Feature blog – Whitefriars College – Tania Sheko’s year 7 English blog

Thanks to Whitefriars College teacher librarian Tania Sheko for sharing another of her virtual creations. This time, Tania has developed a blog to support her year 7 English class. Tania explains:

http://englishwfc.wordpress.com/ is basically something I started to support the year 7 English class I teach collaboratively with an English teacher at my school. I decided to document the progress of our journey through this class because I’d read other teachers’ blogs and found them to be helpful and inspiring. I wanted to include what worked and what didn’t work and why. I think it’s important to be honest so that readers can benefit from your experience. I include resources and links, student work, videos used and created, in the hope that a teacher may find something they could use – an idea, a word of caution, recommendations or advice. I also include a short list of my favourite English teachers’ blogs. These have been a wonderful, rich resource for me.

 english@wfc

I also find that making myself record what we do in class is a worthwhile discipline. Nothing is forgotten or wasted, and I can look back to review what we’ve done, as well as clearly see the path we’ve taken and how far the students have come.

 Thanks again Tania for your contribution to the world of Web 2.0 and for sharing your efforts with the readers of Bright Ideas.

Kideos

Kideos is a cool site that hosts videos for kids aged 0 – 10.

Kideos homepage
Kideos homepage

Categories include:

Book Characters

Cartoon Characters

Cute Animals

Disney Channel Programs

Disney Movies

Dr. Seuss

Educational Videos

Fairy Tales

Kids

Mickey Mouse and Friends

Muppets

Nursery Rhymes

Portuguese

Sesame Street

Songs

Spanish

Super Heroes

Teletubbies

Trains and Machines

Wiggles

 Register with Kideos to view your own custom selection of ages and characters.

 

The Kideos website says that “Kideos is the premier destination for kids to safely watch videos on line.”

Kideos should be useful for parents and early childhood and primary teachers.

Rouxbe cooking school

Rouxbe is an online video cooking school.

Rouxbe homepage
Rouxbe homepage
Information from the website states:

Welcome to Rouxbe!

Rouxbe is the web’s first-ever online cooking school – the next generation food and cooking site focused on teaching home cooks the skill and technique behind great recipes.

Your video viewing and learning experience is brought to you by DEAN & DELUCA who are providing you with access to all of Rouxbe’s full step-by-step video recipes, and our featured cooking school lesson-of-the-day.

The step-by-step video recipes would be ideal to use in schools, particularly for students who have literacy issues when reading recipes or those who find following aural instructions difficult.

Also good for the home cook!

Academic Earth – videos from the world’s top scholars

Academic Earth provides free videos from some of the world’s top scholars. Universities that provide content are:

  • Berkeley
  • Harvard
  • MIT
  • NIH
  • Princeton
  • Stanford
  • UCLA
  • Yale
Homepage

Homepage

Subjects covered include:

  • Astronomy
  • Biology
  • Chemistry
  • Computer Science
  • Economics
  • Engineering
  • English
  • Entrepreneurship
  • History
  • Law
  • Mathematics
  • Medicine
  • Philosophy
  • Physics
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Religion

This could be a useful site for teachers and advanced/extension students.

Totlol

Just in time for the holidays, but with educational applications too, comes the fabulous Web 2.0 resource Totlol.

Labelled YouTube for toddlers, Totlol uses videos from YouTube that have been selected by parents/educators as appropriate for children aged 6 months to grade school (primary school). Videos are then placed in a queue to be moderated by other Totlol members before they are uploaded and available for public viewing.

Parents or teachers that are still concerned about the possibility of inappropriate content can set filters, parent locks and timers (so that children do not watch videos for too long).

As with sites like Hakia, Totlol’s viability really depends on the community helping to build it by recommending videos to be added to the site. Totlol is a brilliant idea as there are so many useful and educational videos on YouTube, but YouTube users are meant to be aged 13 and up. Parents/educators worried abour questionable videos available on YouTube can now breathe a sigh of relief!

Thanks to Gerald Brown via IASL listserv for the heads up on this great resource.