Ninjawords dictionary
Sunday, January 17th, 2010Online dictionary has no adverts and is fast
Online dictionary has no adverts and is fast
Works in the Mac OS terminal, and on Linux if you install curl.
#! /bin/sh
curl —basic—user “username:password”
Update of something I found from 2007, when twitter was using a different [...]
Useful freeware mapping tool
“An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. And it’s not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas aren’t the ones that win.”
Paul Graham, via daring fireballI’m getting serious about mobile platforms. I need to decide [...]
Students on science degrees usually learn how to present findings in the form of a ‘poster’. A science poster is a special kind of wall display invented so everyone who attends a conference can present their results even though there is not enough time for them all to speak. MS PowerPoint (and OpenOffice Impress) can [...]
I’ve already blogged about the Most Important Key When Presenting with PowerPoint. The next most useful is the B key. Press the B key while presenting, and the screen goes black – your audience have nothing else to look at except you, and that means that you can get a hearing no matter how zappy [...]
Computers have windows and some way of pointing at things on the display. Mobile devices are moving over to touch sensitive displays with ‘gestural’ commands. Here is some pre-history…
Ivan Sutherland’s SketchPad demonstrated by Alan Kay. Sutherland’s PhD supervisor what Claude Shannon, and he in turn supervised Kay’s research. Alan Kay contributed to the development of [...]
A spin on Godin’s (the bald one) first few sentences: Running a class blog for students gets the teacher searching for really good Web links that fit that particular lesson’s content and that help students understand it. As Dave C (the chemist blogger) has worked out, you can use those links next year and in [...]
A colleague draws a short line at the edge of the whiteboard recording the image of the window frame when the Sun shines in the classroom window and then carries on. As he is an enthusiastic and engaging teacher, the students’ attention is drawn away from the mark. The students are always amazed at how [...]
Twitter includes a 140 character limit on each twit. Sounds like an ideal constraint to me. Challenge to students: summarise today’s lesson in one twit. Provide a copy of the blank above to each student…
Paul Constant has written a review of twitter as a series of twitter posts (via daringfireball.net). Now, what I want to [...]
OFCOM have published comparative maps of mobile broadband coverage (Jan 2009) showing various providers for the UK.
t-mobile 3G above…
3G coverage.
No brainer, if you live in Scotland, you need a wired connection. What surprised me was the fractal holes in the Birmingham conurbation area on t-mobile (my current web’n’walk modem) and the contrast with 3G, the [...]
Image*After and MorgueFile are Web resources where you can find and download high resolution photos for use in PowerPoint presentations or Web pages. MorgueFile’s name comes from the archives kept by newspapers and the Police of old photographs. You can used the ‘advanced’ search page in Flickr and specify only images with a Creative Commons [...]
Computers should be like toasters, they should just work for years and then when they stop working, you should be able to pop out and buy a new one. Toasters don’t need backups, and a major cause of problems with computers is loosing data (which may include family pictures and purchased music as well as [...]
Virtual learning environments: an evaluation of their development in a sample of educational settings is a report from OFSTED that looked at 18 college VLEs, with ‘reviews’ of 5 more.
“We found that the exploitation of VLEs at curriculum level resembled more of a cottage industry than a national technological revolution.”
Of course, if you want a [...]
The crux of the problem. Active learning is known to be more effective than receiving information, but we don’t use the active tools in Moodle. Geoff Petty gives out a large number of handouts on the downloads page of his Web site. The pyramid above was found in the Word file called Active Learning Works, [...]
Professor Alan Staley is Head of the Learning Technology Development Unit at BCU. He has introduced Moodle as BCU’s VLE and has used the introduction of a VLE to encourage more active styles of teaching and more focus on pedagogy. I attended a JISC West Midlands Regional Support Centre user group meeting some years ago [...]
Diana Laurillard is professor of Learning with Digital Technologies at the London Knowledge Lab. Laurillard wrote a very influential book called Rethinking University Teaching, published by Routledge, second edition with updated examples and a few modifications was released in 2001. Roger Rist has provided a brief summary of the conversational model from which I [...]
