As we continue our Sealife topic we have been exploring the conservation of sea turtles and subsequently climate change. We learned how rising sea levels have a direct impact on sea turtle nesting sites. I just wanted to outline some of the great resources we used in our classes this afternoon.
Category: Science
3 Video Resource Sites to Support Maths, Science and Spelling
There has never been a better time for finding online resources to support learning. I subscribe to the RSS feed from my delicious network and my Google Reader is regularly bulging with useful links to sites that can support the work going on in the classroom. Here are three highlights that use video as the central media to help support curriculum work.
Spelltube brings the weekly spelling list into the technological age.
Spelling videos have been created for each of the 3000+ words in the National Spelling Bank, from which teachers can generate and assign a word list to their Key Stage 2 pupils. Memorable characters help to reinforce spelling concepts in an enjoyable way that will appeal to various learning styles.
The site allows a teacher to sign up for a free class account, which then provides children with individual login details. Spelling lists can be assigned and scores tracked within the site. It is tailored towards the UK national curriculum and supports the spelling objectives within it. I think it provides a great alternative toSpelling City.
The idea of SIMPLE SCIENCE is to have informative music video presentations for use in the primary school classroom.
They are designed to be used as part of a lesson to reinforce learning objectives and scientific concepts and also as a useful revision tool for the SAT exams. They work particularly well on a large whiteboard but can also be viewed on the computer screen and TV.
Once again the resources support the Key Stage 2 QCA Science units in the UK and each of the sections provides a video of the science behind the topic and a song to help the children too. The films can even be bought as a DVD or the songs on CD. There is no sign up or login needed to watch the films.
The site uses Vimeo embedded films and you can see Simple Science on Vimeo here. The fact they have not used YouTube makes it much more accessible in schools. Apparently they have a whole stack of early years songs and films planned for next year which should be worth looking out for.
Learning Clip is an online resource to support teachers, teaching assistants and parents implementing the renewed primary mathematics framework.
The resources are structured to follow precisely the learning objectives of the renewed framework. For ease of navigation the resources are also listed by topic.
They all have the same easy to use format. Each clip comprises of, a short introductory video, an interactive activity, a worksheet and a set of notes.
After an initial registration a user needs to login to access the resources. It is worth noting that on the home page it states that the resources are being made available to teachers for free “during the development phase”. I assume from this that there may be a time when the resources require a fee to use them.
During the initial development phase of the project all the clips have been freely available to anyone interested in teaching and learning mathematics. From the 16th January 2010 some of the resources will only be available by subscription. The rest will continue to be free to registered users.
I hope you find the three resources useful and find a place in your classroom for using them. Please let me know of any other video based resource sites that you know of or have found useful in the classroom.
Google Earth Wikispace
At this time of year I like to look at this great resource in Google Earth I think it will be a useful teaching aid for Science.
It shows the leaf colour of major forests in and around the UK, the information is gathered from the Forestry Commission sites and layered into Google Earth. The colours will change as the Autumn season progresses.
Open this Placemark
Take a look at my wikispace for classroom uses of Google Earth for further resources.
You win some you lose some
A short while back I was buoyed by the use of Google Spreadsheets in our science lessons. The children enjoyed the fact that we were sharing data and it added an edge to their motivation. They questioned the data that popped up as the sheet updated, they enquired about it’s ownership and accuracy. However this week sharing a Google presentation did not run so well!
I assumed we would have a similar experience and the sharing feature would work just as well. Groups were created in each class they were assigned a planet (we are looking at the solar system) and after a short intro, asked to explore our del.icio.us links and create one slide (or more if needed) in a ready made presentation. 3 children were working on a wireless laptop. It just never really got off the ground and I found my self firefighting access, update, deletion and wireless problems. Admittedly the technology got in the way of the learning and it proved a disappointing afternoon. You really do win some, lose some. There were of course some groups that worked without any issues. So what went wrong – I think that it is important to try and reflect on the successes and failures on this blog so that I learn from it and others do as well.
- We put a lot of pressure on the wireless network in the session as 16 machines were active and Google docs regularly refreshes so the web connection was very busy.
- Some kids worked on the class PC and they seemed to work a lot smoother.
- The children accessed del.icio.us links and these included a NASA image gallery so that could well have chewed up the bandwidth a bit.
