eTwinning is the online community for school and college staff across Europe. You can register at any time to find partner schools, set up joint classroom projects in all curriculum areas and collaborate online in a safe and secure environment.

Get hands-on training in eTwinning, delivered by two eTwinning Ambassadors at this free workshop in your area:

Tuesday 21 May
09:15-15:15
New Bewerley Community School
Bismarck Drive
Beeston
LEEDS
LS11 6TB

The workshop will be run by two experienced eTwinning teachers, who will take you through the eTwinning platform, introduce the various tools available and offer advice for using ICT throughout your classroom projects. They’ll also talk about their own experiences of using eTwinning in the classroom.

The workshop is open to teachers from nursery, primary, and special schools at all levels of eTwinning, including complete beginners. Lunch will be provided.

Register for your place now.
https://etwinning.wufoo.com/forms/etwinning-full-day-workshop-south-leeds/

Our colleagues at the London Grid for Learning have been working hard to produce yet another excellent resource for the benefit of all National Education Network members.

Viral Contagion looks at the real world maths that could occur as a result of an outbreak of a biological virus in an urban area.

Dramatized news reports describe the impact of the virus outbreak across South London, challenging students to consider the maths behind such scenarios.

This resource offers a collection of 4 discrete, differentiated lessons that provide an engaging and challenging focus for Key Stage 3 and 4 maths student
This unique learning resource features:

• High quality dramatized video scenarios
• SCORM compliant resources to integrate into any learning platform system,
• Downloadable Fronter room
• Computer models,
• Interactive whiteboard resources
• Full teacher guidance and support

www.viralcontagion.lgfl.net

As schools are now investing a lot in handheld devices  and e-book readers teachers may find this Free e-book manager a very useful tool. Calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users for users of e-books. It has many features divided into the following main categories:

Library Management

Calibre manages your e-book collection for you. It is designed around the concept of the logical book, i.e., a single entry in your library that may correspond to actual e-book files in several formats.

Calibre can sort the books in your library by: Title, Author, Date added, Date published, Size, Rating, Series, etc.All you need to do is download your e-books  into one folder, in whatever format, eBook, ePub or PDF and with a couple of clicks it will upload the books to your device.

You can easily search your book collection for a particular book. calibre supports searching any and all of the fields mentioned above. You can construct advanced search queries by clicking the helpful “Advanced search” button to the left of the search bar.

You can export arbitrary subsets of your collection to your hard disk arranged in a fully customizable folder structure, maybe by key stage or reading ability.

E-book conversion

Calibre can convert from a huge number and supports all the major e-book formats.

The conversion engine has lots of powerful features. It can rescale all font sizes, ensuring the output e-book is readable no matter what font sizes the input document uses. It can automatically detect/create book structure, like chapters and Table of Contents. It can insert the book metadata into a “Book Jacket” at the start of the book.

Syncing to e-book reader devices

Calibre has a modular device driver design that makes adding support for different e-reader devices easy. At the moment, it has support for a large number of devices. Syncing supports updating metadata on the device from metadata in the library and creation of collections on the device based on the tags defined in the library. If a book has more than one format available, calibre automatically chooses the best format when uploading to the device. If none of the formats is suitable, calibre will automatically convert the e-book to a format suitable for the device before sending it.

Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form

Calibre can automatically fetch news from websites or RSS feeds, format the news into a ebook and upload to a connected device. The ebooks include the full versions of the articles, not just the summaries. Examples of supported news sites include:

• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• The Economist
• Time
• Newsweek
• The Guardian

calibre also has a built-in ebook viewer that can display all the major ebook formats. It has full support for Table of Contents, bookmarks, CSS, a reference mode, printing, searching, copying, customizing the rendering via a user style sheet, embedded fonts, etc.

For users with apple devices we would recomend using it’s built-in content server over your network.

There are many sources of free e-books on the internet and to get you started YHGfL have a selection of FREE e-books available from Rising Stars HERE

To download the software click HERE

Calibre has an on-line manual HERE

For those used to creating web animations in Flash, Adobe has now released their Edge Animate for Free when registering for their Free cloud services Creative Cloud.

The downloadable software use an intuitive interface that’s based on WebKit, so your animations work across modern browsers. You can design  HTML content with an assortment of styling options and integration with font services like Adobe Typekit.

Motion to graphics and HTML can be added using the powerful timeline editor, edit property-based keyframes and use enhanced easing equations for precise animation control, or use the Pin tool to help speed up the animation process. To help you in this it has  a number of built in lessons for you to follow.

The content created works reliably on mobile devices running iOS and Android™ operating systems, as well as modern  browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer 9.  You can also define a fallback state so your content will be displayed on older browsers.

