Safer Internet Day takes place this week on the 7th February. The aim of the day is ‘ to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people across the world.’ Here’s a video which gives more information about the day:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are some of my favourite resources that you can use to support your work on the day:

1) A ‘Safer Internet Day Kit for Schools‘ is available with resources, lesson plans, competitions and certificates.

2) The ThinkUKnow site has resources that can be used with different ages groups:

3) The BBC have a number of great resources, including an animation featuring Dongle the rabbit, an interactive Tracy Beaker episode and a ‘Caught in the Web’ Newsround special.

4) KidSmart have a wide range of resources and interactive games that can be used in class.

5) Vodafone also have lots of useful information for parents to help them keep their children safe online.

6) Our sister site, Teaching Ideas, has an enormous collection of themed ideas and resources linked to ‘Staying Safe Online‘.

7) There are also lots of e-safety videos on Teaching Videos.

8 ) Know IT All have a fantastic animated video which teaches children about different aspects of Internet Safety.

9) BrainPOP also have a free video about Online Safety.

10) Kent Trust Web have a number of useful resources, documents and links to support schools.

Are you planning to get involved in Safer Internet Day this year? What activities will you be trying?

Clicker, a literacy support tool from Crick Software, is currently used in over 90% of UK primary schools. It helps pupils to achieve reading and writing success and the latest version, Clicker 6, is about to be launched at BETT 2012.

A key focus for Clicker 6 is independent learning. The new Quick-Start Screen enables pupils to work on activities straight away without teacher assistance, whilst built-in support tools like the updated speech feedback and new word predictor enable them to overcome learning barriers that would previously have prevented them from putting great ideas into writing.

Clicker 6 also has new activity wizards which guide teachers through the activity creation process, automatically transforming their content into Clicker Sets, and makes tailoring these activities to pupils’ needs quicker and easier.

For further details on Clicker 6, visit Crick Software on stand F40 at BETT 2012, where you can also find out about exclusive upgrade discounts. You can also visit Crick Software’s site for more information.

I get to watch lots of online videos in my search for new additions to my Teaching Videos site. The site now has almost 2,500 educational videos, so I thought that I would share some of my favourites… the most inspirational… the most incredible… the most beautiful… and the most entertaining. Here they are:

1) Try to Do – This wonderful video tells a great story about a baby squirrel who tries to climb a big wall. It is a fantastic way of encouraging children to think about perseverance and determination, as well as exploring ways of helping others.

Click here to view the embedded video.

2) I’ll Be Gone - This video could be used to discuss how sounds and music are made… watch the rhythm of each sound played out in the video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

3) Steve Spangler Science – Steve has a huge collection of online videos which teach Science in very exciting ways. Lots of his experiments can be tried at home or in the classroom, but some (like the one below) are definitely not appropriate!

Click here to view the embedded video.

4) Landscapes: Volume Two – This is a beautiful video which features stunning time-lapse video of landscapes in Arizona and Utah. It would be great for inspiring descriptive writing about settings and locations.

Click here to view the embedded video.

5) The Water Cycle stop motion – I love stop-motion animations and we make lots of them at school too. This video is a great animation about the water cycle which is perfect for Science lessons:

Click here to view the embedded video.

6) The Balloon Lady - Can you write a story about the Balloon Lady? Why is she so cheerful? How does it make the other people feel to be given a balloon? What happens to the balloons after the end of the film?

Click here to view the embedded video.

7) Kuroshio Sea – This looks incredible in full-screen HD on an interactive whiteboard. I’ve shown this to classes a number of times and the reaction is always ‘WOW!’.

Click here to view the embedded video.

8 ) The Highwayman – Lots of schools use ‘The Highwayman’ by Alfred Noyes as part of their Literacy lessons and this animated video is a great accompaniment for any work using the book. Don’t forget that there are more teaching ideas linked to The Highwayman on my Teaching Library site.

Click here to view the embedded video.

9) Test Your Awareness – This extremely popular video is a great test of children’s observation skills!

Click here to view the embedded video.

10) Haerskogen – These amazing little creatures could be used in the classroom in lots of ways. Can your children write a description of them, or a story about their lives? Could they design their own creatures in Art, DT or ICT? Could you use them in Science for work on habitats and adaptation?

Click here to view the embedded video.

What are your favourite online videos?

Adobe have recently launched a new site for teachers. The Adobe Education Exchange is an online resource where teachers can seek support and advice from colleagues, share resources and gain inspiration from one another around the use of digital tools in the classroom. The site hosts example curriculum resources, lesson plans, tutorials and examples of class projects to inspire teachers to learn new methods of teaching.

The site already has thousands of resources, which you can find by different subjects / age ranges. You can also upload your own resources, allowing others to use them in their classrooms. The Adobe Education UK team are also on Twitter, so you can follow updates there.

