Here is a selection of websites suitable for use in the Primary Curriculum. I have compiled them from the help of my own resourcea and the wonderful educators on the OZ-Teacher Mailing list. If you have any other great resources that are useful for the Primary years please add them in the comments.

Junior School All Ages

Wordle
www.wordle.net

Adrian Bruce website links to lots of good sites!
http://www.adrianbruce.com/computers/educational-software.htm

From very simple to very hard patterns and rotations
Build a Block

Great science website looking at animals and habitats
SwitcherooZoo

Put your face in photos (a lot of fun, not sure how educational)
http://www.photofunia.com/

Creating heroes to put in comics
http://cpbintegrated.com/theherofactory/

Stacks of lesson plans for all levels on literacy
http://www.readwritethink.org/

Loads of resources for the IWB (can be used on a normal computer too!)
http://www.copacabana-p.schools.nsw.edu.au/Get_Smart_Pages/Get_Smart.htm

Lots of literacy activites to download. Some are not THRASS friendly but there is some that are!http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/cll/sea/

Times Tables Game with a Moon theme!
http://www.primaryresources.co.uk/online/moonmaths.swf

Times Tables with a Fish Theme
http://www.multiplication.com/flash/PracticeFish.swf

 Grammar Ninja coz it’s cool!!
http://www.kwarp.com/portfolio/grammarninja.html

 Look, Cover, Write check Spelling
http://www.ictgames.com/lcwc.html

Wick Ed NZ website with lots of educational games
http://www.tki.org.nz/r/wick_ed/index.php

Lower Primary

Lots of games in many subject areas. Easy to play and suitab for either the PC or IWB
Toy Theater

THRASS friendly phonics website
Roy the Zebra

Hugely entertaining and educational!! Lots of different subject areas!
http://www.tvokids.com/ 

Upper Primary

Dance Mat Typing Tutor
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/typing/

Clay Animator – for stop motion animation
http://www.clayanimator.com/english/stop_motion_animator.html

Free online brainstorming
www.bubbl.us

Andrea Mosaic – create your own photographic mosaics made with your own pictures.
http://www.andreaplanet.com/andreamosaic/

Here are some good websites that I have found that I need to put somewhere that wont get lost in amongst a whole heap of other links. So here they are!

QR Code for my website from Kaywa

Well it has been a while since I have done a post! I have been slack on the blogging this year, not through lack of desire I might add! Mostly though lack of time and a the feeling that I have not much to say! This year I feel like I have been behind the 8 ball right from the start. I went back to work 3 weeks early which unfortunately was not enough time to get everything done that I needed to do at the start of the year and I feel like I have been behind ever since until now!

With my e-Learning role at my school I have felt this year very much like a car that is in desperate need of a tune up,very rough and jerky and not getting anywhere smoothly. I guess after the massive year that I had last year some form of plateau was inevitable. I have spent the most of my time doing background admin type activities such as setting up our Parent Portal, Setting up our Google Apps for Education and setting up our Learning Management System.  All necessary tasks, but hardly setting the world on fire!

EduKate:
So we have had EduKate set up for 6 months now and it is really starting to take off. Teachers are using it to deliver work and assessments to students and students are all jumping on bard with it. I didn’t get time to out a piece of work on it one week for my class and they all told me off for not having it on there! EduKate links in with our Parent Portal and that is getting some really good feedback from the Parent body! There is still more training to do with staff as it is a year ,long training program that we are running, but thus far I am very happy with the uptake!

Wild Wednesday Workshops:
Had the ‘brilliant’ idea to run workshops on Wednesday afternoons for the first 5 weeks of each term for staff to show them web2.0 tools. Whilst initially well received as the year has worn on attendance has dropped off. We are a very meeting driven school (as I am sure most schools are) and adding another meeting into the schedule just hasn’t worked, so I am going to rethink that idea.

