A webtool I came across last year was this; Tour Builder a Google Earth plug in. In fact I even explained this when I was at a conference in the demo slam. And I won!! So exciting. I've only used it a couple of times in class, but I do totally love it.

The basic premise of it is that you can create a tour across the world using Google Earth. This can then have different pictures and videos added to come up with an explanation of each stop along the way.

I used mine to create one about the journey that a Muslim will go on if they are doing Hajj. My Tour Builder began at Heathrow aiport and then flew across to Jeddah. There will links to the Ka'baa and the pillars of Jamraat in Mina. It was really easy to make and I loved using all the search boxes to find the pictures I wanted, rather than having to save them and then insert them. You could change the icons for the different places you stopped off at and then in the white box on the side insert detailed information to explain each one, or even link in a video. I did struggle to work out how to put the videos in. That is something I will need to work on as it wasn't quite as straight-forward as linking a youtube clip. 

What I really liked about it was the ability to see the distance that a Muslim will travel, thus realising that a tremendous undertaking it is. The class were seriously impressed by it. At points we could have done with zooming in on the writing, but we were able to make the pictures bigger which was necessary so that everyone could see. My normally not wonderfully behaved class completely lapped it up! I guess I will have to wait till next week to see if they actually understood or took anything in. One boy even said later that the lesson was too fun for him to have learnt anything. I think he did. They'll be a tough answer and question session for us to try out next week....

You can see it here. 

Picking a name out of a hat is boring

Here is something I love - I used to pick out of a jar, or let children answer when they have their hands up. But then, I found this: fruit machine. I think it is very important as a teacher to have good questioning and answering sessions. People who are shy are unlikely to put up their hands and often it is the loudest people who get the chance to share. Previously I have used jam jars with all the names of the class in them, but this is quicker and more effective and I never seem to get round to making my jam jars. This is easy to use and I love the noises it makes when it selects the child. I now need to work out how you can have all the names of different groups saved so you don't need to imput them everytime. 

I'm planning to try it out in a lesson tomorrow with a year 7 class. I have a new teacher coming to observe my lesson and we will be using all manner of different internet based tools; I can't imagine what he'll think. But maybe he'll catch on and I will find a partner in crime. 

Screen Cast

Sometimes when I have met with parents to discuss their child's progress they have said to my that their son or daughter has sometimes expressed a lack of understanding in how to answer the different questions they have to complete in their Religious Studies lessons. This is a completely understandable issue. I have been thinking recently about the concept of flipped learning. By this the learning is done at home in preparation for the lesson and in the lesson instead of doing the teaching you are able to do fun and creative activities in order to demonstrate what has been understood.

I am a little daunted by trying this out, but in my reading one thing which struck me was the importance given to videos as a means through which information could be shared with the class. I have already written about how much I love that here. I thought therefore that it might be sensible to create some videos explaining the different answering structures we use and how they could be deployed. Encouragingly in one of my lessons I said to a class I had made one, and one of the boys in there said he had already watched it. Result. I plan to make some more for each of the different questions so that in homework time I can encourage the classes to watch over the videos as a reminder of what they should be doing.

To do this I used a tool called Screen Cast O-Matic. It's terribly simple; just open it up, pull the recording area to the right amount of your screen and hit record. You can even record a voiceover of you awkwardly explaining something. I am the Queen of Awkward so this of course was right up my alley.

The best Chrome Extensions for teachers.

So I totally do not want to be all over dramatic. But I do feel chrome is like, utterly fantastic. It still amazes me that I can have all these awesome extensions in my toolbar, some of which I use several times a day. Here are a few my life is all te better for:

• Eye Dropper:

This allows you to pick any colour on a webpage and find out the colour value. If you are then designing a webpage, or social media banner you can use consistent colours. Instead of endlessly trying to match the colour by pressing at the right point on the colour circle, you can get the precise one quickly and easily. I showed this to a friend on Saturday who was designing a web banner to match her book cover and she said it was revolutionary.

• Tab Scissors

With this you can cut open your tabs. Then the two tabs will appear next to each other on the screen. I find this so useful in class when we might be looking at a bible passage and I also want to be completing a quiz saved on a webpage. Or I might want to refer to two webpages at the same time.

• Glue

After you have finished with the tabs, use this extension to glue the webpages back together again.

• Save to Google Drive

This saves any webpage you have been looking at to google drive. When I am discussing big ethical issues with my scholarship class such as euthanasia or the just war theory we will look at websites together and then anything good can be saved to the shared Google Drive folder and they can refer back to it when completing essays and preps for me.

