Comic Master: Digital Storytelling

Comic Master is another in a long line of online comic creators that would be great for digital storytelling.

Supported by Reading for Life, it allows students to create their own graphic novel using pre-designed characters and backgrounds. The end product can be printed A4 size.

The working area is a little small, but you can zoom in and work on individual panels which does make things easier.

If you like this kind of thing you should also check out:

• Doctor Who Comic Creator
• ToonDoo
• Spore Comic Creator
• SuperHero Squad

Corkboard: Online Post It Wall

Corkboard.me is yet another online collaborative notice board / Post It wall. Like all the others it allows you to post and move post it notes on a shared wall. Embed images by pasting in their URL.

It’s very simple, and like all the others could be used for brainstorming or collecting questions or comments from a class.

Try it now at : http://corkboard.me

The market for these is getting a little saturated now, but it’s always nice to have options and alternatives.

Like this? Also check out Wallwisher, Primary Wall and Scrumblr.

JellyCam: Stop Motion Filming

JellyCam is a simple, free piece of software to allow you to make stop motion videos using a webcam. You can download JellyCam for free here.

I found it very easy to use. There’s very little in the way of whistles and bells. You hit the space bar to take another frame, and the software allows onionskinning so you can get an idea of how the new frame relates to the last frame.

You could use this with a webcam, a visualiser, or upload still photographs taken with a regular digital camera.

JellyCam produces a Flash Video file (flv) from your movie and even links straight to YouTube so that you can upload your finished video. I couldn’t see how to add an audio track – so you might have to do this in an additional piece of software.

You’ll need Adobe Air to be able to install it. Which you can download from here. If you’re looking for some no-frills stop motion software then you should definitely take a look at JellyCam: http://www.jellycam.co.uk/

Learning with Visualisers

Discover the benefits of using a visualiser with primary pupils, along with useful tips and resources in this handy video from Teachers TV.

This video shows how you can use a visualiser to take photographs, how to create videos for pupils to reference, and how to use a visualiser to encourage pupil self assessment.

Year 3 teacher and ICT Coordinator Dave Orritt travels to another primary school to get see how they use visualisers to aid teaching and learning. He observes a Year 4 teacher using a visualiser in maths and art lessons, including showing a video to the pupils, and using it to help pupils assess their own work.

After getting advice on using the technology from fellow teachers, Dave heads back to his own school to see how he can use one effectively in his own lessons.

E-Learning for Kids

E-Learning for Kids is a “global, nonprofit foundation dedicated to fun and free learning on the Internet for children ages 5 – 12.”

They offer free online courseware in maths, science, PSHE (Life Skills), literacy and computing skills.

There are plenty of online Flash-based resources here. Some would work well on an IWB (a full-screen option would be handy), but they would be good for independent study, with students working through them at their own pace too.

Looks very similar to Learning Objects

Mr Thorne Does Phonics

Mr Thorne is a Year 1 Teacher at a North London school. He has produced over 200 videos to help with the teaching of phonics which he hosts on his website at : www.mrthornedoesphonics.com

It’s an excellent resource for children and parents, teachers, schools and anyone teaching phonics.

BrainNook - Online Maths and Literacy Games

BrainNook is a new online game that helps kids develop Maths and English skills while exploring  and playing safely with others.

BrainNook contains over a hundred educational games based on fundamental concepts in Maths and English Grammar. The games cover Maths concepts ranging from single-digit addition to 3D spatial visualization, and English concepts ranging from building simple sentences to counting syllables. These games are embedded within colorful virtual worlds that children can unlock and explore.

In BrainNook, children play educational games while exploring virtual worlds, safely competing and interacting with other children, and solving puzzles.

In addition to Maths and English skills, BrainNook helps kids strengthen other important skills such as reading, reasoning, decision-making, analysis, memorization, dexterity and computer literacy.

For teachers, check out BrainNook @ School, an easy way for your class to play BrainNook together.

Science and Maths Outside the Classroom

As it’s the school holidays, and we really should be thinking about turning our computers off, and stepping outside into the fresh air, here’s an excellent set of resources to help teachers make use of the outdoor classroom to support maths and science teaching.

King’s College London has launched a brand new, free CPD resource for KS3 science called  Thinking Beyond the Classroom which brings together three strands of King’s well-known research in science education: Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE), Assessment for Learning and Science Beyond the Classroom.

