Category Archives: News

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Brand new, FREE Digital Literacy Scheme of Work for Schools released.

This new resource adds breadth to online safety education by including strands on Digital Citizenship and Information Literacy, the materials covering a young person’s journey from Foundation Stage right through to Key Stage 4 & 5.

Based on the hugely successful Common Sense Media scheme in the United States, it brings together a wide range of resources not only from that scheme but also the highly-regarded Australian ACMA Digital Literacy scheme and European/UK materials, all carefully mapped to a set of UK curriculum opportunities.

The content is media-rich, engaging, informative and challenging and includes:

  • Long-term and medium-term planning schema matched to age and key stage
  • Detailed, pragmatic lesson plans for the busy teacher and
    non-specialist
  • Video and whiteboard materials
  • Printable student materials
  • Parental letters & information packs linked to every lesson so families
    understand their children’s progress
  • Track student progression with “Digital Passport”, a unique, online tracking
    and assessment dashboard
  • iTunesU portal to distribute lesson materials to students’ own devices

This free scheme is a ready-made, robust solution for any school that wants to build resilience in it’s learners by developing an online safety programme that goes beyond a one-off assembly on e-safety. It has been designed to fit around existing curriculum and brings education around these “new literacies” bang up-to-date.

You can find the content at www.swgfl.org.uk/digitalliteracy available as individual PDF files or the whole scheme as a zipped download. If you have any queries about the scheme or would like to arrange training then please email hos@worcestershire.gov.uk

Oh, by the way … did I say it was FREE?

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Graduates to be offered £20,000 to train as computer science teachers

Michael Gove announces new courses designed with help from Facebook, Microsoft and IBM to improve basic, boring school lessons

Read more…

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Clicker6 Workshops and Presentation

You are invited to join the experts from Crick Software for an in-depth look and hands-on workshop with  Clicker6.
Date: Monday 19th November 2012
Venu: The Finstall Centre, Bromsgrove. B60 3EN
Cost: 1 HoS unit or £60 for 2 people per session.
Clicker6 is a multi-award winning literacy tool that enables pupils of all abilities to significantly develop their reading and writing skills.
For more information and booking details please see the flyer posted on Edulink: http://tinyurl.com/Clickr6flyer

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Schools warned over data protection after security issues

17 September 2012

One in five schools have admitted to having insecure email systems,the Information Commissioner’s Office has said, as it issued new advice to help schools tackle data protection weaknesses.

Having surveyed 400 schools across nine local authority areas, the ICO said awareness of data protection law was “generally good”.

But schools needed to pay more attention to complying with data protection laws, which if seriously breached could result in fines of up to £500,000.

95 per cent of schools were found to have provided some information to pupils and parents about what was done with personal information.

But the ICO said a third of schools with password-protected computer systems said passwords were not necessarily strong enough and were not changed regularly.

20 per cent of schools admitted their email systems were not secure.

“Whilst awareness of the law was broadly good, knowledge on how to comply with it wasn’t always there,” said Louise Byers, ICO head of good practice.

“In many respects that should come as no surprise – it’s not teachers’ area of expertise – and it is precisely what our report is aiming to address.

“I’d urge teachers and heads to take a look at our recommendations and make sure they’re complying with the law. The sensitive personal data that schools handle means it is crucial they get this right, and we hope the ICO’s report will help them achieve that.”

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Clicker 6 update

For schools that have already bought Clicker 6: 

Crick Software have been busy over the summer completing a new update for Clicker 6. It is now available to download from the Crick website. The release includes many program enhancements, including the ability to add videos to Clicker 6 activities. Here is a list of the most important new features.

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Clicket 6 – Trial Version now available

 Teachers who would like to try the software before purchasing are now able to do so by downloading the new Clicker 6 evaluation version from the Crick website. This 28-day trial can be added to as many computers as necessary.

 

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Google image search

Did you know you can use an image to search Google?  See below an extract taken from the Google help pages…

Search by Image 

Discover all sorts of content that’s related to a specific image. Just specify an image, and you’ll find other similar or related images as well as relevant results from across the Web.

For example, search using a picture of your favorite band and see search results that might include similar images, webpages about the band, and even sites that include the same picture.

How to search

  • Visit images.google.com, or any Images results page, and click the camera icon camera icon in the search box. Enter an image URL for an image hosted on the web or upload an image from your computer.

 How to enter an image URL

  1. On any webpage, right-click an image and select the option to copy it. In most browsers, this option’s name starts with “Copy image,” except Internet Explorer for which you’ll select “Properties” and then copy the URL that’s then displayed.
  2. Visit images.google.com, or any Images results page, and click the camera icon camera icon in the search box.
  3. Paste the copied URL into the search box
  4. Click Search

How to upload an image

Visit images.google.com, or any Images results page, and click the camera icon camera icon in the search box

  1. Click the Upload an image link
  2. Click Choose File
  3. Select the image from your computer

Tip: You can also drag and drop an image to initiate a search in Chrome or Firefox 3.0+. Simply click on an image, hold down the mouse, and begin dragging it toward the search box. You should see a blue box appear, and then you can drop the image into that box.

  • Download a browser extension for Google Chrome or Firefox to search by any image on the web, simply by right-clicking on the image.

Tip: After downloading your desired browser extension, you can change the extension setting so that the camera icon appears when you hover over an image. Then you will be able to simply click on the camera icon and search by the image.

Search by Image is optimized to work well for content that is reasonably well described on the web. For this reason, you’ll likely get more relevant results for famous landmarks or paintings than you will for more personal images like your toddler’s latest finger painting.

How it works

Google uses computer vision techniques to match your image to other images in the Google Images index and additional image collections. From those matches, we try to generate an accurate “best guess” text description of your image, as well as find other images that have the same content as your search image. Your search results page can show results for that text description as well as related images.

Compatible browsers

Search by Image is compatible with the following browsers:

  • Chrome
  • Firefox 3.0+
  • Internet Explorer 8+
  • Safari 5.0+

The results page

When you search by image, your results will look different from your normal Images or Web results page. The biggest difference is that your results can include non-image results like webpages that seem relevant to the image that you searched for. The elements of your results page will change depending on your search and on the information that’s most relevant to that search.

Elements you might see

  • Preview image: see a small version of the image that you searched with. (Note that if you return to that results page after a certain time, you may not see this image anymore.)
  • Best guess: if our system can find a text description for your image, you’ll see it appear as a link to further search results. You might also see a few top web results for that text query. To change your search, edit or add to the best guess by typing in the search bar.
  • Visually similar images: see a set of images that are close matches to the image that you searched with. Click the link to see additional images that are similar.
  • Pages that include matching images: see web pages that show your image on their site
  • Other searches related to this image: if our system finds more than one “best guess” description, you’ll see them as links at the bottom of the page. Click one to see full search results for that query.

Google’s use of user-submitted images and URLs

When you use Search by Image, any images that you upload and any URLs that you submit will be stored by Google and treated in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Google uses those images and URLs solely to provide and improve our products and services.

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NAACE Primary ICT Co’s Course

Those of you looking for some comprehensive CPD reagrding ICT subject leadership may be interested in the above course.

We are exploring the possibility of delivering this with a local flavour to reflect the established ways of working and resources we most commonly use in Worcestershire, but the course outline, costs and sign up as offered by NAACE can be accessed HERE.

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