- Google presentations deals with different data than the spreadsheets, whole slides need to be updated sometimes with images etc – not just a number in a spreadsheet.
- The children had to start from scratch and make new slides for their planet – some mix ups went on here.
- All of the children were using one Google domain login – not sure if this hindered.
On reflection the idea is still a good one. Children all contributing to one presentation that has a common theme. They all have a piece of the jigsaw. But I think that we just asked too much of the wireless network, it certainly was far more than we have ever done. I am uncertain if the same login made an issue, I may try out some individual account logins with a similar activity.
I think that the most important thing to learn from this is that sharing Google Presentations works smoother when on hard wired PCs because it deals with a larger data set than spreadsheets.
Taking risks is a good thing. If I had never planned such an activity I would not have learned about how differently the application performs in the classroom. Were I to do it again in the future I would feel better prepared. Lesson learned.
Sharing a Google Spreadsheet in class
Today was Day 1 in terms of our laptop use in the classroom and we hit the ground running, so to speak – just how I like it. I am sure you have had days like today, when it is a bit of a whirlwind from 8am right through to 4pm – where does the time go? Today the sands just seemed to slip through my fingers! Not to say it was one of the best days for a long time.
We now have 8 Toshiba laptops running happily in both of our Year 5 classes and today we kicked off with a simple word level activity in literacy. One group worked on Race to Ramses! a game about combining prefixes and suffixes to create new words. I have taught with laptops in the past but the new technology (laptops and WAPs) is just so much more reliable. And it is great seeing children completely engaged with one to one technology supporting their learning, I am so pleased to see it in the hands of the pupils – which is the whole point. You might think “web game, one group…not really setting the world alight” – but I suppose it is a culmination of a lot of work and to finally get things in front of children, reliable and solid feels like a big achievement.
Needless to say in the afternoon we swam into deeper waters and I’d like to think we pushed the envelope a bit…
The morning was successful and the children enjoyed working on their own machine and many children asked for the web address for the game – so we will have to get our del.icio.us account sorted or get them into their Google accounts soon!
In the afternoon we were looking at some science work we have begun regarding healthy living and exercise. Today we explored pulse rates and we used an online spreadsheet to share our results, hence the title of the post. (This work is similar to some online spreadsheet action we had last year with my Year 6 class) I decided to use a Google spreadsheet as I have been using the Docs application for a while (in fact I have a few grumbles about that – more soon) but you could have easily used EditGrid as an alternative – I set the sheet up so that all of the children’s names from both classes were present in the first column. Then 10 other columns were labelled, “Resting Pulse1, Resting Pulse 2…” It was in these cells that the kids added their resting pulse after counting for 30 seconds and doubling.
I then accessed the same spreadsheet through my Google login on all 8 laptops per class that I put around the room – so in effect I logged in 16 times (plus my PC and SMARTBoard, so 17) to the same document from different locations. We talked a little about how to find our pulse and then asked the children to record 10 instances of their resting rate into the spreadsheet. It was great! With the live update feature we were able to see individual results popping up all over the place and even from next door in Rick’s class who were doing the same. Google Spreadsheets has an Auto Save option which makes life much easier and gives you the opportunity to see the live data. Not only did the hardware hold out fine, but accessing the spreadsheet was excellent – even with 17 simultaneous users on a single login. The children really enjoyed seeing each other’s work and it gave them a great overview of not only the class year group working together, but also to the sorts of data people were adding. Children from the other class were nipping across the corridor and questioning the validity of results from kids in my class.
The children had a tendency to sit with the laptop in front of them, in small groups rather than freely moving around the classroom and accessing any machine. But I suppose that is due to the nature of task.
Within the space of about 40 minutes, perhaps less, we collected approximately 600 individual results all in one place. No doubt they will be quicker next time. This method of data collection also allows us the ability to then manipulate the results afterwards, working out averages of the whole year group etc. I would highly recommend doing this if you have the reliable kit in your classroom, we have already said that it will be an excellent data entry method for our maths lessons on data handling.
It is now 12 hours since I started the day at school and I am just about coming up for air, no don’t worry I am not at school still! – but it is great to reflect here on these sorts of days. One to remember and I hope you might take some of these ideas and use it yourself.