You can browse the project materials at Thinking Beyond the Classroom website

The unit is supported by ten activities fully trialled and tested in schools. The activities support and encourage observation, group work and discussion and are easily carried out in school grounds, parks and local open spaces. The CPD unit includes video-clips of the activities being used by KS3 students in an inner city location and the unit is designed to show how teaching strategies used in the classroom can be transferred to the outside.

Scimorph - augmented reality for Science

Scimorph is a cute little website that uses Augmented Reality tech to provide Primary school students with opportunities to discuss and solve science-based problems.

Using a webcam and a special marker printed onto a piece of paper – Scimorph will appear on the screen. By moving the paper you can move him and view him from all sides. It’s a little fiddly, but persevere and it becomes quite simple. This should also work with a visualiser if you have one of those connected.

There are several scimorph zones you can investigate – The Bug Zone to look at microbes, Gravity Pulls and The Vibe Zone to investigate sound.

Each zone provides a series of questions or scenarios. Scimorph is not a complicated simulation or anything like that. The main purpose is to promote discussion between children about the science underlying the different situations.

Guidance on how to use the resource can be found here. It does provide a useful introduction to Augemented Reality technology and is worth checking out if you want to try something a little different with your class. Visit it here.

Toonlet - Digital Storytelling

Toonlet allows students to create their own comic strips populated by their own characters. They can choose how many frames they want for their cartoon, and the simple editor makes it easy to drop their characters into a story.

Once the characters have been created, the strip editor lets them tell their story by simply typing into the speech bubbles.

The finished strip can then be shared via direct link to the comic, or embedded into a blog/wiki. You can also save the strip as a png file.

Registration is needed to use the site to create comics, but it’s free to do so.

There are lots of different ways to use this in class. You could write simple dialogue between several characters to tell a story – in language lessons create conversations in that language. Use for revision to explain processes or topics. Create interviews with famous people from history or characters from books that the students are studying. Recreate scenes from classic tales in their own words. And many more. Here’s a nice guide to using Toonlet to create strips.

Toonlet would also be good for creating avatars, even if you don’t want to make a whole comic. Create characters in the character creator and right-click/save as a jpg.

Spore Creature Creator

Spore 2D lets you use the creature creator tool from the Spore computer game to create your own creatures. You can drag and reshape the basic body plan and then add a variety of different limbs, appendages and defence tools.

Students can create their own monsters for creative writing projects – perhaps as a story starter.

In Science it could be used  when teaching about adaptation. Give students a specific set of conditions and see if they can invent a creature that could live there. Or students can design a creature and then explain where it lives, what it eats etc. (In a similar way, use Build Your Wild Self like this)

Spore 2D could also be used to create on-screen avatars in place of regular photos of the students.

Take a look and see what you think at : http://www.spore2d.com/

As an alternative, but related tool you can use the Spore comic creator to use pre-designed Spore creatures in comic strips to tell your own stories.

Cyberkidz

Cyberkidz is an educational platform for primary students. Designed for classroom use if a smartboard or interactive whiteboard is available, it can also be played individually by the children, both at school and at home.

Games are provided for Maths, Literacy, Science, Geography, plus some creative games. You can browse by subject and age. There’s no search, but there’s not really enough here yet to need one.

Interestingly the site can be accessed in different languages – French, Dutch, Spanish, Portugese, German and more. 

Games are nice and big on the page, unlike some sites I have been to, which makes it easier to see on the IWB.

It’s an interesting site, and I would assume from the amount of content on there that it’s still growing.

Solar System Scope: A 3D Space Model

Solar System Scope is  an amazing interactive 3D Model of our Solar System. You can zoom in and move the planets around the Sun to see how they move in relation to each other.

You can switch between an heliocentric view, geocentric view or a panoramic view of the Solar System. Earth centred view is great if you then use the play controls to move the time forwards as you can see the how day/night changes across the surface. Heliocentric view is good for showing how we get seasons as well as demonstrating the movement of the Moon around the Earth in the course of a month. The scales of the planets in relation to each other is not accurate – nor is the distance apart, but they’re necessary changes to make the whole thing fit on a screen and be useable!
Click on any planet to “visit” that planet and explore its surface – or get more information about it.

It’s a truly fabulous application -and every Science teacher should add it to their bookmarks for their next Space lesson alongside Google Moon, Mars and Sky.