I hate to admit it, but the future is probably with small portable devices rather than Web Books.
Just a way of looking at Moodle courses that Alan Staley described during a Moodle User Group meeting some time ago.
Just a few sentences on each. A draft of some staff training material.
A search engine for Maths. You can type things like “y = (x+1)(x-1)x” or “weather Birmingham UK 2008” and get graphs and data. You can type a search term like “x^3 – 2x = 10” and the system will solve the equation exactly or approximately and draw graphs.
“The crux of the problem lies in the assumption that any program executing on a system on the user’s behalf should have the exact same abilities and permissions as any other program executing on behalf of the same user.”
OLPC wiki entry for bitfrost
Nice page on the security model built into sugar, the operating system [...]
Vanilla is a simple and rather basic forum script that runs on a Web server and needs a MySQL database and PHP (MySQL 3.23+ and PHP 4.1+). I had an instance working in about 5 minutes. The very basic functionality can be extended using plug-ins. In particular the rather ace autolinks plug in will automatically [...]
Uploaded the screencast about tree diagrams to MoleTV as a test of their system and embedding. I just uploaded the original .mov file I made using iShowU on my iBook. I’ll try a .mov converted from an .ogg file recorded on Ubuntu later, shame there is no direct support for .ogg files. MoleTV converts to [...]
Thanks to Geoff Rebbeck for telling us how PebblePad is used in his college. PebblePad is a rich system, so I should not have been so surprised that the way its being used at Thanet is so different to the way I’ve seen the system for assessed portfolios.
The new building has IWs in each room (240+ across all the campusses), with PCs in teaching rooms. Staff do not have laptops, staff PCs are allocated to staff rooms. There is a campus wide wifi for students so they can use their own laptops – the students authenticate and are taken to a landing [...]
I’m attending an unconference tomorrow at Gloucester College. This event is supported by a community page on the ning.com social networking site, I’ll link to that when the event is over. Ning is easy to use as a participant and provides a range of tools (photo, video sharing, automatic generation of slide shows from photos, [...]
Modem connected web book allows students to see YouTubes and encourages them to use blog between lessons.
Lens aberrations clearly visible on cheap compact digital camera
“For those uninitiated with Layer Tennis, the premise is simple: two players trade a Photoshop document back and forth, each player has 15 minutes to iterate on the previous “volley†however they see fit. The matches are played live on Friday afternoons, and people follow along and comment via Twitter. It really isn’t about winning [...]
http://m.slideshare.com/ is a landing page on Slideshare for mobile phones. The resolution of each slide is reduced to 240 by 180 (still in horizontal mode). I noticed that slides with white backgrounds and sparse content did not always render properly (big black blocks on some slides obscuring the image, as if the writing was ‘missed’ [...]
Useful online graph paper generator allows you to save PDF files with a choice of grids
Fujifilm Finepix J12 point and shoot makes nice classroom pictures. Battery has to be removed for charging.
Ubuntu repositories contain this program, it does what it says on the packet
Record my desktop from the Ubuntu repositories produces a screencam video of your Ubuntu session
MSIE v6 ignores the two forward slash style comments in CSS, and Firefox and Safari don’t. You can have different styles on different browsers…
ScreenToaster is now out of beta testing, and a lot of the sharp edges have been rounded off. ScreenToaster is a Web application that allows you to make screen videos of what you are doing on your computer and share them with others.
I’ve just used it to provide a series of videos of how to [...]
Individual attention?Self-directed learning?Tailored Curriculum?None of the above?
The BETT 2009 homepage has a poll on the right hand side of the page. After some deliberation, I went for ‘tailored curriculum’ and found myself in the majority (a fairly unusual position for me). I was dithering over ‘none of the above’ for some 30 seconds or so [...]
Simple metaphor, cross platform, open source
Contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity
8 minutes on how to link slides together and build a menu in PowerPoint.
areas of the states projected so that they are proportional to the number of seats in the electoral college. By Mark Newman
Will Richardson
Have a look at http://eduspaces.net/keithpeter/
I’m testing how the aggregation of feeds into ELGG blogs works.
