Author Archives: jf72
WES Worcestershire’s E-Safety Site
WES (wes.networcs.net) is undergoing a serious facelift over the next few months. Not only will the resources be updated and refreshed, the appearance and navigation will be improved to facilitate access to the most appropriate resources for specific user groups.
Watch this space!
Looking for cursive fonts to support handwriting?
http://www.cursivewriting.org has a large range of different fonts which should allow you to find one that suits the style your school has adopted… Not too expensive either!
They even have a unjoined precursive and cursive fonts to support the development the children make over time.
WES gets a new look!
Over the next few months the Worcestershire E-safety website (WES http://wes.networcs.net ) will be refreshed through a collaboration between ourselves and the the University of Worcester. Accessibility and appropriateness of resources will be key so that all groups of users can continue to find the best e-safety resources through a one-stop-shop.
Want to edit the best bits out of a YouTube video?
Came across a really simple on-line tool for editing YouTube videos… www.tubechop.com
Just put the url of the video you want to edit into the website and it provides you with options to indicate where you want to start and stop the video. Once you have ‘chopped’ the video you are provided with an embed code for your edited version as well as a url.
Recommended i-Pad apps
At the recent i-Pad day at the Finstall Centre it was suggested that we tried to bring together a list of apps that people were finding really useful, either as teacher productivity tools or to support learners.
Use the comment facility to add any that you have found interesting. It would be really helpful if you could indicate:
- cost, (if any)
- what area of the curriculum you felt the app supported,
- what age range you were working with.
This of course will not be definitive as it is how you use a resource rather than the resource itself which makes it age appropriate, but it might help to give an indication of where people might start to look.
ICT remains a National Curriculum subject
Perhaps the Government have listened to some of the concerns of the ICT community about the disapplication of the ICT Programme of Study – Gove has rejected the proposal to relegate ICT to the basic curriculum come 2014, ie it will remain a NC subject with a statutory (but slimmed down) PoS.
The Government will maintain the requirement for the teaching of art and design, design and technology, geography, history, ICT, music, and physical education across all the primary years.
Programmes of Study for these subjects will follow later this year. They will be much shorter than the drafts for English, maths and science being published today. This will give teachers much more freedom in these areas.
YouTube for Schools
http://www.youtube.com/schools allows you access to thousands of free, high-quality educational videos on YouTube in a controlled environment.
You can customise the content available in your school. All schools get access to all of the YouTube EDU content, but teachers and administrators can also create playlists of videos that are viewable only within their school’s network.
YouTube.com/Teachers has hundreds of playlists of videos that align with common educational standards, organised by subject and class. These playlists were created by teachers for teachers, so you can spend more time teaching and less time searching.
Radiowaves App released
Radiowaves has released an innovative app which is in the Apple app store now.
It is for use by schools, teachers and pupils to create and safely share content from mobile devices.
Download the app at http://www.radiowaves.co.uk/makewavesapp or search for MAKEWAVES in the app store.