Secondary ROM ‘n’ RAM

Here’s a great opportunity to get your pupils involved in digital media work, with the possibility of winning £1000 worth of software/hardware or support. YHGfL are running the competition, the result of which will be beneficial, as “All entries will be showcased on the YHGfL regional media gallery website, creating a bank of resources which can be used by all schools both regionally and nationally”. The closing date for entries is 10 July 2009.
For more details and an entry form see the YHGfL site.
See what’s already available on the regional media gallery.

Have you tried Wolfram Alpha yet? Some are describing it as a search engine, whilst the company themselves describe it as a ‘computational knowledge engine’. I first came across it when it was reviewed on a recent edition of BBC click, (23 May 2009) and also in Macworld. Of course that meant that we had to have a play with it. The macworld article gives a good description of how they tested it comparing it with Google for speed and results, so I won’t repeat that. We have a bit of a reservation about the validity of some of the numerical data, maybe it’s because it is American but here’s the issue we found: Dave typed in ‘Newcastle’ to retrieve data about his home town. It reported the city population as 192,383 people, the 2001 census results show it as 259536.

So how to use it?  Try putting in your date of birth, you get some interesting statistics, age in days, weeks etc; times of sunrise and sunset.  (My moan in this now, because it knows where I am when I enter the data, it gives me the sunrise etc for Huddersfield - hey I was born in the South-East of England where sunrise is earlier). It’s my guess it could generate some fun data that pupils could use in a spreadsheet graphing activity.  Could be useful for Maths works and there are obvious possibilities for Geography.

Wolfram Alpha

Interesting website with free Flash resources for creating review games based on a number of TV favourites e.g. Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The games would be useful for Starter and Plenary activities.

They can be downloaded from the website, which also includes files for creating new games and a library of games. There are also a number of other utilities including a seating plan generator.

Site link: http://www.superteachertools.com/index.php

Thanks to reading a recent thread post (by djphillips) on the TES ICT forum I was introduced to the a great e-learning website which explains much of the science behind computing.  Not only are the ‘games’ fun and informative there is also the option to go behind the scenes and watch some videos.  This package is a result of the traditional science Christmas Lectures, this one from Christmas 2008; put your hands up all those who looked forward to them each year as a kid!

Anyway, I think pupils would love it, and it makes the explanations of computing much more interesting.  Hope you like it as much as we have.

Royal Institute Christmas Lectures

Thanks to all colleagues who recently completed a customer survey about Kirklees Ednet. As a result there will be changes:

One improvement being made immediately is the integration of a keyword search into the document word search so that keyword matches appear at the top of the list of found documents. As of 1st May, all documents added to Ednet will have keywords. It would take many months to add keywords to all the existing documents on Ednet but we will try to ensure that the most important documents are keyword-searchable by September.

It was also pointed out that Friday may not be the best day to send out the weekly “What’s New on Ednet” email so that will be changing shortly to a Monday mailing.

We hope this will provide you with an improved experience.

Kirklees Ednet ICT

Having read this article on the BBC technology page, I decided to take a look at the new features. After a few minutes hunting around from the google homepage, I found ’similar images’ and ‘timeline’ as developmental products in the Google labs section.

For me personally I can see more use in the ’similar images’ feature. How many times has an image search resulted in an image that is “almost good enough, if only I could find something along this line”? Okay, so it’s not absolutely perfect (what, or who, is?- answers on a postcard), but I think it’s worth a look and could be useful in the classroom.

‘Timeline’ offers the user scope to alter the time periods and you can also choose which publications to search within; but here’s the downside, they are all American (but hey, so’s Google, what can I possibly expect).

Take a look and make your own mind up.
Similar images
Timeline

Cyberbullying: Supporting school staff  cyberbullying-staff
This document was released by the DCSF this month, it has also been launched on the digizen http://www.digizen.org/ website.

“In 2009, Childnet produced guidance for the DCSF on Cyberbullying in relation to ‘Supporting school staff’. This document builds on the 2007 Safe to Learn Cyberbullying guidance, and provides advice for employers of school staff - Local Authorities and governing bodies. It also offers advice for school staff about keeping themselves and their personal information safe. It was written in consultation with the DCSF Cyberbullying Taskforce, and with support of the leading school employee unions and professional associations” (http://www.digizen.org/cyberbullying/)

Cyberbullying can have severe impacts on the victim. This document has clear advice and guidance along with policies and procedures that schools should use.

For more E-Safety advice visit Kirklees Ednet

• Compatible with XP and Vista
• A5 working area
• Resolution up to 2000dp1 & 1024 levels of pen pressure
• 2.4G Wireless
• Usb receiver – stores in back of tablet when not in use
• 16 programmable macro keysPage up/down keys
• Volume control using penintergral Li battery – charges via usb cable
• Easy installation
• Up to 50 tablets can be linked via one receiver

Gerry’s comments:

Can be used in a computer room with a projector but no smart board without problems.
Distance is good – fine in a classroom. Very solid kit, metal case but not too heavy.
Students have used it as a straight forward graphics tablet – great for graphics editing and creation.

£125 each or £80 each for orders of 3 or more.

Schools are welcome to submit joint orders.

Contact details:

Ahktar Kasia akhtar@Ink4u.co.uk

Email: info@ink4u.co.uk

Thanks to Gerry Quinn of Westborough High School for this information and review.

Unfortunately, the blog has been subjected to a good many spam comments. Up until now I have felt that it was important that genuine users of this blog could easily comment, so I was willing to moderate and delete the daft comments. This evening, however, they were being posted almost every minute. Time to draw the line!

If you are a genuine reader then please register on the site and you will be able to add your comments. I apologise for any inconvenience this causes.

There might be some room for experimenting with this information if you are looking for an up to the minute topic, are wanting to cover simple graphics and have an eye on audience and purpose; I guess you could also get some functional skills in here (world of work). The Indian government want a symbol for their currency, to compete in the international world of recognition, £ $ and so on. For more information read the BBC magazine article.

India seeks rupee status symbol