Changing the Teaching and Learning:
So whilst I there is lots of good ICT integration going on at school from Nings to blogs to wikis to IWB’s. I don’t think that what is actually happening in the classroom has changed that much. I think that the ICT’s have just replaced former paper based activities with ICT based ones. It is very much still teacher driven and the idea of collaboration  and 21st century teaching skills even within the class itself isn’t really on the radar! As I am not in charge of this area as such I am kind hamstrung as I am reliant on my Head of Teaching and Learning catching the vision, however she also is snowed under with lots of admin style tasks! I am totally frustrated as while what we are doing is a good start there is so much more. I think this is the thing that is making me feel like an untuned car the most!!

Google Apps for Education:
I know this is hard to believe but we have not had email for students until about 2 weeks ago!! Much to the frustrations of many! It was almost at the point (and I think we were a 1:1 school I would’ve bypassed it all together) that we could’ve skipped email and gone straight to something like edmodo! However we were not quite ready yet as a school to grasp the no email concept!

Cybersaftey:
Went to the Developing Leaders conference for CEN (Christian Education National, the movement my school belongs to) and heard a very interesting/shocking presentation from Susan McClean the Cyber Cop. She argued that teachers should not be on Facebook and especially should not befriend their students. She had seen too many cases where teachers however innocent have been accused of dubious behavior because of something taken out of context on MySpace or Facebook. She quoted the VIT Code of Conduct Principle 1.5 d. which states

Principle 1.5: Teachers are always in a professional relationship with the students in their school, whether at school or not

Teachers hold a unique position of influence and trust that should not be violated or compromised. They exercise their responsibilities in ways that recognise that there are limits or boundaries to their relationships with students. The following examples outline some of those limits.

A professional relationship will be violated if a teacher:……

d. holds conversations of a personal nature, or has contact with a student via written or electronic means including email, letters, telephone, text messages or chat lines, without a valid context

I have to be honest and say that I struggled with being told this. I associate with my students out of school all the time and always have! I go to church with them, am friends with their parents, play basketball with them, have done Sunday school with them and use students as babysitters I constantly do life as a teacher with these students and I love it! So it was difficult for me to deal with this! However I have to follow the code of conduct so I have dutifully, but not happily, deleted any current students from my Facebook profile. It was great to see a more balance approach by Jenny Luca on her blog.

So the next 6 months should be interesting hopefully I can start to get more in tune and get some really good stuff happening at school and affect more change!

What is a Ning??
A Ning is a website that allows you to create and control your own online social network. It is a similar concept to Facebook or MySpace except you can control who the members are, the content and the topic of the network.

So what use would this be in education?
For the students
Excellent to create a controlled collaborative environment for a class, year level or a group of students from different year levels that need to work together or even students from other schools. It would also be useful for a specific project that you might be working on for a set period of time.
For you as a teacher
Thgere are many educational Nings on different topics which you can join to share resources and ideas with educators from around the globe. Not to mention that it might be a safer environment than jumping straight into something like Facebook if you are worried about it.

Features of a Ning
A Ning has blogs, discussion boards Note, photo storage, event promotion, the ability to create groups, the ability to change the theme and the layout of the Ning

To create your own Ning click here

Some examples of Nings

ICT Development Network Ning

Classroom 2.0

Ning in Education

T-Bird Times

Photostory is a fabulous program that is sooo simple to use. It allows you to put together still images (photos, scanned drawings, scanned images) music, voice and text to make a simple “movie” or story. It is on our college network and is available as a free download from the Microsoft website here.

A user guide is microsoft20photo20story20320introduction

Some ideas of how this could be used in the classroom:

• Visual representation of an historical figure
• Alternative way to present an assignment
• A verbal book review with appropriate images
• Creating an advertisement
• A group story
• A different way for kids to share what happened on the holidays/excursion/incursion
• Presentation of a concept, e.g. what Australia means to me, instructions on how to play netball

The output can be viewed on screen, emailed, burnt to DVD, and even sent to a mobile phone!

We have recently purchased 6 Flip Ultras for use in the college. The website for finding out more info is here. They are very easy to use simple video cameras that can enhance learning in your classroom in a myriad of ways.

