telfordteacher

Moorfield Primary’s ICT coordinator, Matthew Brown, has put together a useful document that outlines how teachers can get the best home use from school laptops, and clarifies the responsibilities that taking such equipment involves. It can be downloaded here.

image reproduced with permission of extrafunky -
image collection available on flickr.com

Please use the comments section to share ideas and resources ready for Tuesday

Here are some useful FAQ’s for use with parents

http://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/parents/

I came across Word Magnets on Tim Rylands blog.  It allows you to copy and paste, or type text into a box, click ‘next’ and see all your words displayed as draggable magnets.  (NOTE If you type a space before your punctuation, the punctuation will be displayed on it’s own magnet.)

Following a recent visit to a school, we put together a simple Excel file to allow children to input data in a precreated file. The data could then immediately be viewed in the form of a bar chart.  Some people find that Excel looks overly complicated, however, we took a few steps to simplify the look and feel of the file.

Click here to view the simple Excel file.  (This can obviously be saved to your computer and the content amended to suit your needs. Feel free to use it, even better use it and add a comment!)

Some of the steps that we took to simplify the look and feel included:

• Hiding the gridlines
• Using bright colours to highlight areas of the data collection table
• Precreating a graph in the sheet, so that the data dynamically altered the graph
• Removing the grey box from behind the standard bar chart
• Filling all of the columns with bright colours

Some changes we had to make to overcome problems:

• Setting the data in the table to only accept whole numbers
• Calibrating the y axis so that the minimum step size was 1

Some features that could be exploited:

• Right clicking on the chart and selecting ‘Chart type’ to alter the representation e.g. bar chart, pie chart  (for some of the representations it is important to show the legend)
• The bar charts can be turned into pictograms (click here to view a simple set of instructions explaining how to do this).

A problem that we couldn’t solve!

As well as adding numbers into the table, you can also click and drag the columns on the bar chart to alter the data.  Although we have set the table only to accept whole numbers, if you drag a bar on the chart and leave it at around 6.51, the data table will read 7, however, the graph will be showing 6.51.  Obviously, if your class are looking at rounding numbers this could be useful, however, I would like the columns to snap to whole numbers when you drag them.

If you know how to solve our unanswered dilemma, please leave a comment. 

It has been brought to our attention, that a number of people are having problems saving PowerPoint and Revelation Natural Art files directly onto shared student drives (when logged on a student).  If you see a message that says ‘[Filename] already exists do you want to replace it?’ and you know that the filename hasn’t been used before, the file will save with 0kb of data ie it will be empty.  If you see this message, please save the file to your ‘My Documents’ and then if you want it on a shared drive, the pupil will be able to drag and drop the saved file into the appropriate area.

A group of 9 people got together to come up with ideas for how best to enable whole school progress in the area of ICT.

We looked at
1. Things that have actually happened that has allowed progress to be made
2. Things that could be done in the future to allow progress to be made

I will add the results later this week. Please add any ideas that you have so that discussion can be enhanced.

Richard S.

We have added a blog from a geography teacher called Ollie Bray (down the right hand side labelled Geog. Blog). Have a quick look and make some comments if you think they would be useful. It is designed using typepad rather than edublogs

Crocodile Clips is used by lots of teachers to support Maths, Science and Technology. At the BETT show the company were demonstrating FREE software for home use.

http://www.crocodile-clips.com/

Be careful, you need to put in the school name accurately

Here is an example activity for Maths
http://www.yenka.com/en/Yenka_3D_Shapes/
Comment on how you have used it…

Hi Richard Smith here,

I have been asked what was the best thing I saw at BETT. There were 700 stands so it is difficult, but the favourite thing I saw was an online package which encourages a global community to be developed using simple methods such as email, instant chat and shared pages linked to joint projects.

I had a long chat with the charity behind this and would thoroughly recommend you sign up for a free trial. In the long term there is a cost involved in order to pay moderators to make sure e-safety matters are adhered to)

Here is the link http://www.rafi.ki/

If you are not convinced spend 5 minutes on the virtual tour

Please add a comment saying what your favourite thing was at BETT

Staff from Captain Webb school travelled down to the BETT show to be presented with the prestigious ICT Mark.
Presenting the award, Dave Hassell, the Director for Learning, Teaching and Inclusion at Becta, commented on how the award was a recognition of the leadership team’s vision and the practical steps the school had taken to ensure that ICT enhanced teaching and learning throughout the school.