Power League

Posted on July 22, 2009 by slav

Power League is an interesting concept. It provides free access to its site which is based on the idea of leagues. Leagues are forums or discussions about particular topics; students can discuss, question, debate and even vote. If a league is not suitable or available, teachers can start their own league.

: Homepage

Power League is a way to get students actively engaged in topics quickly and easily as they can all have their own say and opinion and vote on the topic, whereas in class, there are often students who are reluctant to voice their opinions.

About page

Although designed in the UK for Key Stages 3 and 4 (years 7-9 and years 10-11), Power League is a very useful site for Australian teachers and is ideal for debating or any class that requires discussion. This teacher guide will give you much more information.

FUSE – Find, Use, Share, Education

Posted on July 20, 2009 by slav

Victoria’s Department of Education and Early Childhood Development has released stage one of their new website. FUSE; Find, Use and Share quality Education resources is set to be revolutionary for teachers by the time it is complete by early 2010. Even now, it has many features both for Victorian DEECD employed teachers and others outside of this system. Teachers can log in using their Edumail details to access extra content and features.

FUSE homepage

FUSE is the one place to get everything you need for teaching and learning. It also provides the ability to save, bookmark and package items for later access. So if you are looking for items such as URLs, documents and videos for teaching a unit of work, they can be found, saved and packaged for easy access at a later date. Teachers can also rate and comment on resources.

FUSE has been developed in conjunction with organisations such as the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the State Library of Victoria, Scienceworks and Museum Victoria.

Innovation and Next Practice Branch Assistant General Manager Katrina Reynen at the release of FUSE

Teachers are ecouraged to upload to FUSE. Documents, URLs, videos and more are accepted in all types of formats.

FUSE is the total online planning tool that will be the virtual library inside the Ultranet, once the Ultranet is released. Teachers can begin using this fabulous tool now with the confidence that it will be a major part of the Ultranet.

Bright Ideas has already uploaded a document, a URL and a video to FUSE to share with other teachers.

Mathplayground

Posted on July 18, 2009 by slav

Here is an excellent website for children that provides maths games. Mathplayground has lots of different maths games and puzzles.

Mathplayground homepage

There are also Maths videos, logic games and more. Well worth a look for students and perhaps even bored children on weekends and school holidays?

Twitter gains PM’s approval

Posted on July 16, 2009 by slav

From Inspired (UK) comes the following article:

Twitter gains respectability

The PM Gordon Brown has saluted the global implications of twitter. Because of it, he suggests, international relations will never be the same again. Meanwhile, schools and young people using twitter have access to an extraordinary range of famous people through such sites as celebritytweet. More usefully, students are recommended to consider picking up on relevant environmental tweets, distinguishable thanks to the increasing use of hash tags. A great twitter opportunity on this theme is this December’s Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. Meanwhile, more immediate feedback on environmental issues of the day can be read via @ecointernet on twitter.

Some excellent ideas about the use of Twitter in classrooms and plenty of time to plan and gain any permission necessary for students to participate in December’s Copenhagen Climate Change Conference.

We Make Stories

Posted on July 15, 2009 by slav

Book publishers Penguin have developed a website where children can write, illustrate (and add sounds) and publish their own stories.

We Make Stories enables young writers to select a number of different story platforms and even re-write a small section of classics such as Alice in Wonderland, Black Beauty and The Jungle Book. Lots of fun for everyone!

Jabbster

Posted on July 14, 2009 by slav

Jabbster is a free online tool that enables you to keep in touch with and share items with family and friends and only family and friends.

: Homepage

The website explains its features:

Jabbster Features

Share photos of all your experiences,
knowing they will stay private and safe.

Let everyone know when and where you’ll be,
by adding your trip to the event calendar.

Share up to date contact & birthday info,
knowing everyone who can view it can be trusted.

Plus much, much more!
We roll out new features every chance we get!

Everything you add is completely private,
so the rest of the internet doesn’t know it exists.

Keep in touch through group discussions,
and allow everyone in your group to participate.

As well as personal/family uses, Jabbster could be useful for parent/teacher/student/class communication and student learning networks.

VocabSushi

Posted on July 10, 2009 by slav

VocabSushi is a free website that helps students develop their vocabulary by playing games.

: Homepage

As the website explains:

With VocabSushi, flash cards are a thing of the past. The best way to build your vocabulary is not rote memorization. It’s seeing how words are used in everyday language. VocabSushi helps you prepare for the ISEE, SAT, ACT, GRE or other standardized test by teaching you vocab words with real-world, contextual examples found in the daily news. We’re different than any other test preparation option, and here’s how:

Real sentences from the news teach context along with definitions

We scour the daily news from around the U.S. to find actual examples of your vocab words. Read selected sentences or whole articles to build a strong grasp of context.

: How it works

This video explains more about VocabSushi:

Sounds like fun! Thanks to Joyce Valenza for alerting Bright Ideas to VocabSushi.

Photofunia

Posted on July 9, 2009 by slav

Photofunia is a fun image effects website that enables users to create and save some pretty nifty images to print out and use at school (or home.) Images can be saved to your computer, saved as an avatar or published on the web by embedding into blogs, etc.

: Sketch

: Advertising

: For Harry Potter fans

These pictures took only a few minutes to do. From the website comes the following information:

What is PhotoFunia?

PhotoFunia is an online photo editing tool that gives you a fun filled experience. You upload any photo and just wait to see the magic. Our proprietary technology automatically identifies the face in the photo and let’s you add cool photo effects and create funny face photo montages.

PhotoFunia is free and very easy to use. Just select an effect you like from over 100 different effects, upload your photo, and PhotoFunia will handle the rest for you.

The advertising on this site means that it’s not really appropriate to use with students, however there is plenty of scope for images to be edited and printed out by teachers and used within schools.

Thanks to Kate Smyth for the tip off on Photofunia.

Archivd

Posted on July 6, 2009 by slav

Archivd is a collaborative research tool that enables users to “automatically extract images, videos, phone numbers, emails, mailing addresses, prices. Group pages by project and subject. Search the full text of every page and custom field. Research with and get feedback from your coworkers.”

: Homepage

It provides a central space for people with common interests, be they colleagues or not, to save, comment on and extract information from web pages, quickly and easily. Students working in groups on research projects could use this tool and as Archivd is available in English, French and Spanish, it could be useful for LOTE teachers and classes.

FAQs explain more and here is a video demonstration of how Archivd can be used:

The people from Archivd have also provided an example of a saved search:

: Example page

There is a trial version of Archivd for anyone who wants to test it out without signing up. Archivd is free, but also has premium services that do cost.

BookGlutton

Posted on July 4, 2009 by slav

BookGlutton is a website for the book glutton in all of us. It provides a number of online book clubs where readers can select which type of group/s they’d like to join whether it be by book or by friendship group.

: Homepage

Full text books can be read online without the need for a specialised e-book reader. BookGlutton also offers notes for books that you are interested in reading. Readers have the ability to read, annotate and discuss books online. Some more information is available here:

More help in the form of FAQs can be accessed as well.

BookGlutton is a very clever idea melding, two of the burgeoning areas of reading; e-books and book groups.

School Library Association of Victoria

Category Archives: Web 2.0 tools