Typing Skills

Whilst reading the blog by Bristol teacher Simon Mills I came across a reminder from Doug Dickinson about these two free resources for helping pupils to improve their keyboard and typing skills.  

The first involves a free download called ‘Sebran’ which contains a number of games including one called ‘letter rain’ which helps children quickly locate letters on the keyboard:

 www.wartoft.nu/software/sebran/

The second is ‘Dance Mat Typing’ from the BBC which is an introduction to touch typing: www.bbc.co.uk/schools/typing/

Image supplied by http://gallery.e2bn.org/

For a more detailed description of typing software  see Spencer’s post on the B&NES Blog 

Topic Box

Regular visitors to the Coxhoe Durham or Snaith Primary websites will appreciate just how useful it is to have all those online educational resources in one place. I have just read about a new one called Topic Box on the Little Miss Teacher blog and have been to have a look around. The brightly coloured and easy to navigate website aims to electronically replace those dusty old plastic storage boxes which look promising but generally fail to deliver. Already there are 2131 resources in 174 different topics which can be rated by anyone who downloads them. Tell your friends and let me know if you come across any other similar sites.

 

The Magic Sorting Hat

I was lucky enough to sit in on the inspirational seminar by Tim Rylands at the Wiltshire ICT Conference this week. During his introduction he used a brilliant, free download from Harmony Hollow which takes all the stress out of selecting a volunteer. Once downloaded and installed, you add the names of your class and click on shuffle. If you reduce the size of the window so that it just shows the top name then when you click on stop you will randomly choose a member of the class.

 

I was also really pleased to see that Tom Robson has taken the first tentative steps into the highly addictive world of the blog. Go Tom!

Making a booklet

Been on one of our courses recently where we showed you how to make a booklet in Textease and forgotten how to do it? Fear not, help is at hand! We are pleased to be able to share our first ever podcast publicly. This is a first attempt so please forgive the quality, but do let us know if it was useful.

Click here for a copy of the Textease template.

 Click here to listen the audio file.