Facebook Privacy Settings

A nice step by step guide on Facebook security settings that I highly recommend reading through if you're on Facebook and work in the education sector:

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/e-safety/58849-esafety-resources-3.html#post816493

Direct link:

Facebook security settings guide

With much thanks to elsiegee40.

Gaming in Education

and on a related theme:

Gamification in Education

As a gamer, and someone who works in an education environment, I've always had an interest in trying to merge the two. As such, the above two videos are of interest to me, along with this blog post:

http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2009/07/do-most-educational-games-suck.html

I thought pulling out one or two websites with good gaming resources might help. (This is in addition to Kodu and Scratch).

Bigbrainz - Timez Attack 6.0



Golems



HoodaMath

FunBrain

Spelling City

http://www.fas.org/immuneattack/

Webtools #2

Shamelessly taken from here

Tagxedo

Allows you to create shaped Word Walls. Can pull words from websites, twitter IDs, google searches or just your own list of words.

 Todays Meet

Allows the creation of a temporary chat room that a teacher can create in seconds, and have their students join and collaborate in real time.

The software we use

Thought it might be useful to list the different software that the school has installed, including tutorial videos or links where appropriate.

The OS that is primarily used across the school is Windows 7.

We have Office 2010, including Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote.

Other software includes:

2D Design
Audacity
Blender
Food in Focus (Please note we have the original software, not the updated FoodinFocus2)
GeoGebra
GIMP 2
Google Earth (with Google Graph extension)
Google SketchUp 8
Inkscape
Kodu Game Lab
MuseScore
Pencil
Picture Power 3
Pivot Stick 3.1 - You may want to mute the music on the video
Robomind
Scratch
Shakespeare Reader
Visual Studio C# 2010 Express
WinFF

ICT Resources post #1

The main purpose of this blog is to share good ideas, websites and resources that can be used in an educational environment. Whereever possible I will link in the page where I found the idea.

So lets begin with a few that I've come across from this blogger based in the States:

http://experimenting-in-education.blogspot.co.uk/

And from here (so far) the following websites have been of interest.

Slide Rocket

A way of collaboratively sharing powerpoint presentations. Could be very useful across a department, to easily share a powerpoints that are commonly used. Of course, this would be even more powerful across multiple schools...

Prezi

In my view, a far more interesting take on presenting ideas and information. Powerful web based presentation tool, which if used properly, can be far more effective than powerpoint.

edmodo

A free, education based social networking site. You will need to get parents permissions before inviting students to join this site, but the amount of resources that are available is stunning. This is almost everything that Kaleidos needed to be, it's just lacking the ability to upload your own resources, it relies heavily on resources being already available on the web. That being said, combine this with a dropbox or Skydrive account, and this could be a very powerful tool.

Wallwisher

Allows you to create an online noticeboard, from which you can pin text and photos to. Could be useful for in class dicussions which can then be saved for future reference.

Diigo

Allows you to create your own cloud library of digital information, images documents, websites, sticky note that you can then access from anywhere, and share with anyone. Much like a cloud based OneNote.

Weebly

Miss the Shared Pages of Kaleidos and want to make your own website? Then weebly might just be the answer. Quickly create your own web page, and upload videos, photos and files easily and share it with your students.

KeepVid

Want to show a YouTube clip, and want a 100% guarantee it will work in your lesson? Want to embed a video into your powerpoint presentation? Try KeepVid, which will allow you to download the video from a URL. As usual, please be aware of copyright infringement when using this website.