Hi everyone,

Each week I am going to try and post some new ideas and things to use in your classrooms I have come across on the internet or have been sent to me. There may be some things that may be relevant to you and some things that you may store for a rainy day.

If you find things useful, pass it on.

A "friendly" spellchecker!

This spell checker can be downloaded for free from this website and runs as an add-on to Microsoft Word.  It’s surprisingly straight forward and accurate and provides a nice looking, child friendly interface.  Being specifically designed to recognise common mistakes made by people with dyslexia, I can see this being very useful as it will also speak the text too.   The spell checker can be used by placing your cursor within the sentence you want to check and simply pressing the F2 button or the ‘Ginger’ spellchecker icon in the top right hand corner of the screen.
If people like it, I'll install it on the school network and in the suite.

How big is the Internet?

www.speaktools.com

www.speaktools.com

Speak Clipboard is an open source application which will read out the contents of your clipboard.  It’s a free, lightweight program. To make Speak Clipoboard talk to you, all you need to do is copy the text to yout clipboard using Right click – Copy, or Ctrl + C, then fire up the app.  I’m quite excited about the potential for making learners more independent in their learning in ICT.  Many times, the ability to read a dialogue box or set of instructions gets in the way of an attempt at problem solving.  Another great freebie!

10 quick ICT ideas!

This is the result of a google search of ideas. I have selected ones which I think might be useful. I have suggested where they could be used...

Have fun

1. Setup a blog - a place to offer additional support, ideas and links to help students' learning. ALL SUBJECTS
2. Get students to video their class presentation - really effective use of ICT where students are in control, scripting and preparing a presentation to go online. ALL SUBJECTS
3. Give students a terrible PowerPoint presentation - provide students with an awful PowerPoint presentation about a particular topic. Make it look awful, include incorrect and worthless information, put everything in the wrong order. Ask them to mark it and then fix it. ALL SUBJECTS
4. Give students a massive Word document and a strict word limit - provide students with a 4 page document full of information and ask them to trim the text to 200 words. LITERACY? ALL?
5. Project a video but remove the sound. For example, play a film trailer without any sound, get students to add their own music and effects to fit. MUSIC?
6. Use digital video played through the IWB, such as Windows Movie Maker to pause and annotate video clips and to take still images of the annotations / picture - to build up story board of main points from video for feedback at the end. LITERACY, HUMANITIES, MFL (CREATING SUBTITLES?)
7. Web cam / Skype- use a web cam to enable subject specialist to be hotseated by different classes at the same time, or use the web cam as part of a role play activity in which the individual comes through on the screen with an eyewitness account of a key event from history as if they have just witnessed it - HISTORY / LITERACY
8. Weathermen / women - use an online weather map and allow the children to present the weather using key terminology GEOGRAPHY / LITERACY
9. You say we (don't) pay - fun variation of Richard and Judy's game. Project images of famous figures or keywords from the topic under study behind a student or group of students sitting at the front. The class describe the image or keyword and the student at the front must guess what is on the screen. ALL SUBJECTS
10. Create a news report - Making the News 2 (MTN2) is a website designed to introduce students to the world of online media publishing and broadcasting for the 21st century. Teachers may register, doing so will create a homepage on MTN for their school. The teacher may then create student accounts. http://mtn2.e2bn.org/mtn/info/whatismtn

Go Animate!

This is great fun! You can use this program to generate a simple animation which the children can narrate. It may be useful in PHSCE lessons to all children to animate characters to explore scenarios.

download here http://goanimate.com/

Half a Min?

• Create your own Flash-based interactive quiz
  
• Your own quiz in minutes - type your questions in, press generate - that's it!
  
• This quiz is ideal for terminology or definitions.
  
• Each word is jumbled up, the player has 30 seconds to try and guess the answer.
• download here http://www.contentgenerator.net/halfamin/default.shtml

Apostrophe Man to the Rescue?

A discussion point and a fun way to introduce apostrophes?

Maths Worksheet generator

This US based worksheet generator produces all sorts of maths worksheets. You simply use the script to make, for example, multiplication tables worksheets or missing addend worksheets or division with remainder. Create worksheets for addition/subtraction/multiplication in columns or long division (by choosing 'vertical' form).  You can use negative numbers.  Experiment with the options to customize the worksheets as you like! It's really helpful when you need something specific or need some differentiation or extension.

http://www.homeschoolmath.net/worksheets/

Here's an example

Wordle

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text, appearing larger the more they are used. I think that this shows emphasis. You can tweak your clouds

with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Its really quite good fun and I think can be adapted academically. For example, I put in our school mission statements and this is what I got.

Try it out at www.wordle.net