eLearning4schools.net

This activity could really cut across the curriculum and provide a focus and content to base work around in a number of subject areas.

The most difficult thing here is getting started and deciding who you may need, there are two main approaches here:

1. There may be someone who is the news that may be has connections or is from the local area who you simply feel could be an inspiration to the students and allow them to ask lots of questions. This may be a local politician, a sports person or celebrity.
2. The second approach is to look through your schemes of work and then figure out where an external person could add value to a particular topic and then do a bit of research and then draw up a short list. Again this could be a local business man, a charity, a soldier etc.

Now this is the interesting part where effectively an interview could fuel so many outcomes. Here are just a few that could be the end product from the interview:

1. A presentation is produced summarizing the interview (all subjects depending on topic and interviewee).
2. The interview could have been recorded and the edited to then be broadcast via the school website (all subjects potentially but a really useful quick task for ICT and Media Studies students).
3. The interview could act as an introduction to topic or project (all subjects)
4. The interview along with further information could be used to produce a life story, poem or news paper article based around the life and experiences of the interviewee (all subjects but possibly particularly useful for English for creative writing, History for describing modern history may be World War 2 or Religious Education and Citizenship for describing an event).
5. The interview could form the basis of a critical thinking task especially if the interviewee is very passionate and opinionated for one particular perspective.
6. The interview could simply form part of the students research for a project or some coursework (all subjects but especially Business, Travel and Tourism and Sociology).

Since 1998 there has been a very significant investment in ICT in schools through the National Grid for Learning Programme.

Virtually every school is now connected to the Internet and the average number of computers in schools for teaching and learning has virtually doubled or trebled in recent years with some schools having enough computers for one each and many one for every two pupils.

But despite all these advances and this investment the vast majority of schools are only now beginning to tap the potential of ICT to enhance teaching and learning and to modernise the way in which schools are run and organised.

This blog is therefore relevant to everyone concerned with primary and secondary education. Over the next week I will highlighting some specific ideas for using ICT in class ranging from one off activities to year long projects.

So please sign up to the RSS feed and make sure you do not miss out on any star tips and ideas.

In my last post I talked about the latest in using Music for learning.

However, I felt it also important to highlight the usefulness of music in creating a safe and calm environment for learners to learn. It is vital that students are emotionally ready for them to start learning and if they are not then there is actually no point in attempting to get started as they will not be receptive to learning. We can get into why another time…..

…But for now it is important to understand that rituals can play an important role to prepare learners to learn and one thing that can get the brain into learning mode as one of these rituals is music.

It does not necessarily need to be any particular type of music although some genres may be inappropriate but will leave that for you to decide. I would stick to a handful of tracks throughout so a half term so the music starts to form part of a ritual.

To finish on I’d like to leave with you a website where you can select the music you want to listen to depending on your mood or that mood you may want to provoke in your students. Anyway dead easy to use take a look the site is Musicovery.com

We have all been there. Coming from a corporate background I can especially! The longest powerpoint I sat through had 347 slides!!!! Loosing the will to live just does not describe how I really felt with enough passion….but it was bad! However, now in my classroom occasionally I forgot all that I was taught and other teachers certainly have not been told in the first place.

So below is some handy tips…aimed at a corpoarte audience but still quite relevant.

| View | Upload your own

This was taken from edublog the short article give 10 useful ways to use a blog.

Edublogs hosts hundreds of thousands of blogs for teachers, students, researchers, professors, librarians, administrators and anyone and everyone else involved in education.

Edublogs are completely free, without any advertising, and come with 100MB of free upload space

“There are many ways you can use a blog in your teaching, here are ten to get you started:

1. Post materials and resources

The web is a fantastic tool when it comes to distributing resources - all you have to do on your Edublog is upload, or copy and paste, your materials to your blog and they’ll be instantly accessible by your student from school and from home. What’s more, you can easily manage who gets to access them through password and plugin safety measures.

2. Host online discussions

If you’ve ever struggled to create an online discussion space - you’re going to love what edublogs will do for you. Students can simply respond to blog posts and discuss topics you’ve set them through comments of through our simple forum functionality - commentators can also sign up to receive emails when their comments are replied to and you can easily manage and edit all responses through your blog’s administrative panel. (more…)

I found this video sometime ago.  It goes through lots of snippits where ICT has been used in the classroom.  I have used it during whole school and deaprtment insets to get the ball rolling.