• Padlet

I use the webpage Padlet a lot in my classroom in order to collate the opinions of my students. With this extension I can easily see the names of all of my walls and quickly make a new one for the class without having to go to the full page and sign in.

• Save as a PDF

With this I can save any website as a pdf. Super useful if I want to print off easily what is stored on a whole page. Maybe I want them to refer to the stickies we made on Linoit in their homework. Well with this I can do that easily. The PDF quickly downloads to my computer and I can save it on my computer and print it out for them or save it to the VLE. .

• Snippy

This allows you to just save one section of your webpage. So if there was a particularly useful paragraph in an article I was reading on an ethical issue I could snip it and save it to my snippets to print off for class later. So so much easier than saving the whole thing and then cutting out the best bit manually with scissors. I basically don’t even use scissors anymore. Ha.

Well I am sure there are a lot more super cool chrome apps that I do not even know about. Would love to hear which ones you find super useful.

And just a final picture, here are all the chrome extensions I have on my computer in all their beautiful glory.

Post-It Plus

I came across a fun new App just before half term. Do you think App should be with a capital? I don't know. Feels appropriate though. I was so excited, and maybe also disorganised that I downloaded it a lesson and then worked out how to use it and then did. I mean, yes I am like totally dramatic. Maybe also a tiny bit bad at grammar. So....sue me.

This app is called Post-it Plus; tagline from the website is 'Moving great ideas forward, from start to finish.' Whatever that means. Basic premise though, and I literally have no idea how they did this is that you can get your class to write their ideas on a post-it note. Perhaps you are brainstorming a question, or discussing what has been covered and learnt in the class. You can then take a picture of this on your iPad and the App recognises the post-its and scans them in.

This App works with my Apple tv, so I can airplay my iPad. Obviously it would be very difficult to read what these say as they are tiny. You can then double tap on them and a gallery opens. So you are able to flick through what the class has written. I like doing this to consider ideas for answers and then we bin the less good ones and keep the ones we all agree on.

If what you have done in the lesson has been worthwhile and you'd like the children to have access to the information you can then share the page. I often upload it to a shared Google Drive folder.

So there we have it, Post-it Plus. A useful App to have in the classroom.

FYI I used a new App to anotate my iPad pictures. Need to work out how to unborder my text!

Adsy: App design

One of the things I love most about twitter is the chance to hear about new technology early on. It makes me seem cutting edge to my friends pupils the fact that most of the time I am pretty much a total dork. While doing some late night twittering due to my food poisoning last week I came across some mentions of a website called adsy. It promised to be a web platform through which I could make apps. I checked it out, and having watched the instructional video managed to understand it.

While what you can achieve is simple; you can only include text, pictures of videos but there is no way to give the user a way to input their own text, what I do like about it is the way it teaches children some of the basics of how one would go about building an app. In my PSHE lessons where we had been discussing revision as the school exams are looming I let them spend some time having a go at designing one as a revision tool. It was very easy and once set up they were able to get on with their apps on our school ipads. In my pipedream I had imagined they would all finish in 1/2 hour and we could share them with each other. It did take a lot longer and none of them finished but I think it was still a worthwhile exercise. There were a couple of children who thought it was seriously exciting. Best for me was the girls who got into it. I was reading today about the digital apartheid which will exist for those who do not understand how to code.

#ISCICT @IanYorston outlines the future problem in relation to those who can code and those that cannot. pic.twitter.com/JyBHCtilYQ

— Nick Dennis (@nickdennis) November 5, 2014

This morning I was reading all about Reshma Saujani who set up Girls who code an initiative which tries to get girls to learn to code. I feel like my use of adsy with my girls was a chance to get them to see that coding isn't something done by spotty boys in hoodies, it can be done by them too. They were seriously excited about their creations, about putting in videos and music, and as yesterday was Teach Girls to code day, that seemed apt!

If you are interested, here is a link to the app I made with one of the boys. We were so keen we finished it in break time. Score.

Have you tried adsy? I would love to see any of the apps you have made.

Inspirational Posters for the classroom

At the end of last term I wanted to make some nice looking posters to put up in my classroom. It is possible to find some online, or to buy them. But they are fearfully expensive. Plus I liked the idea of having some which fitted with comments that had been made throughout the year so were personal to my school.

After some research I found a great app called Phoster. It is so simple to use. There are lots of different backgrounds and you can then edit what is written on them. Just look here at all the funky options. I would find it far too difficult to make something like this myself. But this can be done in a matter of minutes. Result! Here is some idea of what it looks like, photo from here

I laminated them all and have stuck them above my board. I love the fun colours and how unique they are.

So if you are looking for an easy, unique way to make fun posters for your classroom then try this app.