Latest News
Capzles
Capzles is a little bit like Animoto and Photostory on some levels, but has different elements to explore.
Capzles has been running for a while now but YOU might find it is worth investigating. Let us know how you get on
Capzles.com allows users to tell a story using pictures, video clips, audio tracks and text. Place this media, called “moments”, together chronologically in a timeline. The result is called a “capzle”.
This is a social site, but can be used on an individual level, to create some interesting results. Well worth an explore.
Memrise – language learning… and much more.
Want to learn a language in an enjoyable, fast and free way- Memrise is an online vocabulary learning application that turns that tasks into games. You can use Memrise for a HUGE range of other elements, as well as learning languages. It is a technique that makes memorising new concepts really practical, and enjoyable.
Why not try learning Vietnamese? We have found it useful to research new vocab as we explore further here at the moment.
When you get in to Memrise-ing, don’t forget to do other things too.
Zotero (and Quotepad)
Zotero collects all your research in a single, searchable interface. You can add PDFs, images, audio and video files, snapshots of web pages, and really anything else. Zotero automatically indexes the full-text content of your library, enabling you to find exactly what you’re looking for with just a few keystrokes.
Zotero is an extension for the Firefox web-browser. It runs in its own pane within Firefox, separately from web pages.
Zotero is, at the most basic level, a citation manager. It is designed to store, manage, and cite bibliographic references, such as books and articles. In Zotero, each of these references constitutes an item.
Every item contains different metadata, depending on what type it is. Items can be everything from books, articles, and documents to web pages, artwork, films, sound recordings, an so much more.
You might want to also try Quotepad. (A gem we have mentioned before but is one of great value for anyone who is studying.
Please let us know how you get on with either of these, if you try them.
British International School, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 3
WOW! Another great day, at the British International School, Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnam, full of challenges and superb successes. Well done indeed, to all of the staff and children, for braving intense heat (for real) and freezing cold climates, where ice shards clawed at our skin “for real” (nudge nudge wink wink – suspend our disbelief) in the virtual worlds!
Thank you to Ian Battersby, Deputy Head at The Tu Xuong Primary Campus, for his thoughts on why he invited us to make this journey to Saigon:
At the BIS, Ho Chi Minh City we are looking to integrate ICT into all aspects of teaching and learning. Tim’s combination of training and demonstration lessons enabled us to make a huge stride towards meeting this objective. As well as providing us with a huge number of Web 2.0 links and ideas, the sessions gave our teachers the opportunity to reflect on their practice and to consider different ways to engage the children and extend their learning.
The children today not only extended their ideas, but stretched and crafted them too:
Many children at BIS have English as an additional language and the games based learning provided a safe environment to experiment with vocabulary and simile. For those native English speakers, the rich settings in Myst and constant ‘dripping’ of ideas allowed them to excel with their descriptive language. As Ian says:
“As we continue towards our aim of using ICT as a tool to aid learning in all areas of the curriculum, I have confidence that ideas from our sessions with Tim will become a part of all our children’s experience – from our two year olds, developing basic phonic skills in Foundation One, to our Year Sixes on the brink of writing their first novels”.
Again, a massive well done and Thank You to the whole of the BIS community, for making our time in Vietnam, so far, such a joyous journey. Now, we are off to Hoi An and Hue to research and explore more. Including a bit of farming and cooking!
xmind.net
XMind.net is the source of an open source piece of software that would only be better if you smothered it with sauce.
XMind is brainstorming and mind mapping software and is a great way to share ideas.
With XMind, you can just double-click to create and edit topics anywhere on the map. Drag-and-drop for reorganizing topics, moving markers, taking a mapshot, and adding attachments. You can even search, on topic, with Google and drag images into your map without leaving the working window.
XMind‘s design, and features, let you, or your pupils, focus on your work and share it easily with others. You can export mindmaps into a variety of common formats, such as PDF, Word and PowerPoint.
The free version of XMind is powerful, with some inevitable restrictions, but still enough tools to make it worthwhile to experiment with, at least.
British International School, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 2
Today we spent a joyous day at An Phu campus and huge “thank you”s to Deputy Head Simon Higham, and Richard Vaughan, Head Teacher, for inviting us to their beautiful school to spend time with their delightful children.
The day started with 60 Year 5 pupils followed swiftly by a group of 40 Year 5 pupils. A quick break, then a further 60 Year 6 pupils followed by another 40 Year 6 pupils – phew! This 5 form entry school has the most gorgeous children to spend time with: up for challenges, up for a laugh, and up for some creativity, in so many ways.
We ended the day with early years teachers, the Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3 teachers, exploring the ways writing can be inspired, modelled and developed using some of the games, and we-based, learning opportunities we have been exploring over the last two days.
It is not just the children at this school who are willing to throw themselves at new experiences. Thank you, to all of the staff, especially those who even danced madly, or ran recklessly, when we were looking at verb-adverb clauses. 
Sporcle
Visit Sporcle for a great twelve minutes of challenging discussion, logic (and guess work!) Challenge a group to work out which are the most commonly used words in the English language.
It is based on research by The Oxford English Dictionary and the “answer” can be found HERE (Don’t cheat!!)
British International School, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 1
The first of three days at The British International School, (BIS) in Ho Chi Minh City/ Saigon, Vietnam. BIS is a selective, independent, co-educational day school. It provides a British style education for an international student body, and is the largest international school in Vietnam, with 1,700 students, from pre-school to Year 13, from more than 40 countries. The school is based in three purpose-built modern campus sites in Ho Chi Minh City.
The school began as a nursery 14 years ago. Now they have two primary campuses, a secondary campus and a new school with primary and secondary opening in August (as well as two new schools opening in Hanoi in 2012). There are currently 151 full time teachers.
The British International School has two primary campuses, called An Phu and Tu Xuong.
Today, we were at The Tu Xuong Primary Campus, a city site located in District 3 of Ho Chi Minh City. It opened as a purpose built primary campus in August 2007 replacing two smaller schools. The campus currently has around 300 pupils from age 2-11 years old.
Two of the priorities for this school year are integrating new technologies in the classroom and raising standards in writing. Today we worked alongside teaching staff from 3 campuses (about 100 people) looking at integrating ICT into the curriculum with specific reference to raising attainment in writing.
A huge thank you to Mr. Ian Battersby, Deputy Head of Tu Xuong Primary Campus (pictured here on the left), who we first met when he was working in Sheffield in the UK, and Simon Higham, Deputy Head, at An Phu Primary Campus, for organising our visit.
Further thanks go to Mr Long, and Mr Thang, the helpdesk supervisor, and IT technician for the Tu Xuong campus, for their expertise, magic powers and patience supporting the technology used today.
3D Models
In response to yesterday’s 3d digital doodlings, we promised a few folk I would link to some other ideas for simple, analogue, paper DT models.
Here’s fun site with some free nets of 3-D models to print and make. (Click on the model)
Read Simon Haughton’s guest blog, about Design and Make, on the 2Simple blog for some simple, but powerful, model making.
Go back and have a look at the our link to Rob Ives’ paper sculptures, for some inspiration.
Voxel art
With Voxel Art, you get the chance to experiment with, and manipulate voxels (3D pixels).
We have mentioned voxels before, when talking about the Voxel iPad app.
We are going put up a couple of nudges to more detailed voxel design packages soon.
In the meantime, go get “boxy but good”.
(Usefully, the gallery on the site is moderated, by the way.)