The amazing Simon Haughton has completed his Primary School History Encyclopedia. The site is perfect for primary children, giving them a place to research different historical periods. Teachers can be confident that the information there is appropriate for young pupils to learn about history independently. Each period in history has pages about a number of related topics with easy-to-read text and photos / illustrations too. The site has taken over a year to create and you can read about its development here.

Simon has a number of other great resources for schools, including:

• The Infant Encyclopedia - http://www.parkfieldict.co.uk/infant/
• Primary School Geography Encyclopedia - http://geography.parkfieldict.co.uk
• ICT Club Activities and Games - http://www.parkfieldict.co.uk/ictclub/
• Junior ICT Companion - http://www.parkfieldict.co.uk/ictcompanion/

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?

Here are links to some of this week’s education-related news:

Schools:

• Tens of thousands of seven-year-olds are struggling to master the three Rs, official figures show. Read the announcement from the Department for Education here.
• The education secretary, Michael Gove, has proposed that every child aged five or over should be learning a foreign language, and promised to “pull every lever”, including encouraging longer school days, to make it happen.
• Work has begun to train 100 former members of the armed forces to become mentors in schools in England.
• A-level pupils should be ranked by the schools they attend as well as the grades they get, an exam board says.
• This report from the BBC discusses schools that are using 3D technology to support learning.

Inspections:

• School inspections in England will give more scrutiny to the quality of teaching, in a back to basics shake-up by the Ofsted education watchdog. Read the official announcement about the changes here.
• Education Secretary Michael Gove has suggested some schools judged to be “outstanding” do not deserve the accolade.
• Parents are to be encouraged to rate their children’s schools on the Ofsted website.

Other News:

• A quarter of teenagers say they have never received any careers advice, according to a poll.
• Nearly a third of children aged ten or under now have their own mobile phone, according to survey of parents.

Next week’s Teaching Events include:

• 7th September to 23rd October - Rugby World Cup 2011
• 17th September to 2nd October - British Food Fortnight
• 1st to 31st October - Walk to School Month
• 1st October - World Vegetarian Day
• 1st October - Older People’s Day
• 1st to 31st October - Black History Month
• 1st to 31st October - The Big Draw
• 3rd to 9th October - Children’s Book Week
• 4th to 10th October - World Space Week
• 4th October - World Animal Day
• 5th October - World Teachers’ Day
• 5th October - Primary Learning and Teaching with Dylan William and Guy Claxton
• 6th October - National Poetry Day
• 7th October - Jeans for Genes Day
• 7th October - World Smile Day

Primary Technology provide lots of ICT support to schools here in the UK. They also offer a huge collection of brilliant online resources that schools everywhere can take advantage of. Here are some of their tools:

• PrimaryWall - A sticky note tool that allows pupils to brainstorm ideas and add notes in really real-time.
• PrimaryPad - A web-based word processor which promotes collaborative learning. It is designed for schools allowing teachers and pupils to work on a pad at the same time.
• Primary Games Arena - A website providing a huge collection of educational games for children to use at home or school.

• My School Holidays – A service that collects and publishes holiday data from local authorities. Schools can also use the data to embed term dates on their school sites.
• Safe Search - A great place to start internet sessions for children and teachers. The internet searches are filtered and there are no adverts allowing safer search results for children.
• Satpin - A simple way to share groups of website links with Key Stage 1 Pupils.

Take a look at this selection of resources and see the full list on the PrimaryT site.

Here are five of my favourite online resources that I’ve discovered recently:

1) inudge (shared by Jill Summers) – This is a music generator that has simple controls and is really easy to use. You just use your mouse to draw on a 16×16 grid to make short loops of audio. There are options to have up to eight tracks (with different instruments) as well as the ability to adjust the volume and audio pan. Any music that is created can be shared and embedded. Here is one of the most popular tracks on the site at the moment:

2) Pixlr-o-matic (shared by Simon Haughton) – This fun tool lets you add a variety of effects to your photos. It has a really simple interface and you can preview the effects immediately and compare which ones you prefer. There are options to use photos from a web cam and upload pictures from your computer, so don’t forget your e-safety rules when deciding which photos to use

3) Well Done – Show Mr. Mitchell - This is a wonderful blog, set up by David Mitchell, as a way of sharing the wonderful things that the children at his school do. When children come to see him, he posts photos and audio comments to publish the children’s achievements on the blog instantly. It’s a great concept and it’s very easy to set up. Watch this video to see how David’s blog works:

Click here to view the embedded video.

4) Triptico (shared by Dai Barnes) – This free software currently offer 19 fantastic tools which are great for interactive whiteboard users. The tools include count-down timers, stopwatches, random pupil pickers, magnetic words, scoreboards and more. The program is updated regularly with new features and I highly recommend it!

5) ICT Planning – Ian Addison has created this great guide to ICT for teachers. It has sections for lots of different types of ICT, with information, web links and suggested resources within each section. There are also references to expected levels that children should reach at different age / year groups.

Have you discovered any new resources recently?

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?