Primary ICT Activity Generator

Over the holidays I came across the Learning Event Generator by John Davitt, which generates over 2500 permutations of topic and activity, for example: “Do the concept of gravity as a blow by blow sports commentary” or one of my favourites: “Do the history of the Olympics as a mime”.

I then decided to create my own slightly more colourful version aimed at Primary teachers, to randomise choice of ICT activities. You can see the Activity Generator here. Type in your own topic at the top, press the button and it randomly generates an ICT activity.

To make it even more useful to teachers, it is in the form of a template, whereby you can edit a text file with your own options, to create a bespoke list of activities. If this template would be useful to you, please e-mail me at cmoore@ssclc.net, and I’ll send it along.

Finally, if you teach at one of our partnership schools (see list here), you are welcome to come along to the CLC with your pupils to be used as guinea pigs for a randomly generated ICT activity session – with small groups working on the same topic, but all using a different medium.

How To Guides from NGfL Cymru

See the Welsh National Grid for Learning website for some excellent, free How To guides on a variety of topics. They cover using applications like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint to create learning resources, plus guides to using the free software Audacity to record a school radio show.

Radio programmes – Life on a plantation

Here are some radio programmes about life on a plantation. They were created by year 9 students at Newfield using mp3 players to record the audio, and the free software Audacity to edit them. They take a little time to load up, and you’ll need Quicktime to view them (you can download it for free here):

Radio Show 1

Radio Show 2

Further examples will be posted at this site – http://newfieldgeogblog.wordpress.com/

Resources for Science

Here are some interesting websites with resources for science lessons. Please feel free to comment on this post and add your own favourites.

• http://www.scibermonkey.org/ – organises a large number of excellent websites in topics for key stage 3 science.
• http://www.ted.com/ – a collection of video talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers, with a section on science. Students can listen to talks from, amongst others, Richard Dawkins, Al Gore or James Watson.
• http://www.newscientist.com/podcast.ns – listen to a number of podcasts from the New Scientist.