I often receive emails from developers of education apps, so I thought that it might be useful to share some of the fantastic applications that are being created to support learning:

1) Happi Spells - ”Happi Spells” is a crossword spelling game where children can practice spelling by dragging letter tiles on to 48 different mini crossword puzzles. Compete for “snails” and try to improve your own high score!

2) I Learn With – Languages! - A fun educational game to help children aged from 3 to 7 years old  to learn their first words and short sentences in a foreign language. Find out more in the video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

3) DK The Human Body App – An amazing application with clear information and incredible illustrations which helps you to learn about the human body.

4) Sing your times tables with Percy Parker – I’ve used this app in school a number of times and the children love singing along and learning their multiplication tables with Percy!

5) Healthy Star - The Healthy Star is a short introduction for young children, to the world of affirmations and enriches them with positive thoughts. The story includes simple relaxation exercises.

6) Edmodo – Teachers and students can stay connected to the fantastic Edmodo system using this iPhone and iPad app.

7) How to Make Origami – This app includes step by step instructions with 3D animations of paper folding to help you learn how to create amazing origami!

8 ) Eggs on Legs – Primary Games make lots of great interactive whiteboard software which I use at school regularly. They are also now developing iOS apps which look great!

9) Jungle Time – Learning how to tell the time can be a difficult concept for some children. This app helps children with their understanding and it can test them too!

10) Formative Feedback for Learning – An app that allows students to receive feedback on their performances in a wide range of curriculum areas. Find out more in the video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

11) Story Builder – Can your children finish these story starter ideas?

12) Math Formulas – A guide to Maths formulae with information and examples. The topics covered include algebra, geometry, calculus, trigonometry, probability and statistics.

13) Britannica Kids (Ancient Rome) – Explore the history of Ancient Rome with the images, games and activities in this iPhone / iPod / iPad app.

14) GeoGame World Series - An educational geography game with lots of different options and challenges. Find out more in the video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

15) TED – The TED talks are always enjoyable and inspirational… they cover a wide range of topics and you can access all of them through this great iOS app.

16) Fishy Numbers – A fun game which is designed to help primary school children with their mental addition skills. Find more educational apps by this developer at www.primaryapps.co.uk.

Which iOS apps do you use in your classroom?

Evernote is a wonderful program which I use every day. At a simple level, it lets you store notes about anything that you choose. These are all synced so that you can access them using the PC  / Mac / iPhone / iPad / Android / Blackberry (and other) versions of the software, as well as via the Evernote website itself. Having the notes available everywhere is a fantastic feature and it means that you should always have access to whatever you have stored within Evernote.

Evernote has a wide range of potential uses for teachers, so I thought that I would share some of the ways that I use it as part of my own work, both in and outside of the classroom:

2) Reducing paper mountains! - I must admit that I’m not great at keeping track of paper… and as a teacher, there is often a lot of paper to deal with. So, I use a Scansnap scanner to quickly scan any important pieces of paper. These are important automatically into Evernote where I can save them for the future and organise them into notebooks, using tags to help me find them again later.

3) Making notes in meetings – During staff meetings, I use Evernote to keep notes on my iPhone or iPad. If I use a piece of paper to make notes, I will often lose it, so storing the information digitally in Evernote means that it can’t get lost! It’s also great because the notes are synced between all of my devices so that I can access them in a range of places whenever I need to.

4) Capturing images – Sometimes at school, there might be a note on our staffroom board which I need to remember or I might be given a post-it note with something that I need to keep track of. Rather than relying on my memory (which appears to get getting steadily worse!), I often take a photo of the note using the Evernote iPhone app. Again, this saves the note across all of my devices, reducing the potential for me to forget about it!

5) Storing documents – You can also add documents to Evernote notes as attachments, so it is possible to use this to sync and store your files in a range of places. However, I am a Dropbox user, so I don’t use Evernote for document storage a great deal.

6) Storing PDFs – Although I don’t use Evernote to store documents much, I do use it to store PDFs so that I can read them on my iPhone / iPad whenever I have the spare time to do so. When Evernote syncs PDFs (and images), it also scans the text, making it easier to search for things later.

7) Bookmarks – I used to use Delicious for storing bookmarks, but Simon Haughton suggested using Evernote instead. By using the Evernote web clipper, you can copy the title, web address and content of web pages into Evernote, so that they are accessible anywhere. By storing the content in Evernote, you also have a permanent record of the web page in case it ever goes offline. I now have over 2,000 bookmarks in Evernote which I can search through quickly using the search box or by using tags.

Keeping track of achievements – I strongly believe that everyone should keep a record of their achievements. As a teacher this might include nice comments and notes from pupils / parents, evidence from lesson observations and much more. In Evernote, I have a notebook which I use to store notes of this kind. Not only is it nice to look through every now and again, it’s great to have information like this available for performance management and professional development reasons.

9) Twitter Favourites - Whenever I ‘Favourite’ a tweet on Twitter, the ifttt service automatically copies these into an Evernote notebook for me. Although Twitter keeps a record of favourites on their site, I find their system really unmanageable and difficult to search through later. Keeping them in Evernote makes it much easier to find them in the future.

