How to choose APPS for your class!

Here are a couple of places to start looking.

Jasemin Allsop's Web 2 Tools 2013

 http://www.ictinpractice.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/web-2-tools-2013.pdf#page8

A detailed 25 page pdf with live links, covering What is web 2.0? Web tools for: literacy, maths, science history, geography, design/making, esl/efl learners. A comprehensive well set out resource for you to select from.

Jennifer Barnett's web Wardrobe, a useful metaphor.

https://jenniferbarnett.wikispaces.com/My+Web+Wardrobe

She says "I think of the today's web 2.0 tools as a wardrobe for my class. A wardrobe is a collection of wearing apparel and accessories. My instructional wardrobe must consist only of those things that fit me and make me better as a teacher. I will share my wardrobe with you, but you must try on all sorts of outfits to see what fits you the best."

STEM resources June 2014

The Great British Bee Count

Bumblebee numbers have declined by 60% since 1970 – very worrying since bees pollinate 75% of our most vital crops and favourite foods. With over 250 species of bee in the UK to keep a track of, it’s difficult for scientists to develop a clear picture of what’s happening to bee populations. But that’s where you come in, or rather your students!

http://www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/blog/the-great-british-bee-count

The Great Plant Hunt

To mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, commissioned and funded by the Wellcome Trust, has created The Great Plant Hunt. This exciting project will encourage children to explore the natural world around them and join other schools in the biggest ever school science project.

http://www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/elibrary/collection/1869/the-great-plant-hunt

2014 - 2015 ATM catalogue now online

Go and take a look at the 2014/15 catalogue for the ATM Association of Teachers of Mathematics,
 which you can now browse on the web.

www.atm.org.uk/Catalogue

Arranged in order from Early Years onwards, turn the pages to
find author profiles, brief reviews and above all lots to inspire
your teaching with well tried and tested materials.
Many publications are now available as downloads and more
downloadable versions are being added this year. The easiest
way to order is on the new ATM web site. It’s quick and easy to
use and here you will find additional titles as well as everything
within this catalogue. There is however an order form at the
end of the catalogue if you prefer to use that.
Brief reviews of some of the titles can be found within this
catalogue. The full reviews can be viewed on the website.
We recognise that our Scottish colleagues and educators from
other countries do not use the key stage structure used in our
catalogue and the ages/key stage links are outlined below:
KS1 5 - 7 years KS3 11-13 years
KS2 7 -11 years KS4 13 -16 years

NCETM Primary Magazine Issue 6

Worth looking at this magazine from the National Centre for Excellence in Teaching Mathematics.

News

New National Curriculum in Focus: Algebra in KS1

Where’s the Maths in That? – Maths across the curriculum

  Do also have a look at their magazine archives.

 

 

link to Early Years Archive

 

 

link to Primary Magazine Archive

Some You Tube Channels

AssocTeachersMaths

Educatioanal Solutions 

nrich Maths

malcfifty

MilesBerry   See "joined up computing curriculum"

The RSA

TechMath

TED

Veston Bruno: Sesame Street clips

Vi Hart: Crazy Doodler

Literacy from Scratch

“Literacy from Scratch” is a response to the United Kingdom (UK) government’s initiative to develop computer programming skills in both the Primary phase of education (pupils aged 5 to 11) and the Secondary phase (aged 11 to 18).
http://www.literacyfromscratch.org.uk/project/index.htm

The project has several related aspects: it involves the reworking of Primary and Secondary Initial Teacher Training (ITT) programmes at Brunel University, through which Postgraduate students are taught how to use the MIT Scratch programming language, to create sustained and animated narrative work. This work has also been developed by a whole year group (187 Year 8 pupils aged 12 -13) at a local London secondary school.

Support materials for creating these animated narratives are being developed at both institutions (the school and Brunel University), and are sent by email to a school in Prague, Czech Republic (CZ) where, with the assistance of both the teaching staff and student teachers at the Faculty of Education in the Charles University in Prague, a local Prague Basic School is undertaking the same project with several groups totalling 45 Year 3 to 7 pupils (aged 8 – 13).

STEM centre resources for new NC 2014.

The National STEM Centre has launched new areas of the website dedicated to supporting the new programmes of study for science and mathematics from Key Stages One to Three. You will need to register.

Many of the resources are excellent old resources made available in soft format such as BEAM and Science 5-13. You can build your own lists and share them with others.