Anyone else going to ELGG meeting in Brighton on the 1st of December?
ScreenToaster is in Beta but still creates smooth animations from my Ubuntu box
Answering some questions from today
Just a few slides on what, why, who and how
“If I were to do it again I might well go down the road of using students as actors, shooting very short scripts and using my digital camera to film. The results would be very different and not so generally useful, but it would be less of an investment in time.”
Chris Jackson – skills for [...]
Free geometry software
Bob Staake screen cam…
Using older software because it is familiar and does what you need.
Using illustrations to convey concepts can save time and can support students who have a visual orientation. Drawing a visual representation of a set of ideas or a process forces you to think in a different way compared with linear text. A project run by several Universities in Europe has resulted in the visual-literacy.org Web [...]
gOS is a version of Linux that is intended to be easy to use and designed around what most computer users want to do (Web, photos, music, e-mail, documents). The distribution is based on Ubuntu, in turn based on Debian, but the gOS people have made an honest attempt to make the desktop easy to [...]
“Many of the students we spoke to are making some use of their own tools to socialise and network in personal and public spaces, and in doing so are actually supporting their learning in that they use these tools to communicate and share information and resources between themselves and their peers, even though they did [...]
What do we put in front of people’s eyes?
Staff development: some reasons why we need to get serious about online learning as well as the mouse clicking
NeoOffice is a build of OpenOffice that integrates with the Mac OS X desktop much better than OpenOffice does.
Make tag clouds from text
The humble spreadsheet can encourage students to talk about doing mathematics. Ideas and investigations you develop are futureproof. The ‘small laptops’ that are becoming more common allow more flexible use of class based pair and group work.
The multimedia capture device we all carry
Teaching Creative Writing blog by Susan Lee Kerr
Feedback from the InTuition Spring 2008 article
How to use tumblr.com and why you would want to
Low power PC bolts onto the back of your LCD panel and provides Web access and basic wordprocessing and office.
What do the built in microphones sound like? Not too bad, a bit low on the treble but reasonable sensitivity. High pass filter in Audacity sorted it.
Windows or not?
We like this…
How to explain what VLEs, eportfolios and such things do
How about this as a synopsis of the role?
Scoping a portal for a college
Microsoft foobar
A series of course designs from the Institute of Education
Scatter diagram with draggable data points demonstrates line of best fit issues
You can use KeyNote 08 to make screencasts
Cross platform tape slide package for the Interweb thing
It is that time of year again – some text I wrote for an online conference on blogging.
For Mac OS X, cocoa native based on the Gnu Image Manipulation Program
How to install the well known quiz generator on Windows XP
Migrants are big users of communications technology
Oddmuse is a wiki script written in perl. It is based on the Usemod wiki script, but can produce valid xhtml. Oddmuse does not need a database, page data is stored in text files.
To get a wiki running on a Web server that runs Apache (1.2 upwards) and that can run perl cgi scripts, you [...]
Quiz program for individual student support
I’m both in different parts of the lesson. I think that many people assume that PowerPoint use implies Sage role, and I was trying to provide counterexamples.
Charles Nelson takes me to task in my post about PowerPoint in a post on his Explorations in Learning blog as follows
“One point that needs to be considered a [...]
What is appropriate, when and why?
The Learning Circuits blog has posed this question about PowerPoint, with some detailed side questions. My answers below. See also Clive Shepherd’s answer on his Clive on Learning blog. I like the example slides put up by Jay Cross, especially the little chap ‘reading’ a technical manual upside down! In [...]
Testing the ScribeFire blog tool, a plugin for Firefox. You can post to blog directly from Firefox, and you can upload pictures using the WordPress image upload script.
The HTML produced by the rich text editor is familiar to Firefox and Mozilla users, full of line break tags. At present, there appears to be no [...]
Using a blog to get views before a staff development event.
Document sharing site, will this be useful?
Get a blog going, use flickr and TeacherTube, just do something
Latest stable version installs easily on hosted server space
YouTube for teachers uses ‘post anything, the community decides’ model for inappropriate content.
