Top Techy Tools for Terrific Teachers

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I worked with pupils in year six at Crossley Hall Primary to make animations with an Egyptian theme. This is one of them. They all did really well but I thought this group excelled. They had never done animation before and they completed this in a morning. After creating a storyboard and making the backdrop and characters they only had forty five minutes to animate their ideas. This acheievemnt in such a short timeframe shows how creative kids can be when they get them chance.

Poor King Tutankhamun from Tim Bleazard on Vimeo.

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This is my presentation for my bMobLe breakout session on using Twitter in a professional context.

There are loads of anecdotes about how brilliant Twitter is for teachers. Here is one from Dawn Hallybone’s blog which is called Twitter is my Google

Here is the handout I created for the session

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I’ve done a quick video guide to searching using Google images.

Click here to view

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Children love programming with kodu, so do I, it’s fantastic. Google ‘download Kodu’ to get a free copy of the program. You tube has a great introductory tutorial by @stuartridout here .

I decided to link some Kodu work into a maths lesson on probability to examine the realtionship between obstacles on the world I created and the probability of completeing the game in less than fifteen seconds. Playing the games allows children to collect data which can be represented in frequency tables, bar charts etc. It also allows children to create and test hypotheses. Are girls better than boys at your game? Do you get faster times with the mouse or the keyboard?
Above is my presentation about using data handling with Kodu. I created a starter file for children to open so they don’t have to start by creating the world from scratch.  You can download the exported Kodu file I created by clicking here
Below is my lesson plan, please feel free to download and use, let me know how you get on! Of course Kodu is loads of fun for creating and playing games but this is just an idea I need to have a go at

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I’m using Gimp, a free graphics program to teach some gifted and talented pupils how to make banners on the subject of E safety. We’re actually having these banners made up into full size adverts that will go up at Odsal Stadium, home of the Bradford Bulls. W’re lucky to have a professional graphic designer come to Challenge CLC to give us some hints and tips too.

Gimp is a great program and is a free download available from http://www.gimp.org/

Here is a step through guide I’m asking pupils to follow. I’m going to let them experiment to create their own designs but this will teach them some basic concepts and hopefully give them a finished product. Feel free to use it yourselves, change it however you like. Sorry it’s a docx file, I’ll put up a pdf when I get a chance.

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Gerald, George, the alien and me! on Storybird

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During this year I have enjoyed working at the Bradford Bulls Play for Success Centre. One of the highlights was when players came in to be interviewed by the children.  The pupils made lots of notes and asked very searching questions.

I thought I’d try to do something a bit different which the info they collected, I didn’t just want to write/type it into a report.

We used Powerpoint (other presentation tools are available) to create player quizzes. There was a question contents slide, multiple choice slides for the questions and a slide saying ‘Correct and one saying wrong.  The children then created multi directional presentations as quizzes.

Click here to download a copy (it’s in Powerpoint 2007 – let me know if you need it in old fashioned ppt format and I’ll email it to you).

This got me thinking about using hyperlinks for other things. I saw the brilliant telescopic text web site when it was mentioned on Twitter by @missbrownsword . It’s great for extending sentences and ties in nicely with Pie Corbett’s work he calls ‘mucking about with sentences.’

I thought you could do something similar with hyperlinks in Powerpoint and it turns out you can. Powerpoint can be funny about too many hyperlinks but I’ve got away with it so far. Click here to download my example

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