The pages are organised into topic areas and contain resource packages which pull together a wide range of high quality resources selected by subject specialists, including:

• activity ideas
• worksheets
• interactive games
• film clips
• lesson plans 

These free resources provide a useful starting point for teachers when planning the scheme of work, with useful tips and advice to support non-specialists and those who may be teaching a topic for the first time and can be found at:

Secondary:

Science: www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/secondaryscience
Science practicals: www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/sciencepracticals
Mathematics: www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/secondarymaths

Primary:

Science: www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/primaryscience
Mathematics: www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/primarymaths

Linking our work using Diigo, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube adn Dropbox.

The Really Useful Maths Book is a resource for primary teachers. This blog will link ideas in the book to the Routledge companion website which went live in June 2014. There are images in Flickr to use as stimulus activities, a list of tags and maths links in Diigo and some useful video ideas in the YouTube channel. We are planning some longer pieces to go on Dropbox.


Maths Challenges

Links for pupils and teachers of Primary Mathematics in the UK. A Diigo group.
Developed for "The Really Useful Maths Book" 2nd Edition 2013.

  Henry Liebling's photostream on Flickr

 

NCETM new Resources and Videos

National Centre for Excellence in Teaching Mathematics PORTAL

The NCETM portal reflects the Centre’s commitment to personal learning.

New curriculum resource and planning tool continues to expand

NCETM have added further sections to their new web-based tool, designed to help teachers plan maths lessons in line with the new National Curriculum. Years 1, 2, 5 and 6 are now live, and Year 4 is scheduled to be added over the next month.
The resource tool, written by a team of teachers with extensive experience both in the classroom and in mathematics professional development roles, will grow to become a powerful planning aid for all teachers in Key Stages 1, 2 and 3.

Video material to support the implementation of the National Curriculum

This collection of 60 short videos, filmed in a range of school classrooms in 2012 and 2013, shows teaching, and learning, in line with the three overall aims of the new National Curriculum. These aims are that pupils should develop fluency, reason mathematically and be able to solve problems.
You can also find the videos on the NCETM YouTube channel .

Ruth Merttens on the New Primary Curriculum

Abacus: The three building blocks of Control, Understanding and Progression
Tackling the new primary maths curriculum, Ruth Merttens at BETT Show 2014
Ruth talks for less than 15mins about the new primary maths curriculum.
Tony & I have both worked with her in the past and value her opinion.
Worth looking at. Too much too soon. BUT try to keep the teacher in control and try to teach for understanding. How can you progress through this fatter and harder maths curriculum?
The Abacus scheme tries to provide a backbone of developing mathematics for you to select from.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8kj4Zs3ZwU

RUM2 tries to offer choices that you can make. Ways of building sets of strategies that children can own select from and use.

BETT 2014

I've just come back from two days at BETT 2014. Been going on for 30 years and how technology has changed in that time. In early 1980's the backbreaking 380Z black computers with handles resembling ammunition boxes with 8"  floppy disk drives costing £1000+each. Now the hardware is converging towards tablets (ipads and the like) and the software is "in the cloud". "Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere", teachers, pupils, parents can all have access. I thought about "Flipped Classrooms" where the lesson (videoed) is the homework and then the teacher works with the pupils on what would have been the homework, but in school.

Espresso won the award for ICT company of the year. http://www.espresso.co.uk/
 "Espresso is a video-rich, cross-curricular service that has won multiple awards.
Suitable for Foundation to Year 6 pupils, Espresso is guaranteed to make every lesson memorable. It saves teachers time and strengthens pupils' deeper learning and understanding." "This year, schools will be preparing for the new curriculum in September 2014. At Espresso, we want to help schools succeed with the new curriculum: from planning, to finding exciting and challenging teaching resources, to embedding them effectively into lessons."

"Espresso Coding is a brand new service from Espresso Education that allows schools to easily deliver the new and challenging area of computer programming, featured in the new Computing curriculum.
It's Computing made simple for Years 1-6. Free to schools until Oct 2014."

Helping you succeed with Curriculum 2014 is a major theme for a significant number of exhibitors, and Espresso' resources were convincing.

This was only one of a number of companies that impressed me with their wares.
If you have plenty of money to spend then there are many options for "control technology", but even on a tight budget there were healthy offerings from providers such as TTS. (Part of RM education won Queens award for enterprise in 2012) Here are a few of their samples.



Programming for KS1: Bee-bots (re-chargeable bee like robots <£50), Bee-bot app (one free, one 69p), Constructa-bot  also <£50 like a bee-bot but witth a pen holder and truck like potential)
Programming for KS2: Pro-bot (programmable keypad on car with hole for pen in centre, <£90)

A rugged outdoor, waterproof green 6 wheeled "Wonder Bug" <£100 with remote controller, looked fun.

I'll write about others over the next few weeks, trying to put together an APPS and software list for both Maths and Computing.