A list of names, each name appears and disappears in a three second cycle
What do we need to teach people about computers?
Being a little subtle can pay off, and not just with IT support
Do the findings actually help you design activities?
Michael Wesch and students producing remarkable stuff
Installing Apache and UseMod on Xubuntu
Slideshare.net lets you share slides. Imagine if you could record sound and time transitions…
The social browser has limited blogging tool built-in.
Mohamed Taher has assembled a nice page of links
Jason Fried’s short blog post is all about communities of practice
From JISC North West. Value added over projector?
Kodak EasyShare C310 for quick snaps
Alan Staley gave a talk at the Moodle User Group meeting today. He showed one slide that struck me as being a very useful way of explaining the various ways of using Moodle to teachers. This simple (well, simple when you see someone else explain it) diagram provides a classification scheme for VLE courses.
This small app allows you to enter a Web address and then save a PNG graphics file of the whole page – screen grabs that are a couple of thousand pixels high.
Change two image files in the default WordPress theme to produce a white page area with sparse header image. I wanted a high key look with plenty of space and no ‘boxes’.
YouTube screencast of RBL session 5 deals with distance travelled, the planning and milestones for resource based learning projects, the way I intend to use progress reviews to support participants in carrying out their project plans, and some quick hints on a piece of writing that is due in shortly. The screencast took two takes of about 7 or 8 minutes to produce. The visuals are simply the slides I will use in the f2f session anyway.
9 minutes and 46 seconds on basic probability, including the probability scale, expected frequencies, mutually exclusive and independent events, possibility space diagrams and even a without replacement problem. All aimed at a GCSE Intermediate group. The .mov file was produced by ‘presenting’ a PowerPoint while speaking a commentary recorded using iShowU screen cam software. YouTube provide the hosting and convert the .mov to a Flash movie.
Option-Backspace does deleting…
The screen design screencast MOV was uploaded to YouTube. I’m now waiting for it to be ‘processed’ so that the video can be watched.
A screencast made on Mac OS X using iShowU and Video2SWF to produce a flash movie with synchronised sound.
Just a trial of the tags for embedding. This post should show the Tiny Dot video about the scale of the solar system posted by saulatali79.
Intellectual property rights may damage innovation and split markets. Lessig explains using the Google Book Search as an example, through the medium of a presentation with sound track.
In previous years, we have used a collective blog for journalism students with the tutor acting as editor. Perhaps it is now time to encourage NCTJ students to set up their own blogs on blogger or similar and self-publish (with safeguards for the College).
Download a 34 page handout that describes the various ways in which a teacher in an FE College in the UK might support students using various ICT/ILT/e-learning facilities. This is a draft, and I’m starting with the text and then adding photos, screen grabs and Web addresses later. Some of my colleagues will actually scan a handout like this and read parts that attract their attention.
What is an Interactive Whiteboard? How can I use it? A description of the two main kinds of whiteboard (‘hard’ and ‘soft’ or membrane boards), and the two main modes (screen annotation and whiteboard).
MS PowerPoint makes it easy to produce screens with a mix of images, text and embedded sound and video clips. Microsoft have included a set of ‘slide layouts’ based on bullet points and screen-width text containers. Both Tufte and Godin are critical of these templates for contrasting reasons.
PowerPoint allows you to associate actions with buttons and other objects on slides. You can switch off the slide transition and use PowerPoint as a system for producing screen based learning packages. This 12 page handout covers the basics…
Staff development notes: I may turn these into a script. Just a few points on how to use e-mail effectively with students.
PDF newspaper free download from Guardian Unlimited
Minimalist pages show just the news stories as they update
What to do if one arrives in your room
Some web applications that let you choose and customise pictures
a bit of that reflection and story writing…
wikispaces.com provides relatively cheap wiki hosting
Learning through play
Keith patents breathing…
Richard Treves has analysed a free course on Google Earth and found that ‘build it and they will come’ does not always work
Inexpensive ‘technology’ to get all students responding
How to reduce cable noise…
Milton Keynes and the Open University go moodling…
Can students teach themselves using the Web?
