Know IT All for Primary Schools is a new resource from Childnet International. It aims to support primary school teachers with practical advice and help children to remain better protected online. There are 5 films for children featuring Kara, Winston and the SMART crew. Each film tackles a different theme and there are a range of activities and lesson plans to accompany each one.

The resource is free from the DCSF (Tel: 0845 6022260 Ref Num: 00321 – 2009CDO-EN). For more information visit: www.childnet-int.org/KIA/primary/

Congratulations to Bob The Builder who celebrates his 10th Birthday this month. His website has some great Early Years games and activities to explore.

 Yes we can!     

The SWGfL website has received a major makeover during the Easter break and has been relaunched with some new and improved features. Including new ways to search and order the Learning Resource area, more detailed information from Service Support and clearer publicity on upcoming events.

i-board regularly make a small selection of their resources available to teachers free of charge.  Currently http://www.easter.iboard.co.uk contains 6 activities suitable for KS1 and early KS2.

They are free to use and you can also link to them from your website, Merlin and My First Place. They are creative, pattern making activities, some themed around Easter. Simply go to the library area of the URL provided and click  “Show All Activities”. Note: When you get to the launch screen of an activity it contains a “copy link” button and “download thumbnail” button to support easy creation of lessons in a Learning Platform.

If you would like to see all i-board resources go to http://www.iboard.co.uk/free free to register for a free trial

If you have ever worked with digital video then you will have experienced some of the potential pitfalls. Will it playback? Why do you sometimes get sound but no images? Is it compatable with editing software such as Movie Maker? It has all been made so much easier with Format Factory. Once you have downloaded the free software from www.formatoz.com it will convert just about any format of video (within reason) into the type you want to work with. It is even able to cope with video taken with a mobile phone. In addition, Format Factory will also convert popular sound and pictures formats.

Thanks again ICT Nuggets

There are a number of sources of free digital maps of the UK. I have been using Multimap www.multimap.com as this now includes Ordanance Survey Maps and aerial photos of the UK. For some locations there are also higher quality aerial photos in the Bird’s Eye view section. The terrain feature in Google Maps http://maps.google.co.uk/ is also worth a look. Other sources of maps include  MS Live http://maps.live.com/ and the Ordanance Survey site which also includes games and activities to improve children’s mapping skills. www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk

To create our own maps we used the map making activity on the Teacherled website  www.teacherled.com/2008/06/01/map-maker/ before looking at World Maps through Google Earth. http://earth.google.com/

New from Artisan Cam is the excellent Super Action Comic Maker. It has a range of backgrounds and characters and allows the user to create an A4 action hero comic book page. 

www.engineeringinteract.org is a great way to learn about Science. It covers a range of topics including sound, light, electricity, forces and Space. Thanks to the Revision World Blog for the link.

Myths and Legends is a brilliant piece of online software for all those who enjoy stories and storytelling. It allows you to read stories from all over the Country and once inspired, to create your own. These can include pictures and sound effects before being submitted to the site.

Recently, I have been working on a number of different projects using digital audio and have found some great tools for the job. These include the brilliant Easi-speak (below) from TTS, the free to download Audacity and the great podcasting tool Podium. 

Thanks to a post by Doug Dickinson on his blog dougmuses I can now also add Vocaroo to that list. It is such a simple way to quickly send a voice message. Listen to Doug explaining just how easy it is to use …. here