Visit it now at : http://www.solarsystemscope.com

Eleven Mathematics Resources to Try in 2011

Brain Nook is a virtual world in which students can practice their mathematics and English skills. Brain Nook provides students with a series of scenarios that they have to resolve by answering mathematics and language arts questions. The first scenario presented to me when I tried out Brain Nook required me to earn coins to buy materials for a vehicle that I would then use to explore one of the virtual worlds. I could earn coins by answering questions correctly. Brain Nook presents students with questions based on their skill levels which is determined by a quick pre-assessment and adjusted as they progress through Brain Nook's virtual worlds.  

Learn Your Tables is a neat little site for students to use to learn and develop multiplication skills. The site offers two basic games on two different levels. The most basic game is a simple drag and drop activity in which students match equations to their correct answers. The more "advanced" game has students enter the correct answer to a multiplication question. The easier of the two levels only contains problems from one multiplication table while the more difficult level contains problems from multiple multiplication tables.

Ten Marks, an online mathematics tutoring service, offers a free program for teachers. Ten Marks for educators is designed to be a supplement to classroom instruction, not a replacement for it.
Ten Marks provides educators with an online forum in which they can assign mathematics practice problems to students and track their students' progress. If a student gets stuck on a problem he or she can open a tutorial to help him or her through the problem. Ten Marks provides teachers with the option to CC parents on the assignments sent to students. 

Yummy Math is a website designed for the purpose of sharing mathematics problems and scenarios based on things happening in the world today. Yummy Math lists activities chronologically as well as by mathematics subject area. Two mathematics teachers, Brian Marks and Leslie Lewis, developed Yummy Math and welcome suggestions from other mathematics teachers. 

Web2.0calc is a free online scientific calculator. While it won't replace the TI-84 Plus, it can do what your average high school student needs it to do. The best part is, you don't have to use it on the Web2.0calc site because they offer three widgets that you can use to embed the calculator into your own blog or website.

Math Open Reference is a free online reference for geometry teachers and students. Math Open Reference features animated and interactive drawings to demonstrate geometry terms and concepts. The table of contents on Math Open Reference is divided into four basic categories; plane geometry, coordinate geometry, solid geometry, and function explorer tools. Click on any subject in the first three categories to find definitions, examples, and interactive drawings. In the function explorer category users can select linear functions, quadratic functions, or cubic functions to explore how changes in variables affect the graphed output.

When it comes to creative uses of Google tools, Tom Barrett is certainly a leader that we can all learn from. A great example of this can be found in Tom's Math Maps. Math Maps are Google Maps on which Tom and others have created placemarks which when clicked reveal mathematics questions for students to answer based on the maps. There are questions available for every elementary school grade level. The placemarks are color-coded to indicate the level of the questions. Blue = Prep, Red = 1st grade, Green = 2nd grade, Light Blue = 3rd grade, Yellow = 4th grade, Purple = 5th grade. Visit Tom Barrett's Math Maps page to view the existing Math Maps and read about how to contribute to the existing Math Maps.

Math Live is a great mathematics website developed by Learn Alberta. Math Live presents students with animated stories that teach mathematics lessons. In all there are twenty-three lessons for elementary school and middle school students. The lessons are divided into four categories; Number, Patterns and Relations, Shape and Space, Statistics and Probability. Each animated lesson is accompanied by a mathematics worksheet that students complete either while watching the lesson or after viewing the lesson. Each lesson is divided into sections and students can advance or rewind as needed.

Conceptua Math is a provider of interactive visual mathematics lessons. Conceptua Math's primary focus is on the development of tools to aid teachers in the instruction of lessons on fractions. Conceptua Math's offerings are a mix of free and premium (paid) tools. There are a total of fifteen free interactive tools for teachers and students. Each of the free tools has an introductory video and a sample lesson plan.

If you've seen Dan Meyer's TED Talk, Math Class Needs a Makeover, you already know that he's an awesome educator. If you haven't seen his talk, go watch it now then come back to this post. This past summer Dan Meyer published his entire 38 week Algebra curriculum complete with slides, handouts, and just about everything you need in order to deliver the lessons. You can download each week individually or download the entire collectionas one file. Dan Meyer also has his entire 38 week Geometry curriculumavailable for free. Again, you can download each week individually or download the entire collection as one file.

Plus Magazine is a free online publication dedicated to introducing readers to practical applications of mathematics. Plus Magazine strives to reach that goal through the publication of mathematics-related news articles, podcasts, and mathematics puzzlesdesigned around "real-life" scenarios.

Interactive Maths Assessment

Interactivate is a suite of fifty-nine interactive mathematics assessments. These assessments allow users to track their percentage of correct and incorrect responses on each activity. Most assessments are designed for individual use although there are some activities that can be used by multiple users. Most of the assessments on Interactivate are appropriate for middle school.

