Teaching ScienceIdeas and help for trainee Science teachers

Here’s a new site that you might be interested in if you are looking for games to play on your interactive whiteboard: Primary Games Arena

While I’m a little uncomfortable about a site repacking other people’s material on their own site, you can’t doubt there’s a tonne of useful games to be found here.

Personally I think that linking to someone elses resource in this way is depriving the original sites of visitors and in some cases banner ad revenue, so I would always suggest you go and visit the originator of the games to show your appreciation.(and if they have banner ads, click one to help them!)

But with this said, the Primary Games Arena does make it convenient to find games for all subjects and it looks like a future addition will be Schemes of Work searches.

So take a look at Primary Games Arena, but remember to go visit the people who actually made the games too – like Crickweb, ICT Games and Manchester Childrens University.

Just a quick post to provide the links to the two tools I used from Classtools.net in the session the other day.

Countdown Timer

This is a cute little tool that allows you to set the class a time limit for a given task, and then count down the time left with some fun background music. There are 10 tunes included, ranging from a 30 second Countdown theme tune, 57 seconds Hawaii Five-0 or a 7 minute piece of Mozart. If you want you can even upload your own mp3 file to use instead.

Name Picker

There are several different ways you can use the name picker, and they don’t all involve names!

This tool lets you input a list of names/text and then go to either a fruit machine or typewriter view. Names are then picked at random.

I used it to get students to to speak at random, picking the next speaker from the list. Clicking the “remove” button will take the chosen name out of the list so they do not appear twice.

It could be also used with keywords or a topic heading. In typewriter mode one word at a time will appear letter by letter (and they dont get to see the other words). Students could then have to give a definition of the word, or one student with their back to the board has to guess the word from the descriptions given by other students. There’s many ways this tool could be used.