It may be the technology
Now I have the topics mapped, it is time to start adding bits of content
Draggable triangle with perpendicular height
Time to start putting some content in soon
Tabbed browsing and RSS feeds in a side bar…
Photoshop and then copy paste a calendar in
Winner of recent BBC redesign contest does a Being John Malkovich
e-learning definition used by OFSTED very broad and includes ILT/ICT
This timeline is all my own work and I didn’t look at the textbook… Lesson 2 and 3 applied to an animation showing how the area of a parallelogram is calculated…
Hog Bay software provide a small app that turns your iBook or MacBook into an Alphasmart with built in hand heater
External mailing lists and registrations can be a source of spam. Use plus addressing to keep tags on where the spam is coming from
Tinderbox from Eastgate systems allows rapid development of complex web sites and a visual map of ‘emergent structure’ of a teaching task
1 Gb storage for files on the Web.
Just some notes for colleagues for a training session
If you have any version of the Flash Player from 5 upwards installed on your browser, then the yellow and blue grid above should show a blue square and a red triangle moving around and changing their opacity.
The animation loops once and then stops, and the frame rate is 15 frames per second. According to [...]
Being able to express thoughts in writing is key to any career
Flash Journalism by Mindy McAdams, lesson 1. Why is a maths teacher using a book aimed at journalists?
Sound track acts as anchor to video
4 minutes and 15 seconds on what a Virtual Learning Environment can do for you
Does the blog act as a gateway to the VLE or does the VLE contain the blog?
Cheaper digital speech recorders can’t produce CD quality but may have plenty of uses in the classroom – just put an external mic on!
Moodle at Shefcol according to Julia DugglebyBlogging by meSeb Schmoller’s fortnightly mailing is now published by typepad. Seb is inviting guest contributions, and I was honoured to be asked to contribute. I wrote about using blogger as a way of getting colleagues interested in online support. My contribution meshed in with Julia’s about the next [...]
“Some lecture classes have 250 students, so I question the effectiveness of a didactic lecture for an hour.”
Dr Bill Ashraf will be distributing lectures by podcast soon in place of live lectures in a theatre. In groups of 250 plus I can see his point: no one ever asks a question in a group of [...]
Not tabloid hacks with fast habits but a book about how to use Macromedia Flash to make Web based news stories. One included exercise is about synchronising sound with image transitions: flash lessons here we come…
We were looking at finding a value for the intercept of a straight line graph when the scale of the graph made it difficult to have an X axis that started at zero – we were setting up and solving a simple equation within a context.
This second whiteboard processed using ScanR was taken in [...]
The photo above shows one of today’s whiteboards as imaged using my Olympus Camedia point and shoot – the images are 1600 by 1200 pixels. I resized the image above using Photoshop Elements with bi-cubic resampling. No other adjustments have been made, the flat image is typical of this camera. A quick e-mail to ScanR.com [...]
Scanr is a Web service that claims to “convert photos of whiteboards and documents into searchable PDF files”. The ‘searchable’ bit applies to pictures of documents with typed text (see later). The service certainly makes converting fuzzy badly lit images of (ordinary) whiteboards more readable. The ‘whiteboard’ function can also be used to convert [...]
Moodle 1.53 and 1.6 can be ‘installed’ on a USB stick. Just make sure the drive letter assigned to the stick stays the same on each machine
Yotophoto is a search engine for copyright free or free use images
Anyone got recommendations for simple digital sound recorders?
Re-installed Moodle 1.53 stable
Anyone going?
Inspiration now does Buzan style mind maps in addition to the more flexible free symbol maps provided previously.
Open Office 2.0 can export PowerPoint presentations as rudimentary flash animations
Script and MP3 of a short talk on blogs in education
Blog about presentations
Preview allows you to cut diagrams out of PDF files and save them as PNG or JPG files
Spreadsheet shows effect of adding two phase shifted sine waves
Pop some graphs on the gcse blog and ask for the equations by e-mail?