Plus Maths Magazine

Plus Magazine is a free online publication dedicated to introducing readers to practical applications of mathematics. Plus Magazine strives to reach that goal through the publication of mathematics-related news articles, podcasts, and mathematics puzzles designed around "real-life" scenarios.

Yummy Math - Making Mathematics Relevant

Yummy Math is a website designed for the purpose of sharing mathematics problems and scenarios based on things happening in the world today. Yummy Math lists activities chronologically as well as by mathematics subject area. Two mathematics teachers, Brian Marks and Leslie Lewis, developed Yummy Math and welcome suggestions from other mathematics teachers. 

Maths Master - Videos for Mathematics

Khan Academy is certainly the most well-known provider of mathematics instruction via video, but there are other people doing the same thing. One such example is Maths Master. Maths Master offers short instructional videos for learning basic arithmetic and algebra. Maths Master is also working on developing video instruction on probability and geometry. The videos can be viewed on the Maths Master site or downloaded via iTunes.

Embedded below is one of the videos from Maths Master.

National Geographic Atlas Puzzles

National Geographic is one of my favorite sites to visit because almost every time I visit it I find something I hadn't noticed before. This evening I had fun exploring and trying my hand atNational Geographic's Atlas Puzzles. National Geographic offers 23 Atlas Puzzles in all. Each puzzle is an online jigsaw puzzle of a continent or country - there is even a map of Australia! 

Assembling jigsaw puzzles can be a fun exercise for the brain as long you aren't missing any pieces. National Geographic's Atlas Puzzles provides some good exercise for the brain without the worrying of lost or missing pieces from a physical jigsaw puzzle.

Smories - Stories for Kids, Read by Kids

Smories is a video site featuring kids reading kids' stories. The stories are written by various authors who contribute to the site. The videos feature kids reading those stories contributed to the site and some classic stories and poems. Many of the videos include captions. The directions for submitting videos are a little unclear, but it seems that anyone can submit a video and videos are vetted before being posted on Smories.

The idea behind Smories is to provide children with a place to see other children reading stories and be inspired to practice reading aloud. Smories provides a forum for writers to share their stories and get some informal feedback when they're posted on the site.

Free Icebreaker and Team Building Games

Icebreakers.ws is an online catalog of dozens of fun icebreaker and team builder activities. The activities are categorised by group size and activity type. To find an activity appropriate for your group just select your group's size then use the activity type key to find "get-to-know-you games," "team building games," or "active (break a sweat) games." 

Big Marker - A Free Web Conferencing Platform

Big Marker is a new free service for conducting online conferences. It looks like a great option for conducting online tutoring sessions, brainstorming sessions, and other online presentations.

Big Marker allows you to create your choice of a private or a public online meeting room. If you make your room public anyone can join. If you make your room private you have to give participants a password to enter the room.  Once in your Big Marker conference room you can share screens, chat via text, chat via audio, or turn on your webcam so that people can see and hear you. Your Big Marker conference room comes with a white board that you and your participants can write and draw on. As the creator of a Big Marker conference you can control who can and cannot be heard or seen in the live audio and video chats.

Big Marker could be a great tool for conducting online tutoring sessions and lessons. Students working on collaborative projects could use Big Marker to brainstorm and plan for completion of their projects.

Toonti - Create Your Own Social Network

Toonti is a new free service for creating your own small social network. Using Toonti you can create a private or public social network. If you choose to make your network private, only the people you invite and approve can join and interact with the members of your network. A public group is open to anyone who stumbles upon it. In your Toonti network users can create profiles, interact with each other through message boards, share media, or create an online study group. Toonti can be used by teachers to create a small network in which their students can have online study/ homework help groups. 
Creating your own social network with Toonti takes only a few minutes. Watch the video below to learn more about Toonti.

Planet Orange - Money Lessons for P-7 Students

Planet Orange is a website developed by ING Direct for the purpose of helping primary school students learn some basic money skills. Through a series of "missions" (games) to Planet Orange students gain or lose money. Students can design an avatar to represent themselves on their missions. The students gain invest or spend the money they gain to match their budgets and reach their goals.

Planet Orange offers teachers a series of lesson plans for students in grades P-7. The lessons are designed around student play in the Planet Orange environment. The highlight of the teacher section are two 65+ page activity books. The activity books include materials for pre-teaching important money-related vocabulary prior to having students go on Planet Orange missions. The activity books also include worksheets and lessons to build upon the student missions in Planet Orange.