The Adventures of Smartie the Penguin is an e-book, with accompanying questions for use on the pages where you see a clock icon and the words “time to chat”. Children discuss safe ways of using ICT and learn a song. There are also links to Kidsmart lesson plans on internet safety.
Mr Haughton’s online, child-friendly encyclopedia contains easily searchable information and activities linked to popular curriculum topics. Click here.
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
There are some great free educational resources on the ICT Games site, which are generally aimed at infants. Also available from here is the Calmness Counter which I was shown recently. Once a microphone has been connected and the sensitivity level selected this site will keep track of the noise levels in the classroom. I just wonder how many pupils will see it as a challenge to get the pointer into the red levels!
There are some wonderful interactive games, stories and resources to help emerging readers on the Roy the Singing Zebra website. The site is free to use at school or at home and is alot of fun.
Thanks to the Teachers Love SMART Boards blog for mentioning it.
Another great resource highlighted by Ictopus is the BBC learning Zone which:
“provides rich audio-visual material for use in primary and secondary schools and colleges. These short videos have been selected to match the curriculum; they can be used in many ways, from the stimulation and engagement of students to the delivery of very specific learning points. Try searching by subject and topic or by keyword”.
I was looking again at the wonderful resources on the Kent Ed website, these range from those aimed at supporting an ICT Subject Leader, cross curricular resources such as the ever popular Sebastian Swan and games and ideas to support Early Years ICT . The colourful and easy to navigate website also includes a number of free interactive games such as Star Writer and the Writing Repeater. The latter allows a demonstration of handwriting on an interactive whiteboard to be saved and played back. It can capture a total of 17 letters, words or joins which can be played back any number of times.
The BBC has increased the range of their ‘Bitesize‘ activities to now include Key Stage 1 for both Numeracy and Literacy. The games cover a range of topics and look to be good fun. There are three levels to each activity (medium, hard or very hard) and can be used as starter activities, for independent work or during a plenary.
Aimed at key stage 1 ‘The Big Day Out’ provides open ended modelling activities. The way it is structured allows pupils to create a postcard or a scrapbook of the places they have visited. Provided by the SWGfL all the activities have a South West regional flavour ranging from taking a canal boat through a lock in Wiltshire to piloting a hot air ballon in Bristol.
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.
Primary Nuggets 