Adding the content to your blog,website or Learning Platform is by a simple Copy/Paste of the code from Edge Animate.

A great tool for animated web design from KS3 upwards.

For further information and to register for the software click HERE

Students aged 11 to 15  from around  the region attened our first Mobile Hack Day with  a number of them having never coded before.  After about 30 minutes of introduction the students were coming up with app ideas and starting to implement them in the Weejot AppStudio. With the ability to use its built in templates and HTML, students were able to create interactive apps about their favorite boy band and football teams. Other students were able to take the design a step further by programming in  small amounts of Javascript.

Feedback from the session was tremendous with a number of students continuing development of their apps after the event.

There is a short video of the event on eViews  HERE

The Weejot publishing service

Weejot is a mobile publishing service that provides tools that enable real-time publishing of mobile apps using the web. By using mobile optimized web pages instead of native phone apps (like the apps you download from app stores), you can reach far more people, far faster and with no time wasted in any approvals process.

Non-technical users can use ‘AppTemplates’ to create and publish apps to any device and developers can use the Weejot API to develop AppTemplates using HTML and Javascript.

Weejot is also a great way to learn the languages of the modern web. HTML5, CSS and Javascript are the main technologies and because we do not limit your ability to create whatever you want – the possibilities are endless!

If you work in education, perhaps either within ICT in a school or for an Education Authority looking for a teaching tool for all your schools then Weejot are committed to providing free accounts for students in schools, universities and authorities who use Weejot to assist in the teaching of programming skills.

For further information click HERE

YHGfL are able to support schools using this resource, for more information email contact(at)yhgfl.net

This year’s Safer Internet Day (SID) is on Tuesday, 5^th February 2013. SID is organised each year by INSAFE who provide resources and links to events taking place in other countries. It is the tenth anniversary of the worldwide campaign to raise awareness amongst the public, schools and other stakeholders around the issue of online safety.

Each year has a particular focus and for 2013, it is ‘Connect with respect‘ which looks at online rights and responsibilities.

February 7, 2013  

UK time  16.00 – 17.15.

First Lady Barbara Bush will read excerpts from “Capital” by Lynn Curlee followed by a videoconference.  Mrs. Bush will answer questions asked by students.  Next activities include:  The Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, shares insights; on-stage students as Reading Partners; and the Quartet of Singing Cadets at Texas A&M University will perform. 

Students can submit five written questions by noon, Monday, January 21 for the videoconference. 

 Selected questions will be asked by students to Mrs. Bush during the videoconference, time permitting. 

 Selected schools will be notified by Feb. 1 for participation in the videoconference.

 Schools may register up to Feb. 1 if not submitting questions.

 For more program information you can contact Dr. Shirley Hammond at  bush.education@nara.gov

Free registration at www.connect2texas.net/bushlibrary41.  Only a computer is necessary for viewing via live streaming or recording.  It is necessary to use the standard video conference equipment for the interactive Q&A session.

More details available on the flyer:

http://www.connect2texas.net/bushlibrary41/2013ReadingDiscovery.pdf

 Look forward to having you join us!

The Education Department

George Bush Presidential Library and Museum

Hull CLC have negotiated subsidised travel to this event, should you (or any of your colleagues) wish to take advantage of this, please simply follow the instructions below.

Instructions:

Go to www.bettshow.com

Register for the show as a new visitor using the priority code ICTMark

NB Only new visitors to BETT are eligible for subsidised travel

(ie those have not registered under the same name/school in the past three years)

Print out your BETT registration and take it with you on the day

 Email director@hullclc.com with your:

Name

School

BETT registration Number

Preferred method of travel (see below) 

By Coach             Cost £25

7.00 am               Leave from St Stephens

10.35                    Arrive Excel

3.30 pm               Leave from Excel

7.05                      Return to St Stephens

500 words  short story competition 2013

The BBC are ready to receive your super-duper, simply spectacular short stories from children aged 13 or under.

Children can get inspired by watching the brand new 500 WORDS film on the BBC website, which includes top tips from Dame Jacqueline Wilson, Tulisa, Conor Maynard, Helen Skelton, Wretch 32 and Harry Judd!

Students could win themselves a pile of books as tall as Chris Evans, and 500 books for the school library!

 For further information see the BBC website HERE

You have until 7:00pm on 22nd February to submit your entry.

With the release of Microsoft Windows 8 tomorrow schools will be wanting to make purchasing decisions for 1:1 or replacment  devices. To help schools understand the differences between Windows  RT (Windows for tablets)  and Windows 8 and  make an informed choice,  Sean O’Shea from Microsoft has put this informative post  together with details on both systems to guide schools in their decision.

Click below to link to the post.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukschools/archive/2012/10/25/windows-rt-or-windows-8-devices-for-your-school.aspx