Google Earth and data handling activities
Google Earth for Mac OS X
To remove blank lines from a text file in Textwrangler, you have to run search and replace, tick the ‘use Grep’ option and then search on the pattern ^r. Replace with nowt and the effect is magic. A boon to the ‘everything in one big text file’ advocates.
The pattern < /?[^>]> can be used to [...]
Put the whole of GCSE Maths where you can see it
Netscape 8 for Windows has a spyware/adware scanner built in
OpenOffice is an Open Source office application produced with a large amount of support from Sun Microsystems. Because the application is open source, you can burn CDs and pass copies to students (or anyone!). Students have downloaded the package and used the Impress presentation component to produce presentations – laptops are often sold with [...]
The demonstration version of Reduce for Windows (scroll down page when it loads) – a computer algebra package – can be used to factorise large prime numbers (and polynomials!) as a way of demonstrating the properties of large numbers. Interactive sessions on a projector (the fonts are a bit small but there is no [...]
Note added 6 March 2006 :: It looks as if security update 2006-001 addresses these two issues, at least as regards Safari and Mail. I picked this one up through software update some days ago.
Its hassle Apple week, with a ‘drive by download’ exploit appearing and being reported on the front page of the BBC [...]
Quiz suite written by esol teacher is at version 6 and getting seriously useful
Excel on projector helps provide rapidly updated charts to trigger discussion
MeatBall wiki page about educational uses of wikis and other links
The transit time of a planet can help you find the planet in the sky and can help plan observing trips
MS Excel or any spreadsheet on a projector with whole class questions
Some projects in Southern Africa aim to reduce the impact of the digital divide
Minimal instant on keyboard usable on trains and allows capture of text in meetings and in odd corners of time.
MS PowerPoint can help you plan writing – forces focus on structure
A simple blog can act as a diary for a class.
Moodle runs OK under Mac OS X apache with MySQL 4.0.2x- just needs graphics library
Gossamer-Threads forum is free to non-profit organisations and has good user management but without bulk upload. Discus Pro costs about £70 but has user creation by spreadsheet.
Temperature records kept from 1659 to present day allow trends to be identified
Tinderbox allows a quick and dirty HTML export template and the construction of a course web site in a very short time
Industrial archaeology in the cyber age? We need to preserve the appearance of the older user interfaces and this site does it well.
Some links on learning theory
Use the ‘forms’ toolbar in MS Excel to link a slider control with a cell. Then you can make ‘dynamic graphs’. Projected onto a screen, you can ask students to predict what the result of a change is going to be.
Download a spreadsheet that simulates breeding 60 fruit flies
The spreadsheet simulates the results of breeding fruit flies (F2 Generation – Second Filial?) where the expected outcome is a simple 1:3 Mendelian ratio of vestigial winged flies to winged flies
The screen shot above shows an anomalous result – a chi-squared statistic well above 3.84, the critical [...]
Try using 4 colours to colour in some maps – harder than it looks
Java applets and some DHTML Javascript can be used for educational purposes- and you don’t have to code a line
Analogue synthesisers – a hoot with op amps and noise
Nicholas Negroponte’s latest idea for improving education
Some differences between blogs and forums – blogs might encourage student involvement more by being less of a ‘performance’ but forums might be better for a structured activity
That ‘no entry’ sign causes lots of trouble
LaTiS Centre Image Archive from Essex University
Thanks for this resource – about 400 free pictures. Mostly .jpegs and around 400 to 600 pixels wide with white backgrounds.
The original Online Map Creator Web site provides an online interface to the GMT package
Planiglobe is the new simplified interface – faster but currently has few options
The original OMC has been around for years and will plot contours of ocean depth and continental height. You can pull the plots down as PS files or [...]
Download a handout for students on organising folders in My Computer. Saves all that stress with failing floppies.
“Alternatives to the ‘monolithic’ VLE, including public domain and open source VLEs, are emerging strongly. Some, such as ‘blogs’ and ‘wikis’, are completely different avenues to electronic publishing and collaboration and can be relatively inexpensive. Although UK universities seem to be surprisingly reluctant to spend less rather than more money on technology solutions, one can [...]
