Please visit e-classroom.co.za - a wonderful South African resource site for R-3 teachers

Do take a look at our wonderful ‘proudly South-African” site, http://e-classroom.co.za,  that provides a delightful array of FREE beautifully created worksheets for our South African teachers. This site, e-Classroom,  has reached over 500 000 hits and is the number one “e-classroom” website on Google!

e-Classroom is a portal which provides free support resource material for educators and parents and is aimed at learners in Grades R-3. Their content is very much in line with 21st century learning, and the worksheets are creative and promote motor skills.  These cover the subject matters of Maths, English, Science, Health and Nutrition, Life Skills, Art and Craft. This is all open source and provided to users via their website at no cost.

Do take a look around. You’ll see the Foundation Phase CAPS documents have been posted there, and the worksheets are out of this world! These worksheets could save teachers a LOAD of time…something every teacher needs! I am sure the learners will love using them as not only are they beautifully presented, but they are fun to work with.

One of the new sections that I absolutely LOVE is called ‘Learn to draw’. The learners can practise drawing all sorts of animals using these methods. This is found within the ‘Latest Content’ section where you can browse and see what is on offer that might interest you.

Save our elephants petition 

I noticed this petition form called ‘Save our elephants’ petition on the website on behalf of the IFAW Animal Action Team, encouraging world leaders to uphold and enforce the ban on ivory trade. That’s a good cause to make known to our learners and be involved in right now.

The site owners say “This initiative is open to all primary schools nationally in South Africa and we welcome constructive feedback participation from educators and parents.”  I am sure they would welcome your comments.  Let them know what you think.

Make an Internet Start Page for your class using Protopage

Wondering what an Internet Start Page is? A Start Page is for your classroom Internet use. When students log on to the Internet this page will come up and on it will be links to everything you might want them to use - targetted links, a clock, possibly even a dictionary, notes etc. Let me start off by showing you a sample from the site we will use. This is how it looks before you have  modified the page to your liking.

I don't know if you are like I have been when it comes to technology integration? I have all my websites saved in my Diigo bookmarks, and otherwise on files saved on my computer. It was often a mission to pass this on to my students. Recently I read a post by the ever-inspiring Jacqui Murray suggesting an Internet Start Page in passing on her post. This idea really 'jumped out' of the page and I started to explore.


The first thing to do is to open Protopage (http;//www.protopage.com) to reister and name your page. You then give your page a title, and you start deleting all the 'widgets' that are there as placeholders. You'll end up like this.

You can change the background but I haven't explored that aspect yet. From then on you start adding your own widgets by clicking on 'Add widget'.  There are a huge amount to choose from, but I found myself choosing mainly 'bookmarks' and one or two others.

You can add as many widgets as you like and make them the size you want as well. You can place them wherever you like on the page. You name them and start adding bookmarks etc. It is such fun! I started to make one to collect Reading and Writing sites for Grade 1 - 6.

Jacqui Murray gives the link to her K-8 page, and it is a source of inspiration to me. Take a look at hers yourself:  http://www.protopage.com/smaatech#Untitled/First_grade.  If you decide to create an Internet Start Page please share your link with me!

Experimenting with forms - especially Google forms

I just love all the different features of Slideshare. Last week I explored adding YouTube videos to Slideshare. Today was my day with experimenting with the Slideshare playlist widget.  I got the idea from http://web2teachingtools.wikispaces.com/SlideShare. First of all I created my three PowerPoints about creating online forms. I uploaded those to Slideshare:
 

1) Google forms – so easy to create
 

This form is definitely my favourite. I can’t believe that Google can give us so many superb programmes FREE. What I especially like about Google forms is that they automatically create their own collection site for you to review the results.

Google forms - so easy to use

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2) Create an Email Me form

Email Me Form

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3) Have you tried Survey Monkey for creating surveys?

Use Survey Monkey to create surveys

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The next step was to upload these to Slideshare. Once that was done I had to make each one a ‘favourite’ by clicking on the presentation to view it and then clicking on ‘Favourites’.Now it was time to experiment with the playlist widget. http://www.slideshare.net/widgets/playlist. This took me to a page where I could arrange it all.

The only problem is that if I try to make this playlist Slideshare less wide so that it fits in to the blog using Firefox or Internet Explorer as a browser, it doesn't work! So I have omitted putting it here apart from the screenshot.

This idea of a playlist originated from looking at Judi Barrett's playlist where she created a whole series of lessons this way:  http://web2teachingtools.wikispaces.com/SlideShare

All Things Google - a collection of tutorial videos embedded on a Slideshare

I absolutely LOVE this feature of Slideshare where you can embed YouTube videos within Slideshare instead of having a string of them on your blog page. Well, today I got rather ambitious and thought I would gather a collection of the Google tutorials I have been learning from recently...12 videos... to see if adding a large amount of videos would work. It seems that it does work. Well, it was a lengthy affair because I first got all the urls incorrect. You have to use the url that shows under the video after clicking on 'Share'. Two of the videos would just not take! So, instead of redoing the whole thing and replacing my Slideshare, I thought that I would post it for now...and return to the problem on another occasion. 
All things Google - a collection of tutorials

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Application for teaching
1. You could have your lesson planned and outlined on Slideshare and as you go through it your video clips and even your Screencasts if it was a technology linked lesson could be right there. If this was placed on your classroom blog the students could access it that evening to review.
2. Slideshare has another feature which I am going to try next where you can use a widget and include  a whole lot of lessons you have created using videos and Slideshare presentations; and can link them in a playlist down the side.  Here is an image of this done by Judi Barrett (after which I will give the link to the real thing).

You can see what I mean by viewing the real thing at: http://web2teachingtools.wikispaces.com/SlideShare

Classroom Innovation - is your classroom like this?

The prestigious Google Academy for 2012 is coming up in London in April and applications had to be in last week. Applicants were given a choice of two topics for creating a video to accompany their online application form, 'Classroom Innovation' and 'Learning and Motivation'. I came across Martin Burnett's video on Classroom Innovation today - just love it. Don't we all want classrooms like this?  By the way, Martin Burnett was the winner of the Best Educational Wiki for 2011 http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/. It is REALLY worth taking a look at his wiki.

Quick file-sharing is so easy with Skype

Have you ever been in a situation when you are at a friend's house, you both have your laptops and you both want to share large documents that are too big for email with one another QUICKLY. Your dropbox is full and you don't have a flashdrive with you! So what do you do? One of the quickest solutions is to try file-sharing with Skype. I discovered this recently when I was in just that predicament. File-sharing with Skype is so quick and easy that I am DEFINITELY going to make a lot more use of it.

Here are the steps.

File sharing with Skype

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