. Select the Teacher’s Pet template - it's the file with a yellow strip along the top. Click OK twice. The dialogue box about enabling macros should then appear. Select ‘Enable Macros’.
Visit http://www.teachers-pet.org/ to find out more and to download the tool.
Mandy
Do you want a quick way of reducing photographs?
Judith Adelsberg suggests a free downloadable resource called Easy Thumbnails at www.fookes.com which she says is " an almost foolproof program to reduce the file size of digital images so that the Clicker 5 files don't eat up memory space on your server."
Judith has offered to write a "How to use it Sheet" which will go up on the Kent NGfL website on our ever growing Clicker pages. (Thanks Judith)
Do you have a tip you would like to share?
Mandy