Here are five fantastic resources that I’ve found in my RSS subscriptions and Twitter streams this week:

1) Learning Chocolate (shared by Rosa Esteve) – This site is great for helping children to learn vocabulary related to a huge collection of different topics. Each topic has lots of different activities to help children learn and practise new words.

2) Stopover (shared by Anthony Evans) – This wonderful video could be used for lots of different Literacy activities. Could your pupils write some narration or speech? Could they write a recount of the story? Could they write a sequel / prequel for the animation? Can they think of vocabulary to describe the characters / locations etc?

Click here to view the embedded video.

3) Fungooms (shared by Sites4Primary) – This is a lovely site for young children, with funny characters, simple games, music, stories and more. I’m sure that lots of older children (and adults) will like it too!

4) Oxford Owl (shared by Peter Richardson) – This site is an amazing resource for teachers, parents and children. There are lots of ideas to help you support children’s reading, along with free resources and e-books. The Kids’ Barn section also has lots of games and online reading activities.

5) Knoword (shared by Tim Rylands) – This addictive game can be used to reinforce and extend language… clues are given and you have to enter the matching word within the time limit given. Could you play this in your classroom?

Which of these resources is your favourite?

I came across Anithings at a visit to BETT a few weeks ago. It is a fantastic piece of software which allows children to create their own animations on screen. They can design their own characters and backgrounds or use the ones provided. Recording the animation simply involves pressing the record button and then animating the characters by moving them around.

Here are some demonstrations of how to use the software. The first shows how to make a simple animation:

This video shows some of the more advanced features, such as drawing tools, storyboards and speech bubbles.

Any animations created using the software can be posted online and then embedded into school websites or VLEs.

UPDATE – This offer is now closed.

The team at Anithings have kindly offered visitors to Teaching Ideas and Teaching News a 10% discount on any orders of the software during February. To receive this discount, simple quote ‘Teaching Ideas‘ or ‘Teaching News‘ when you place the order. Schools and teachers using either of these codes will also receive a pack of 90 Anithings stickers featuring characters from the program… great for a display or as a reward for children who create amazing animations with the software!

BETT, the ‘world’s largest educational technology event’ took place last week and I was very lucky to be able to spend a few days there. Here are some of the things that I discovered:

• Anithings – A ‘creativity tool’ which lets children create animations by simply dragging objects around on screen. It costs £250 for a site licence, but there is a 10% discount during January.

• Interactive Resources – This company makes the (extremely useful) Maths Packs, Teaching materials and Primary Games which can be used on interactive whiteboard and / or individual computers. During BETT, I was given a quick tour of the new online version of their site, allowing teachers (and pupils) to access the resources online at home and school. Teachers can also filter all of the resources by subject / topic and allocate activities to students who can try them when they next log in.
• Story Stage – I watched a demo of this software from Scholastic and was really impressed at the ability to connect multiple mice to the same computer, allowing children to work collaboratively. Why doesn’t all software allow multiple users like Story Stage?

• Smart – It was nice to hear about the release of Smart Notebook 10.6 (available now) which brings compatibility with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard on the Mac. It also has a ‘transparent’ tool which makes the Smart Notebook interface disappear, as well as a number of new Maths tools.
• 2Simple – I managed to get a final copy of 2Create a SuperStory, as well as trials of 2Assess ICT and the Online Tools. I’m really impressed with the potential of the online tools, allowing children to use creative software at home and school and save their work to an online storage area. Anthony Evans showed me 2Design&Make (built into the online tools) to make some fantastic 3D models.

• Linkbun.ch – Allows you to share lots of links with one small link which can then be shared via email / Twitter etc. Thanks to @ianyorston for sharing this gem.
• Stupflix – This looks a little like Animoto (as both allow you to combine audio / photos / video) but Stupeflix seems to have more customisation options. Shared by @digitalmaverick.

• Dabbleboard – An online collaborative whiteboard. I’ve used Dabbleboard at home once or twice, but never in the classroom. @bevevans22 talked about this during a Teachmeet Takeover session and I can definitely see it being a valuable addition to a lesson.
• Scratch – Scratch is a programming language which I’ve always thought was a bit complicated. However, @mberry gave us all an entertaining 7 minute demonstration of the program and made it all look incredibly easy. Downloading and trying Scratch is now high up on my ‘to do’ list.

• Newseum - @digitalmaverick mentioned this during his Teachmeet Takeover session about Glogster. The Front pages section lets you view the front pages of a huge collection of newspapers from around the world.
• Class blogging - Oliver Quinlan gave a really inspiring presentation about his class blogs and how time is given for the children to respond to each others’ blog posts. We regularly post items on our school website / blog but children rarely have time to add their own thoughts… something that is sure to change now!

Did you go to BETT? What did you discover?

Phew.. what a week! Over the past seven days, I’ve been busy with an Ofsted inspection at school, our summer fair, and a visit to (including a short presentation at) the Kent ICT conference 2009.

The conference was a chance to learn new ideas from the many speakers and talk to suppliers of educational / ICT resources. I was also asked to provide a brief presentation about the Myst work that we’ve been doing at my school.

Highlights from the day included:

• A presentation by John Davitt – John shared a range of tools and ideas, including his Learning Event Generator. There is also a Homework Generator, which sounds useful. As I’ve been using Edmodo to distribute homework recently, I’ve needed to find more generic homework activities (because of copyright issues), so this will give a handy selection of ideas.

• Animations from psycho65… Matt showed a Prezi presentation (watch it here) which included a number of his pupils’ wonderful stop-motion animation.
• Presentations by Tim Rylands… Tim came back to Kent to share lots of new sites that I’d never heard of before. Some of these included Fighting Malaria (an incredible site with interactive photos and sounds which transport you to some amazing locations), Wordsift (which ‘sifts’ through your passages of text, finding definitions, images, synonyms and more) and Switcheroozoo (a wonderful site which lets you create your own creatures). Tim also recommended the Wii game ‘Wild Earth – African Safari’ which inspired me to make a new ‘Games to Enhance Learning’ presentation on Ideas to Inspire.
• Tim also asked a few Kent teachers (including myself) to share some of the work that they had been doing with Myst since his presentation at the last Kent conference. It was really interesting to see the amazing work that other schools have been doing, and it was also nice to be able to share some of my own children’s achievements. You can view the Prezi that I used here.

Find out more about the Kent ICT conference on the Kent ICT blog and Tim Rylands’ blog.