10) Gift Ideas – Whenever I think of a possible gift for a colleague / friend / family member (or whenever they mention that they might like something), I add it to my ‘Gift Ideas’ notebook so that I have an instant collection of shopping ideas at Christmas / birthday times!

Privacy Issues – I must mention that anything you add to Evernote gets synced online to their servers (so that it can then be synced back to any other devices that you use). Therefore, it’s important to think carefully before adding certain kinds of information to Evernote (i.e. pupil data and other private school documents) – although it is possible to set up ‘Local Notebooks’ which are not synced and only stay on the machine that you are using at the time.

Evernote is a brilliant free piece of software. It’s my ‘second brain’ and I have signed up for the Premium service (which offers greater upload limits and other features) as I use it so much. Do you have any other great ideas for using Evernote?

Although I wasn’t able to attend this year’s BETT show in London, it was still possible to find out about the new products and services being shown, as well as the fantastic presentations being given by teachers and educators, thanks to the Internet! Here is a review of what I discovered from this year’s BETT:

• The New at BETT online publication outlines some of the new products that were featured at the show.
• The Bee-it site has a number of posts about BETT, including a list of the winners of this year’s BETT Awards. They also have daily reports from their time there… see Day One, Day Two, Day Three and Day Four.
• The TES have a list of the workshops that tool place on their site, along with related ideas and resources that you can use.
• Chris Ratcliffe, from Scholastic, has also created set of day by day posts… Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Teacher Blog Posts:

• Ollie Bray’s blog has a number of interesting posts about his favourite parts of BETT 2011.
• Alex Findlay has written his review of the event which he feels was ‘calmer than normal’.
• @misterel has posted the Teachmeet presentation that he gave about using EasyVoter in Moodle as well as a review of his experiences.
• Bev Evans gives a detailed outline of the event, along with her top 10 highlights, in her ‘London Calling’ blog post.

Image – BETT 2011

• Alessio Bernardelli has shared some of his favourite memories from the day that he spent at BETT.
• Ian Addison has also shared his thoughts about some of the things that he saw. Kevin McLaughlin has also written about the benefits of connecting with other teachers and educators at the event.
• The Geeky ICT Teacher has a list of some useful ideas and resources that she came across.
• Tim Rylands’ site has a review of his presentation called ‘ICT to Inspire’ which also involved Simon Widdowson and Kevin McLaughlin.
• Danny Nicholson has two posts (here and here) which mention some exciting new products and interactive whiteboard resources.
• Jason Dilling has produced an account of his visits to the Frog and Fronter stands to view their products.
• Dai Barnes has also written about the Teachmeet event on the Friday night which he watched online. You can watch a recording of the event here.
• Simon Widdowson and Simon Haughton have both written some extremely interesting reports about their visit to the events, with information about the presentations that they gave.

Audio, Photos and Videos:

• Here is a collection of photos from BETT 2011. Which tools, sites and products can you see featured in the images?
• Leon Cych has created a video playlist of his videos from BETT. View them here or subscribe in iTunes.

Browsing through all of this information about BETT, it seems that there were very few big announcements and new products revealed at the event. The main highlight for lots of the teachers seem to be the Teachmeet and Teachmeet Takeover events… this was certainly the case for me when I attended in 2010.

Did you go to BETT 2011? What were your favourite parts of your trip?

I’m always coming across new ideas, links and resources on Twitter. Here are some of the things that I’ve found recently:

• Kevin McLaughlin has set up a new group and site for educators to share ideas for using games and related technology to enhance teaching and learning. You can also get involved via Twitter.
• Ian Usher shared an interactive site which reviews the news from 2010.
• Terry Freedman has written 10 tips to help teachers plan the use of technology in their lessons.
• Danny Nicholson shared Grabbabeast… another fantastic avatar builder.

• The Smart Exchange now provides free Smart Notebook 10 files from accredited publishers (shared by Helene Podmore).
• Here is a great online jigsaw builder using images from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (suggested by Colleen Young).
• A new site has been set up by Simon Haughton, where teachers are sharing their favourite ICT Tips.
• Class Jump offers free websites for teachers, educators and students too (shared by Brendan Jones).
• Google Body is a detailed 3D model of the human body. You can peel back anatomical layers, zoom in, click to identify anatomy, or search for muscles, organs, bones and more (shared by Kevin McLaughlin).
• Colport Teaching recommended ‘Dangle’… a live action film that you can use with KS1 and KS2 pupils.

• Keisa Williams suggested Incompetech as a place where you can find royalty free music.
• James recommended this booklet which shares ideas for using parachutes in PE lessons.
• James Michie and many other contributors have published the first EdJournal with lots of interesting articles for teachers.
• Learning in Hand has a list of recommended iOS apps for your iPods / iPads (shared by Tony Vincent).
• John Schu shared this page which has various animal sounds.

Have you discovered any great new resources on Twitter recently? Share it in the comments…

Many teachers are beginning to see the benefits of using QR codes in the classroom. If you’re not familiar with QR codes, they are black and white pictures (similar to the barcodes that appear on items of food etc.). When you scan the QR code with a special application (many of which are free and available for computers / smart phones / mobile devices), special messages can be revealed, contact details can be shared and (sometimes long and complicated) web addresses can be visited easily.

