As someone who has trouble from time to time keeping up with figuring out the time zone difference between different countries when trying to make arrangements for international skype calls I was happy to come across EveryTimeZone – a great interactive online app that provides you with an ‘at a glance’ view of time zones across the world in relation to where you live. It automatically adjusts to the time on your computer – and shows the hours of daylight and darkness. It is also adjusted automatically to the  daylight saving variances in different countries.

In addition to being a useful personal tool, I can see this being an excellent app to use in the classroom – both as a way of learning about time zones, and also for students to use when scheduling their online interactions as a part of global classroom project work.

I attended the CORE Breakfast in Christchurch yesterday morning, and thoroughly enjoyed the presentation by Helen Cooper from the Ministry of Education and Simon Evans of CORE about two exciting sites.

While these sites have been around for a little while now, this was my first real tour of each of them, and I was impressed with how far they have come – and what the vision is for their future development! I was particularly impressed with the ‘learning journey’ feature of the Digitstore site, providing teachers with the ability to develop collections of resources that can then be made available to students.

Digistore is a repository for digital content that enables teachers to better select digital content to support their students. Resources are available from early childhood level through to senior secondary school level and include a vast range of digital resources including film clips, audio clips and documents. The site also features learning objectives, which are interactive items based around a learning skill or concept, covering a range of subjects, including Maths, Science and Languages.

Software for Learning is a catalogue of software, which informs and encourages teachers to use the software in the classroom. Each software features information about how to use the product in the classroom, as well as galleries, tutorials, and snapshots of how teachers are currently using it in New Zealand.

Simon and Helen used Livebinders for their presentation that can be found here.

Some years ago now a colleague of mine and I put an idea to a potential funder to develop an online timeline for people to contribute photographs and stories that could be tagged to specific locations – linked to collections in museums. The proposal wasn’t successful and so our idea languished. So it was with interest I explored HistoryPin today, after the link was sent to me by Malcolm. Created in partnership with Google, HistoryPin allows anyone to contribute photographs and stories, linked to a specific location, building up a visual history book. Viewers can search for and explore the stories related to a certain location, and using the time slider, can find stories in that location in different times in history. HistoryPin also links with StreetView images so that comparisons can be made between historical views of locations and how they look now. As the resources on this build up I can imagine it being a really valuable reference for the classroom.

I’ve just been playing with this wonderful resource after spotting a tweet from Paula Jamieson from the Te Whakatipuranga Hou ICTPD Cluster. As someone who used to play second violin in the school orchestra, I’ve always enjoyed introducing young learners to the delights of the orchestra and the ways in which all the different instruments can combine their unique voices to produce such wonderful symphonies of sound.

This animated guide to the orchestra from animatedscience is a really fun and easy to use introduction to the orchestra for students. Combining the full sound of an orchestra playing with a number of interactive quizzes, it’s an easy way to review what the various instruments are named and where they are positioned in the orchestra. I recall when I was at teacher’s college spending hours creating a similar activity using overhead transparencies – but this beats what I produced hands-down!

Thanks to Animatedscience, and to Paula for bringing it to my attention

I just came across this interesting site that began last week caled The Secret Life of Scientists. It’s a web-based series  from NOVA on PBS that will spotlight two science and engineering stars every month. In a selection of three to six short videos, each person reveals his or her passions—both in and outside the lab. You can ask these scientists your questions and find out how their surprising secret lives fuel their science. Coming up over the next few months will be a pole-vaulting engineer, a rock ‘n’ roll physicist, and a juggling climatologist, just to name a few. The current featured scientist is leech expert and culinary adventurer Mark Siddall.

I’m sure there will be some useful ’starters’ here for science classes somewhere – or for follow-up and general interest participation for individual students.

Video seems to be the big thing to day
A while back I was asked by a secondary math teacher if I knew of any resources that she could use with her classes, and I was able to point her to a blog post I’d only just put up about Math in Movies.

Now I’ve come across this site called Brainstorm Math, which has a wide range of usefully categorised instructional videos on maths topics. Registering for the site is very straight forward (and free – although there are paid-for services available in other sections of the site). The videos I watched are all short instructional tutorials based on a specific maths concept – very useful for learners who want to review a part of the programme and prefer to watch and listen rather than read, or to make available to students in a class running a differentiated or self-paced programme for instance.

Despite the US-centric approach, worth a browse

The use of YouTube videos to help illustrate or augment classroom teaching has become almost ubiquitous in schools nowadays – unless, of course, you’re in one of those schools that has YouTube blocked by a firewall

Another issue is the time it takes to locate good quality and useful videos that are appropriate for classroom use. WatchNow is a new site that lists an ever-growing collection of excellent educational content that is categorised by subject area, and comes complete with a rating system and comments from other users.

The site is still in its infancy, but growing fast – worth a browse and bookmark. An interesting reference to it in this edutopia post – includes some useful advice on using YouTube video in the classroom.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

I’m almost finished writing the final draft of a chapter for a book that is to be published later this year on the 20 years since NZ introduced Tomorrow’s Schools. In it there’s reference to the enormous changes we’ve seen in education in relation to the use of the WWW as a means of accessing content and for communicating with each other. Seems that I have been doing a lot of reflecting lately about the distance we’ve traversed since the internet became a part of our lives, and the impact of this technology on almost every part of society. So it was of interest when I came across this Vimeo presentation on the history of the internet – providing a useful historical overview of the development of the internet from its inception in 1957 (it’s almost as old as I am!!) and thought I’d share it here.:-) It provides a succinct and usefully illustrated of the earlier years of the internet’s development and would make for a useful learning object for inclusion in courses needing this sort of background.

My colleague Paul told me about Yenka over the weekend, so I downloaded it and have been having a bit of a play. Yenka is a new generation of educational modelling tools from Crocodile Clips. Although it’s been around for nearly a year now, this was the first time I’d heard of it, and being interested in anything that helps with visualisation and learning, I wanted to try it out

If you’re a secondary science, maths, technology or computing teacher you’ll definitely find this of interest.

Yenka is a downloadable app for Macs and PCs, which is available free for home users, or for a small fee for educational use in schools. I like this arrangement as it’s yet another example of a product that can be introduced in the school environment for students to be able to use on their home PC by simply downloading at no cost.

Withiun the Yenka product there are a range of things you can do. Yenka Coordinates is a free modelling tool for teaching about 2D and 3D coordinates, while Yenka Sequences is an innovative tool for introducing programming. Yenka Electricity and Magnetism allows you to simulate the generation, transmission and use of electrical energy, in full 3D. And these are just some of the things available from a suite of opportunities focusing on the areas of science, computing, mathematics and technology.

For primary teachers, check out another product from the Crocodile Clips group – called Bunja, it’s an innovative educational toy for teaching mental arithmetic.

Every now and then I come across an online resource that makes me go “wow”, and is worth sharing. This dynamic periodic table of the elements is one of these. If you’re a chemistry student or teacher then you’ll definitely find this useful.

The table boasts lots of features, with an incredible amount of information crammed onto the one page, available in different views. This includes element names in dozens of languages, even Asian scripts, and the ability to switch between views simple, with names, with electron configuration, and inline inner transition metals.

The site’s developers also promise they’ll update details the day a new element is discovered or synthesized, and even keep up with new, more precise relative atomic weights as IUPAC publishes them.

You can even use the site offline – simply load the site in your browser, click around the tabs to cache most of the data, and then activate the Work Offline feature of your browser before revisiting the site. Most of the site will continue to function without Internet connectivity.

Thanks to all involved in the development if this resource, and for making it freely available.