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Google Love Stories

April 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Google released their Parisian Love Story advert for the Superbowl earlier in the year – watch it, it’s ever so clever:

You can now make you own stories with 7 simple search terms.  It couldn’t be easier, you just type in up to 7 search terms and then choose whether the video will show it as a normal search, image search, map search etc.  Try it here: http://www.youtube.com/user/SearchStories

I knocked one up very quickly – took about 5 minutes, you’ll have to excuse the cheese factor of it!

Could be a great tool for pupils telling stories new or old, explaining topics, making revision tips, any other suggestions?

Enjoy :)

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Surfing the wave – How I filter MY Web

April 6, 2010 By 1 Comment

The best bits of MY web (Image by Niffty on Flickr)

The Internet I love (Image by Niffty on Flickr)

Inspired by Simon Job, this is a post about how I surf the torrential tidal wave of information that is out there on the Internet, how I filter it down into a manageable stream to consume and how I save the best bits for later.

I have been using Google Reader for the last 3 years or so to read the latest updates from my favourite websites and blogs.  I have just spent about the last 4 hours tidying up my list of 400+ websites which I follow after reading an article on Lifehacker about how to declutter and streamline you google reader inbox.

I hope there are some useful tips about Google Reader, Delicious & Instapaper for newcomers to rss, and to old timers with a bulging reader like myself.

I’ve split this little guide into three sections:

  1. How I read just the best bits of the Web that I want, filtering out the noise.
  2. How I save the best bits to read later or for future reference.
  3. How I find retrieve my archived information.

I’d be fascinated to hear how you filter the Web to your liking, and whether any of this was of use to you :)

Simon Job has created a great little graphic to explain this process:

Using The Web

Using The Web

[Read more...]

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BrainPOP Maths Videos

September 27, 2009 By 3 Comments

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.

[Read more...]

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Filed Under: Classroom, EdTech, Maths, Tools Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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cre8ate maths

August 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Cre8ate maths is a fantastic set of rich mathematical activities developed by the Centre for Science Education (CSE) with the mathematics lead from the Mathematics Education Centre (MEC), of Sheffield Hallam University.  They have been created to support schools in Yorkshire & Humberside, and are focussed on the 12 priority industry sectors of the area.  Activities are based around the chemical industry, food production, childcare and many others.

[Read more...]

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Sharing Resources

January 25, 2009 By 9 Comments

Like most teachers I have collected masses of resources over the years and created masses more.  Lots of my resources which I believe to be free of copyright are stored online and catalogued with the excellent www.delicious.com.

As I’m sure most readers are aware Delicious.com is a great social bookmarking website.  It’s a place to save all of your bookmarks online, so that they are accessible from any computer with an Internet connection.  If you’re new to Delicious then this Common Craft video sums it up best:

I have tagged numerous web based resources along with the specific urls of lots of Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Activstudio files.  The files are all stored on the excellent www.getdropbox.com.

Dropbox gives you 2Gb of free online storage space.  Dropbox works best when you install the client on your computer (Windows/Mac/Linux compatible).  The installer creates a ‘My Dropbox’ folder on your computer.  Anything that you store in this folder is automatically replicated on the Web and on any other machine you install Dropbox on.  This makes it great for synchronising files between different machines.

I have stored all of the resources that I want to share in the ‘Public’ Dropbox folder, this one is viewable by all.

To catalogue a file in Delicious, go to the file, click ‘Copy Public url’ and paste this into a new bookmark on Delicious.

Dropbox Copy url

Dropbox Copy url

Delicious.com save new bookmark

Delicious.com save new bookmark

This bookmark is then tagged with as many descriptive words as possible.

These bookmarks include numerous pdf files from the National Strategies site which I have cut up into manageable parts.  I hope that the National Strategies are happy with this educational use of their, at times, excellent resources.  If any person feels I am sharing material to which they own copyright, or who would like full credit given, please contact me and I will amend it to your wishes immediately.

I have included the tag msow in all of my bookmarks.  I did this as I wanted to be able to differentiate these as bookmarks for teaching purposes (msow originally stood for ‘maths scheme of work’ as there are Delicious links at the bottom of each page of my online scheme of work).

If there are other Maths teachers out there with existing Delicious accounts can I suggest we all agree on a  common tag such as this?  It would make searching for resources more focussed.  A search for ‘Data‘ brings up too many links unsuitable for teaching, but one for ‘Data+msow‘ would just bring up ours.

So if you’d like to join my network, follow the link below.  If you’d like to follow the idea of a common tag for Maths teaching resources then please leave a comment.

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nrich – rich mathematical tasks

January 6, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I thought it time to share some of the resources that I use frequently and perhaps I take for granted.  1st up, nrich:

nrich is a great UK website that is chock full of rich mathematical problems  suitable for pupils from 5-19.

The website has a teacher or pupil view.  Following the link to the teacher section gives you the option of searching by ability range, looking at various curriculum mapping documents and looking at the monthly problems.  Each month a new set of problems are added and answers are invited from the public.  This can be good incentive for pupil completion, promise to send in the best examples!  Puzzles are split into 5 stages, these nominally follow the UK Key Stages, 1 being early primary school up to 5 being A-Level.

I sometimes use these as homeworks, group tasks, extension tasks.  They really can be used to spice up any lesson.  These puzzles and challenges fit in well with the new KS3 National Curriculum.

So get searching, there’s bound to a puzzle you can use for the topic you are teaching tomorrow!

EDIT: For reference the Stages follow the UK Key Stages:

  • KS1 = 4-6 yrs
  • KS2 = 7-11 yrs
  • KS3 = 11-14 yrs
  • KS4 = 14-16 yrs
  • KS5  = 16-18 yrs

I tend to mix & match as appropriate to each class, searching by topic first and selecting a puzzle appropriate t0 their ability next.

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Filed Under: Classroom, Maths Tagged With: , , , ,