Musings on Maths, education, teaching and technology.
The BBC has started making available clips from their thousands of hours of wildlife documentaries. You can choose which clip you want to watch by filtering your search by Animal, Habitat, Adaptation or Location – Geographical heaven, but obviously could be really useful in a number of subjects. There are 5000 clips available on-line already.
This might be the final death of your school Internet connection – but here’s the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/wildlifefinder/
First up a disclaimer: The lovely people at BrainPop UK offered me & my school a free 3 month subscription to their site in return for a post on their new Maths videos, this is said post.
With that out of the way, what’s BrainPop? The website has videos for many subjects, all starring Tim and his beeping robot friend Moby. Subjects covered include: Science, English, Maths, Humanities, Arts, PSHE, Citizenship & Design & Technology.
Tim & Moby can probably explain it better than me, head over to there introductory video here.
So today Google announced that they will be introducing their very own Google Chrome OS.
This follows in the wake of excellent the Google Chrome web browser which was released last year. Designed initially for netbooks, it appears that the OS will effectively be little more than a web browser. The beauty of this is that it will be incredibly quick and run on relatively underpowered/old hardware.
Google announced a new product to the World at it’s Google I/O conference yesterday, Google Wave.
There has been much written about it around the Web, by folks more intelligent than I, so if you want to catch up on the intricacies then read some of these sites:
Ars Technica Tech Crunch Tech Crunch again LifeHacker DownloadSquad
You can sign up to be informed about Wave, and hopefully get involved with the beta at the Google Wave website: http://wave.google.com. If you’re lucky the video might be working on that site too, it was temperamental at the time of writing.
This looks very exciting for school use. Many seem to have dubbed it the ‘new email’ already. The collaboration possibilities in and between classrooms look fantastic. I’ve been a big fan of using wikis as collaborative documents and this looks like it will take the concept of a wiki to a new level. The ability to drag and drop files into a collaborative document in a browser for instance lowers the technical skills required for working with these kinds of technologies considerably.
Last week I began hearing some twittering about ads appearing on Edublogs blogs. A little investigation on the Edublogs forums showed a post which, to be fair, dates back some months detailing the fact that ads will be added at random to free accounts. They can quickly be removed for $40 a year as part of the Edublogs Supporter scheme.
As you will see on the forum post and twitter link above the backlash has begun. Whilst it seems unfair to kick a free service I can’t help feeling let down by Edublogs. The service was always heavily promoted as being free and ad free. To suddenly turn on ‘in post’ Google ads without so much as an email to members informing them of this decision is disappointing. There are already tales of inappropriate adverts involving guns, dating agencies etc appearing on school blogs. The fact that these are planted inside posts makes it appear as if the author is promoting them.
I’d been thinking on and off over recent months that I should really own my own little part of the Web, so really I should thank Edublogs for spurring me on. The process of buying a domain and importing this blog was easier than I thought. I will detail the process in due course for anyone who is interested. Whilst costing a bit more than $40 a year, I’m pleased with the result.
I think it is important that we teach pupils to manage their on-line identities, and it will be increasingly important what employers, pupils and parents see of us online. If someone wants to find me then I think mrstucke.com is an obvious place to look!
So farewell Edublogs, I hope you get over this hurdle. I am thankful for getting me started so easily on this journey but I’m off to pastures new….
CC image from kamoda on flickr
Richard Taylor from www.tutpup.com passed his new site on to me in a recent comment on the blog:
We have just beta released a new free maths games website which is starting to get quite a bit of traction in the UK. It’s free, has no ads, and allows kids to compete head to head but doesn’t allow them to communicate directly. It is really KS1 & 2 focused but we are getting lots of use from secondaries (or we were last week before half term).
We have just added a few new teacher features (class registration, reports etc) and if you have any ideas or queries drop me a line, or if you like it you could put in a link.
I have had a chance to look at the site this weekend and to test it with a low ability class of 11/12 year olds today and I’m delighted with it!
The site allows pupils from around the world to compete against each other at mental maths questions in a completely safe environment, no actual personal details just clever usernames made from colours and animals (I’m bluepig22!).
The competitive element is the clincher, the class I tried it with today are difficult and disaffected but did more Maths today than they have for most of the year.
The site is simply designed and my class enjoyed beating not only each other but pupils from Brazil, Australia, France, Japan……
I’ve not even looked fully into the class reports feature but this could be most useful for identifying weaknesses and future teaching points.
A nice touch is the graduation medal that you get when you have done really well at a certain level, this really encouraged pupils to move onto a more difficult level rather than sticking with the easy questions all day.
An excellent, free resource, well done Richard! Let me know what you think 
me elsewhere