Music

Just realised that I haven't posted about two of my favourite music making sites, so here you are:

Incredibox is a fantastic site that lets you layer beatboxing samples to create your own music. There are now three different versions, and you can record a composition which is saved onto the site, and you get a link to share it with others. Really worth a look - suitable for all ages.

Isle of Tune is a music sequencer, where you build a town and each house, tree, lampost etc creates a different sound when a car drives past. It's a great way to compose your own music or try to recreate a piece you already know.

Robert Burns

Click here for a downloadable version of this map:

There are some other links to Burns and Scots poetry on this blog from last year

Wondermind - exploring how our brains work

This game on the Tate Gallery website looks really interesting. It's probably best for p5 - p7, and has games and videos which explore and explain how our brains work, based on the theme of Alice in Wonderland. It introduces neuroscience to children in a fascinating and fun way. This would be great to look at together on the Smartboard, then let children play the games in the ICT suite and discuss how they got on.

Classical Masterpieces App

Classical Masterpieces is a free app with 20 pieces of classical music. Leigh-Anne recommended this, and suggested it might be agood idea for Big Writing lessons - would save you searching for music online or using the CD in the box - thanks Leigh-Anne!

Any other recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Using ICT to help teach about direct speech

There are several websites for creating fake text messages like the one above, and would be really handy for reminding children when writing to:
 * take a new line when a new person speaks
* enclose the speech and punctuation in speech marks
* a comma follows the text (like the little bit at the end of a speech bubble)
You could try iphone text generator, fake phone text and i fake text
 

Blooms Taxonomy film clips - may be useful for introducing or discussing thinking skills.

Pirates of the Carribean:

The Simpsons:

Finding Nemo:

For Blooms Taxonomy illustrated by Harry Potter click here

Mindmapping Software - for ICT suite and iPads.

Mindmapping is a great way to use ICT to organise thinking, and there are many websites with free mindmapping software that look like they're worth a try. Here's a couple:

Bubbl.us looks good, as does Spiderscribe. Bubbl.us can be used straight away and Spiderscribe requires you to set up an account before using. It'd be worth setting up a class account so that mindmaps can be saved and re-visited. These would be useful for a whole variety of things: planning a project, evaluating a project, planning a story or piece of writing or much more.

Popplet is a fantastic iPad app, which is really useful and intuitive to use. We've bought copies for our iPads, and if it hasn't automatically downloaded yet, please let me know. I used it last year with the P7s with the iPad connected to the Smartboard to list all the things the children thought would make good rules or guidance for having a productive year. We were then able to move the items around, grouping them until we had this:

We also have Kidspiration and Inspiration in school, so if anyone really wants these, I can install them on your laptop.

Wikipedia for Schools

You may have noticed that the information online isn't always accurate or indeed appropriate for our pupils. I was able to demonstrate this a few years back when during an ICT lesson, we were using Wikipedia to research capital cities. The first sentence under the entry for Paris declared the city to be the stinkiest in the world, and recommended visitors to hold their noses due to the stench. I had to explain to the class that someone had edited the page to make this crude joke, and that indeed it was a very easy thing to do and that we couldn't always trust Wikipedia - or indeed any other website. This is still true today, but there is now Wikipedia for schools which may be more trustworthy here.

 From the website: This selection of articles from Wikipedia matches the UK National Curriculum and can be used by school children around the world. 6000 articles, 26 million words and 50,000 images make Wikipedia for Schools bigger than Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia put together! Wikipedia is great, but it wasn’t designed with the National Curriculum in mind. And because anyone can edit it, articles sometimes get vandalised. That’s why we’ve put together this special collection to make learning as easy and safe as it can be. Here at SOS Children, we’ve checked all the articles, tidied them up a bit, and put them together by school subject. SOS Children ( www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk) is a charity which works around the world to help children in need. As well as Wikipedia articles, we’ve collected pages from the SOS Children website, so you can learn more about the work we do in 125 countries around the world.

Definitely worth a look!

New Years Resolutions and Setting Goals

Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut who was the Commander of the International Space Station in 2013, and became a celebrity due to his use of social media to share photographs and videos of his time orbitting Earth. There are photos he took of Scotland here, and a slideshow of other photos here. His YouTube channel is worth a visit too. He was in Edinburgh in December and visited Liberton High School to speak to pupils - many of our pupils will have friends or older brothers or sisters who heard him speak. The comic below shows the answer he gave to a child who asked online for advice on becoming an astronaut. I think it'd be great to use to talk about aiming for your goals in life - and how even small steps and determination can help shape who you want to become. Click here for a larger version.