Here are some other examples of how teachers are using QR codes with their pupils:

• Tom Barrett has used QR codes in his classroom and has shared a number of useful suggestions for using them to help children to access a range of digital resources. He has also started an ‘Interesting Ways’ presentation, which currently has 26 suggestions for using QR codes in education. You can view the presentation here and on Ideas to Inspire.
• The pupils in David Mitchell’s class have stuck them into their Literacy books, as a way of encouraging those looking at the books to visit a copy of their work online and read the comments that had been added there!
• Kerry Turner has used QR codes in a number of ways. I was particularly impressed with the idea of printing them on sticky labels and using them to share useful sites / important information with students.
• James Michie has written a detailed account of the use of QR codes in education, which contains a number of ideas and lots of links to explore.
• Dughall has also written an interesting review of QR codes, which includes some ideas for using a related tool called Stickybits.

I have  recently created QR codes for all of my Teaching Websites, along with all of the Teaching Themes. You can download a poster which shows all of these, should you wish to use the codes to visit the sites. Download the poster here.

If you’re planning to use my Internet tutorial, Welcome to the Web, it might be useful to print the relevant code for children to enable them to access the site more easily.

Have you used QR codes in the classroom?

Alan McKinney from SoundScalpel has kindly contributed a large collection of sound effects to Teaching Ideas. You can download these sounds and use them in your classroom for:

• Adding atmosphere to lessons,
• Assemblies,
• School performances,
• Adding sound to children’s ICT / multimedia work,
• Addition to a school website / VLE.

www.teachingideas.co.uk/english/dramasoundeffects.htm

I’ve also recently discovered www.freesfx.co.uk which has lots of free sound effects which you can also use.

www.freesfx.co.uk

What are your favourite sound effect resources? How do you use them in the classroom?

Stuart Ridout has started a useful collection of tips for teachers with interactive whiteboards in their classroom. The tips are all contributed by teachers using Twitter. Simply search for #iwbtips on Twitter to see the latest tips. Here are a small collection of the contributions so far:

• Make sure iwb is accessible-installed at a proper height or w/adjust mount. Tennis ball helps students with challenges touch screen (from EdTechieGeek).
• PLAY with your whiteboard, do not be afraid to explore and experiment (from psycho65).
• Take 5 mins every day to learn how to use an iwb tool and use it with your class, use 5 in one lesson at the end of the week (from Kevin McLaughlin).
• Ensure groups use the IWB for independent working bits in lessons; brainstorm, designing, google earth, presentations, etc (from Mark Robinson).
• Tchrs must remember that iwbs r about the kids not the teachers. Gr8 for group work/indep tasks.Avoid stand and deliver lessons (from Ann McDonald).

Image – IMG_0724

Stuart is planning to compile all of these tips into an e-book and I’ll post another update when news about this has been revealed. Why not share your own #iwbtips and have then added to the e-book?

Here are some details about new free resources from Futurelab:

Education Eye
Education Eye is a free, engaging and easy-to-use online space that gives access to a wide range of useful and relevant innovations across educations’ varied communities. Connecting people with innovative uses of digital technology, new resources and new approaches to teaching and learning to help inspire further innovation in education.

Infocow
Infocow is a social search website made for and created by young people aged 14-19. It connects young people with sites, stories, information and inspiration to help take control of their lives. Infocow links to hundreds of different websites and sources of information that can help with making positive changes, whether that’s finding out what to do after GCSEs, or what the first steps are to leaving home. The following Youtube video explains more…

The main Futurelab site has a large collection of resources and information for teachers. It’s well worth exploring.

EducationApps have been busy building lots of new iPhone and iPod Touch apps for use in education. Here are some of their latest additions:

• Ultimate Times Tables – A fun way for children of all ages to learn their times tables. This has four different types of tests and allows up to five users to save their results.

• French GCSE Revision – This is an interactive way to help students revise their French GCSE vocabulary, with tests, flash cards and a built in dictionary. Watch the app in action with the video below:

EducationApps have developed a number of other applications so look at their site to see their other developments.

I am really pleased to announce the availability of the second ‘Teaching Themes‘ section on my Teaching Ideas site. Last month’s World Cup theme was incredibly popular and the resources are all still online if you would like to use them. This month, the theme is Myst:

www.teachingideas.co.uk/themes/myst

The Myst series of computer games can be extremely valuable teaching tools and they are becoming incredibly popular in classrooms around the world, thanks to Tim Rylands. The characters, landscapes and storylines in the games can all be used to enhance learning in a wide range of curriculum areas. My new Teaching Theme area currently has more than 80 Myst-related teaching ideas, display resources, educational videos, online applications, photographs of classroom displays and links to other useful sites. I hope that the new theme will help you to use these wonderful games with your children.

We’ve already started working on next month’s theme, which is ‘Summer at the Seaside‘. If you have any ideas, resources or links which might be useful for the World Cup, Myst or Summer themes, please get in touch. Thank you!