How to use:

Here is a link to the one page user guide that you can download and keep

flipultraquickstartguide

1. Turn the power on by sliding the switch on the side of the camera

2. To Record press the red button once and start filming. To stop filming press the red button once.

To View

The videos on the Flips can be viewed on the Flip itself (although the screen is way to same for showing a whole class) on a television (by using the supplied cables) ans by downloading the videos from the Flip to your computer (this is done through the ‘flip out’ USB connection on the camera)

To view on the computer just insert the USB connection on the camera into a USB port on your computer. The software should load automatically and you should then easily be able to transfer the videos accross. Once they are on your computer you can do all manner of things with them!

Teaching ideas….

So what can you do with one or more of these in your classroom? Here are some ideas

• Film any debates or plays so students can see themselves and give a critique for improvement
• Film students having a conversation to help improve their speaking and listening
• Film any exciting activities in your classroom E.g. Miss Mac filmed her Grade 1’s finding insects they were then able to watch as a class and gain even more insight into the insects in the school grounds other than what they found individually
• Film a science experiment then student can rewatch it to gain further insight into what is happening
• Students can make their own movies, commercials, speeches, presentations
• Interview students (could be good for goal setting?)
• Make a video to send to another school

I have included a link to a great slideshow by Tom Barrett which gives 35 great ideas for using the Flips for students and for staff learning.

Slide Show

If you have any other ideas please leave a comment on my blog so we can all share!

I had a very interesting time at a staff meeting on Thursday afternoon. To set the scene…… we have purchased a you-beaut, whiz-bang Learning Management System this year and we were having our first all in staff training session. We had all the teaching staff in a computer lab, a Go-to-Meeting set up with eduKate up in Qld and the lovely Kate from eduKate on the phone for the voice component. The session went for half an hour and to me it seemed fairly simple. But at the end of the meeting there was a few enthusiastic looking staff members and the rest (about 95%) looking at me absolutely shell shocked! At first I wondered why? To me it was nothing new I have been looking at learning management systems for the last year anda half, there has been lots of talk in our local area as well as in our school system about schools getting LMS’s set up and what they were doing with them. The staff had all gone through basic ICT training the precious year, and I had been talking to them about eduKate for the last 4-5 months! I assumed everyone would have a basic understanding of what a LMS is and have the basic ICT confidence to be able to make a start on using it. Hmm I was very wrong as the silence of my staff was overwhelming! But then my lovely Principal jumped up and gave a fantastically reassuring talk to the staff that it was OK to be totally overwhelmed with this and that we have a year to learn how to use it. Immediately the mood changed in the room.

Some things I realised…..only 1 or 2 of the staff (other than the small group of teachers that have commenced expert training) members had actually seen a Learning Management System before and knew what one was! I had assumed (incorrectly) that because staff had completed the ICDL last year that they now had the skills to explore all web 2.0 and ed tech has to offer by themselves. But obviously they don’t! So what to do?? How do I inspire, encourage engage this group of adults to embrace ICT and want to integrate it into their curriculum, to encourage collaboration and to look at Project Based Learning? Without needing constant hand holding?

My current strategy up to now has been to showcase a little bit of everything to the staff and hope that they will pick and use some of it. Whilst this has worked for some people; the people who have a natural tendency and a confidence with technology and aren’t afraid to try new things, it hasn’t worked with many of the staff who have found all  sorts of excuses not to use technology in their classroom. I don’t think it has been a deliberate attempt to thwart my efforts but it is borne out of a genuine fear of the failure and a fear of the unknown. Our culture demands that we have the right answers all the time and that we don’t make any mistakes so experimenting with something as ‘risky’ as technology (so much can go wrong) is going to be a major issue for some staff.

So I am changing my strategy some what. I am still going to showcase lots of different web2.0 tech for those staff that are willing to embrace it. But for the staff that are struggling with the leap I am going to encourage them to pick one tool and gain mastery of it. E.g. master the Interactive whiteboard or a class blog or wiki. A tool that is foundational that will lead to the use of other tools. For example if they are using a blog well and then want to pop up some video footage of what they have been doing in class then that will enable them to explore the Flip and You Tube etc, etc. I am also going to resource as much material as I can from educators who are not tech gurus who can inspire my staff that all you have to do is take the first step. Sometimes having someone who they see as an IT geek talking to them all the time does not help as it produces the “well that’s OK for you, you’re good at IT!” response.