The Becta report based on an ‘oportunity’ sample of schools using Open Source software to varying extents compared to schools using commercial software (i.e. Windows servers, desktops and Office) has now been published (publication was delayed during the General Election).
The BECTa press release has a good summary
The full BECTa report Open Source Software in Schools [...]
Paper has a function and the paperless office isn’t going to happen. Looking at how people use paper might lead us to understand where IT solutions might work well.
The Natioanl Library of Virtual Manipulatives for Interactive Mathematics is a Web site with a large number of Java applets that invite students to explore Mathematics problems. ‘Manipulatives’ is the US term for things like Cuisenaire rods and Dienes blocks.
The Java applets are mapped to the US curriculum based on ‘grades’. I have used [...]
Java game speeds up estimation with three digit whole numbers.
“Within three months of opening up of the Internet kiosk, it was found that the children, mostly from the slum, had achieved a certain level of computer skills without any planned instructional intervention. They were able to browse the Internet, download songs, go to cartoon sites, work on MS Paint. They even invented their own [...]
Processing is a programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional [...]
The NFER has a long term project (started in 2002) tracking students’ experience of citizenship education. The most recent report is referenced as follows….CLEAVER, E., IRELAND, E., KERR, D. and LOPES, J. (2005). Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study: Second Cross-Sectional Survey 2004 Listening to Young People: Citizenship Education in England (DfES Research Report 626). London: DfES
The [...]
Free sound editor available for download
Versions for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows
Can edit MP3s and .wav formats
Can record from microphone or other sources supported by the computer
Supports a sound programming language called Nyquist
Possibly the best icon I have seen for an open source program – wouldn’t mind getting the T-shirt!
I have this idea of [...]
“Teddys would be with their user for their entire lives. They would change in shape and form to match the growing sophistication and interests of the person, but each time someone got a new model Teddy, the information from the earlier version would be transferred to the new. As a result, Teddy would always retain [...]
Take on the world with a stack of 5 by 3 index cards – one way to get Web sites sorted before clicking on the Dreamweaver icon when building a moderately complex Web site.
This page describes card sorting techniques to help plan Web sites. Ideally card sorting can help define content – not so much [...]
I’ve been using a simple robust Web based forum with a number of students studying an ICT module on an Applied Science course – students include 16-19, mature full time and mature evening class students. Teaching is primarily face-to-face but with online follow up.
I used the Gossamer Threads forum as it is free to non-profit [...]
Fax your MP is a simple service that does what it says. You can fax your MP from a computer connected to the Internet. You just
type in your postcode
the database comes back with a page about your MP and links to recent votes and speeches
you can then type in a fax (or e-mail if the [...]
PROPS is an online publishing system designed to mimic the workflow found in a small newspaper. Journalists can write stories which can be assigned by an editor. A story can be tracked through first, second and third re-writes and finally added to an ‘issue’ of the newspaper. Issues can be final (ie published) or staged [...]
MindGenius is a ‘mind mapping’ software tool for making ‘bubble notes’ or ‘mind maps’ – visual diagrams that allow you to explore the links between ideas. Many teachers in humanities subjects use ‘mind maps’ to motivate students doing essay plans and so on. I’ll be using one to help forensic science students produce a report [...]
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I suggest you use a very simple page design and navigation for course sites
In my opinion, that means…
** a home page that acts as a course diary
** a contact form
** a page with downloadable files such as the scheme of work
the course diary should have carefully chosen links added each week at the top of [...]
The ILT category has just a few ideas that have worked for me. The emphasis is on
things that require little preparation other than the teaching plan
30 minutes a week rule
ideas that increase interaction between students in the classroom
ideas that keep students in touch with teachers, peer group or the material in the periods between class [...]
You can use a simple guestbook script (such as Big Sam) to post links and a brief description of what was covered each week for students, especially evening students who come to College once a week and who will inevitably need to miss lessons now and again.
The best strategy is to use a script [...]