Teaching ScienceHelp for trainee Science teachers

iBoard produce an excellent bank of interactive resources for Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 classes in several subjects, including literacy, numeracy and science.

In November last year iBoard was purchased by the TES and made available free of charge to all teachers, which is an excellent development.

If you are involved in teaching KS1, this is well worth a visit.

You can access the resources here: http://www.tes.iboard.co.uk/

I wrote this in case it was a Snow Day today and the Science lecture gets cancelled. But seeing as it wasn’t but the Internet connection was very dodgy, it might be worth sharing anyway so you can try out some of the links again.

Here are a few things I’d like you to try.

1. Investigate Build Your Wild Self. http://www.buildyourwildself.com/

Create an animal version of yourself.

Then take a screenshot into Word (print screen button and paste) and write about how this creature might live. What would it eat, how would it hunt? Where would it live etc etc…

2. Investigate Simple Science Songs : http://www.simplescience.net/

How could you use some of these songs to introduce different science lessons? or as a plenary. Could you write your own songs based on these?

3. Take a look at the interactive science websites on my delicious list at: http://delicious.com/dannynic/pgce+science+interactive

Pick two sites that are your favourite.

Then. Go to the Wallwisher page that has been set up at: http://wallwisher.com/wall/scittscienceict

Double click on the page to add a note. Create a note about each of your favourite science/ict sites from the list (or that you have found elsewhere)

Remember to add the address of the site, and a quick note about what it is and why you like it.

4. Take a look at this slideshow on Photopeach. This is an easy way of making a slideshow from images taken with a digital camera, digital microscope or webcam.

The slideshow – What is it??

If you want the answers, they can be found here.

Think about how you could use this to create a slideshow of images on a topic or to showcase pupil work.

And finally

Also : take a look at how other teachers have used technology to provide activities for the children to do from home:

Radstock Primary School

Heathfield Primary School

Had a question at the weekend from a ex-scitt student for some help on how she could get the audio from a YouTube video and put it onto CD. I thought it might be useful to share the procedure I tried. It seemed to be pretty straightforward (ish)

Here is the original file on YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=EWrmTQPuCdI

The first thing I did was to alter the URL of the YouTube Page.

I removed the www. from the URL and entered kick in front of the youtube.com to give this address:

http://kickyoutube.com/watch/?v=EWrmTQPuCdI

This site allows you to download YouTube files in different formats. For this one I am going to just choose MP3.

Click on the MP3 button, and then click on the green Go button.

The Go button will change to a blue Down button.

Right click on the Down button and select Save Target As (or Save Link As)

You can then save this MP3 file to wherever you want to on your computer.

You should be able to then put this file into iTunes and burn to CD if you want.

As an additional step – I had a problem playing the MP3 file on my computer. So what I did was to convert the MP3 file using Switch Sound Converter – a free piece of software that I thoroughly recommend.

I just used it to convert the mp3 file into an mp3 file – which sounds silly, but the file it produced worked on my PC OK not sure why….

Hope this helps!

I’ve put a batch of my Smart Notebook files up on my Think Bank website for anyone who wants them to download.

Best thing to do is to right click and “save target as” since Smart sometimes gets confused.

Fishing Rod Keyword idea

Skeleton

Pulse Rate Fair test planner

Generic Post It Planner

Living or Non Living

Food Chains

Flowers

Body Parts

Plenary for Space

Plenary for Electricity

Plants and Flowers

Weather Forecast

Frog Life Cycle

Properties of Materials anagram activity (includes countdown themetune)

There are also a few Literacy and Numeracy Smart Notebook files on the site as well as some simple Flash activities on the site as well.

If you want the Blockbusters game, you can download that here.

Based on the ICT day the other week here’s a different way to present the images taken with a digi microscope using a website called PhotoPeach.

The first presentation shows the images – show it to your class and guess what the different things are.

What is it??? on PhotoPeach

The second presentation has the same images, with the answers added as captions.

What is it? – The Answers on PhotoPeach

The microscope I used is the Easiscope, from TTS.

Enjoy!

The previous 5 posts were written by the Scitt students as an introduction to blogging during their Science/ICT day. Hope you find them useful!

Just wanted to point you in the direction of a very nice video that’s available on the Teacher’s TV Website

It’s aimed at Primary Science teachers, and gives 7 different lesson starters to use on your Interactive Whiteboard.

You can view the video here: http://www.teachers.tv/video/28260

There are also some associated documents to go with the video in the Downloads page.

If you are interested in reading more about how teachers are using technology in their classroom then here are some very good blogs that are worth reading.

• Betchablog
• Box of Tricks
• Dougbelshaw.com
• Ewan McIntosh
• ICT in my Classroom
• Integrating ICT into the MFL classroom
• Realizing Your Personal Legend
• Successful Teaching
• Teachers Love Smartboards
• Teaching with Technology
• Thinking past the square

If you haven’t already, it’s well worth signing up with Google for a google reader account. You can then copy the addresses of the blogs into Google Reader and read them all in one place – no need to trawl through each blog checking if they’ve been updated. (and of course remember to put this blog in there too!)