I have realised the importance of baby steps and keeping thing simple, and trying a strategy that build confidence and not fear or resentment.

This post has been written on Ideas for getting educators involved with using web technology as part of The Edubloggers birthday celebration competition.

So I thought this blog would come in handy! Thought i would share my preliminary thoughts on the Professional Learning Goals Program that I am planning for next year. The assumption that I am making is that we expect our students to create learning goals and measure whether they have met them or not to help them become life long learners so why not teachers?? My scope is the development of teachers in ICT integration and use but I am hoping that is could be used for all areas of a teachers growth. So the plan thus far is by using a Ning staff will join a learning community within the school and post answers to a series of questions via a blog either on the ning or RSS’d (what is the past tense of RSS?)  to their ning page on the goals that they would like to set for themselves.I will then meet with each staff member to help develop a plan of action to help them achieve their goals, which will include after school training sessions, external PD’s, readings, peer reviews, mentoring and joining a professional learning network. Staff will then need to blog their progress and reflections at least 4 times over the year (obviously they can do more but that will be the minimum) and to utilise the features of the ning to collect evidence of their achievements e.g uploading photos, videos, documents, commenting on other’s pages etc. (It is also a sneaky way to get staff to use some web 2.0 technology and hopefully begin some collaboration and conversations!) I will also meet with staff over the year to chat with them about their progress. Staff will be encouraged to set goals that are meaningful and relevant to their teaching and needs.

So I am hoping this will work and these are just my initial thoughts. I need to work out what will happen if staff don’t work on their goals at all. I need to work out what the questions will be. Anybody see any other glitches, flaws, suggestions needed???

So over the holidays I have been thinking of how on earth I can encourage collaboration between teachers at our school and between teachers at our school and other teachers at other schools.  Our school is small and traditionally has had many one person departments, for example I was the only Business Management teacher for many years. So there isn’t a strong culture of teachers working together and collaborating on projects or curriculum although in some areas of the school it is starting to change. So my challenge is to encourage teachers to collaborate more, encourage conversation and dialogue about powerful learning all with the purpose of helping staff to integrate ICT into the curriculum and to develop 21st century teaching and learning. I know, I know easy peasy what am I worried about, right????? NOT!!!

So to help with this I am going to get teachers to set their own professional learning goals next year that I will meet with them to help develop and meet at various times during the year to check their progress. I will also tailor the PD that I run/resources I show them etc, etc to their Professional Learning needs.

So to “encourage” staff I thought that I would use a web2.0 platform to run this Professional Learning Program out of and at the same time to encourage some dialogue and perhaps some collaboration. But which one??? A central blog and get all staff to comment on the blog entries at various times? A wiki and use the discussion page for teachers to post their goals and discuss their progress whilst using the wiki pages for resources etc?? A ning where every staff member has a page where they put their goals and can comment on their goals and others as well as add photos and do blog posts etc? Or each staff memeber having their own blog to reflect on their own learning. Too many choices! Or we could do something inhouse via Moodle or eduKate. Or perhaps another format all together. Anyone with any ideas??

On another note all together I thought I had made a decison about the LMS that we are looking at for next year being eduKate however I had somehow all this time overlooked to little but very important words “per annum”! Yes that right I tought the price was a once off price but no it is a per annum price and when I realised that i nearly fell over!! $6500 per year is fairly steep I think. So what do I get for that? I suppose it pays for the help desk support that you wouldn’t get with Moodle and it pays for upgrades but it doesn’t pay for any training which is additional. Now I am totlaly unsure of which way to go as for that amount per annum we could have an absolutley cracking, gorgeous installation of Moodle with lots of bells and whistles. However we wouldn’t get with Moodle the integration with TASS which we use quite heavily and eduKate links directly into our reporting system which is good.  If anyone has used either sytem and can offer me some advice that would be great!

Anyway now that I have those questions of my chest back to lovely holidays and PJ days having a lovely relax and unwind from a very hectic year!