classroom | A blog for students on the FDLT and BALT courses at the University of Northampton

July 21, 2021
by Jean
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Develop your use of technology in learning

There are a number of opportunities to take part in free online training in using apps and tools that are useful when supporting learning in the classroom and in your own study. Listed below are four places to start. You might consider the apps and tools most commonly used in your setting and see what is offered in relation to those or just follow your own interests.

BookCreator Certified Author

This short online course provides a through overview of all the tools available in BookCreator and is a great starting point for using this excellent tool.

Creating visual learning materials with ThingLink

This is part of the Microsoft Educator Center set of training modules. It is worth browsing these are these are some interesting and useful short online courses of relevance to classroom support.

Adobe Creative Educator Level 1

This short course introduces you to using Adobe Spark to make visual and interactive learning resources. It is one of many useful short courses available through Adobe Education Exchange.

Apple Teacher / Portfolio

Completing the six ipad or Mac Apple Teacher units is a thorough introduction to using Apple apps and tools to support learning with pupils. If you have done this the next step is build your Apple teacher Portfolio.

As you complete these courses you can use the digital badges you earn on your email signature and of course, add them to your CV.

July 15, 2021
by Jean
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Summer Reading Challenge!

This year’s Summer reading Challenge from The Reading Agency is called Wild World Heroes! You can find out more about it here. There are resources to support it available for schools, libraries and for use in the home so everyone can take part wherever they are. Its a really good idea to keep children reading over the summer and this can help enormously.

June 24, 2021
by Jean
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Some free resources

Free English resources from Pobble

Pobble is a resource that provides inspiration and editable plans for the teaching of English. You can find out more about Pobble here. There is free access to all the resources until the end of August.

Free music input and resources from Rock Steady Music School

Rock Steady Music provide free 30 minute live streams for KS1 and KS2 on Friday afternoons live and available on catch up. You can find out more about Rock Steady Music School here.

June 18, 2021
by Jean
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A creative finish to FDLT Year 1!

This week our FDLT year 1 students reached the end of their first year at university. It was great to be able to welcome them back to Devonshire Place and the Waterside Campus, Northampton to work face to face making stop motion animations. As you can see from the animations on the Padlet below they worked creatively and co-operatively to explore this approach and produced some great results. For many of them it was the first time they had made animations.

We used the app StopMotionStudio and there is potential for the animations to be opened in iMovie so sound effects, dialogue and music could be added – most of us did not have time to do this in the session!

As you can see from the photos here the students have great skills of making, measuring and improvising. This is what makes them such great supporters of learning back in school.

We wish them all a restful and enjoyable summer so that they will be ready for FDLT year 2 in September!

May 18, 2021
by Jean
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Science outside the classroom

Details here about an interesting education event you and your school might be interested in. Tickets can be booked here.

May 12, 2021
by Jean
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Drawing to learn anything: no drawing skills required.

Here’s a great opportunity to hear art educator Paul Carney introduce his book ‘Drawing to Learn Anything’. As he says “Do not be put off using this book if you can’t draw. If you can write your name you will be able to use the simple drawing techniques outlined.” Being able to represent information visually for yourself and to your learners can be such a useful skills when you work in education. There are many opportunities for you to use drawing as one of your teaching approaches when supporting learning in all subjects in the curriculum. You can also use drawing to help you take useful notes and collect information as part of your university course.

Book a free place here.

February 13, 2021
by Jean
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Mathematics resources and ideas!

Some useful resources to support learning in mathematics:

The Association of Teachers of Mathematics (ATM) have put together a collection of resources to support mathematics away from the screen. You can access it here. It is huge collection of useful recommendations from members of the ATM/MA joint primary group and well worth exploring.

One of my colleagues here at the University of Northampton, Lucy Westley, made this mathematics digital classroom using GoogleSlides. It gives you the opportunity to explore the range of mathematics resources available to support learning. Have a look at it here.

Another interesting resource is this from Mathigon. It gives you access to a wide range of mathematics manipulatives to use in digital learning, along with puzzles, games and information to use in supporting learning.

January 29, 2021
by Jean
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Creating with BBC sound effects!

BBC Sound Effects is a useful site that can be used to create resources. It can be accessed here.

It can be searched to find a huge variety of sounds that can be downloaded or linked to for educational purposes. Read more about the terms of use here.

As can be seen on the screenshot there is a ‘mixer mode’ where sounds can be chosen and played together to create a soundscape. Have a go at this here.

Combining sounds with images can be an interesting and creative activity. Here’s an example I have made, adding environmental sound to Georges Seurat’s painting ‘A Sunday afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’. I have used a Google Slide. I’ve chosen and downloaded the sounds to Google Drive and then used ‘insert / audio’ to add them to the slide.

It would be possible to do this in Powerpoint, BookCreator and ThingLink.

January 26, 2021
by Jean
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Using Mote to add your voice to google docs and slides

What is Mote?

Mote is a Chrome extension. It allows you to add voice feedback within Google Classroom, Docs, Slides etc. The free version allows you to record for 30 seconds and the various subscriptions allow for 90 seconds of recording at a time.

How do I add it?

Here is a short video to show you how to add it.

How do I use it?

There are more videos about how to use it here including this one below about using Mote.

I’ve added a Mote comment to this document.

If you want to listen to the comments you also need to have installed the Mote chrome extension.

January 14, 2021
by Jean
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WindowSwap in the classroom

You will probably have come across the site WindowSwap this week. It can be accessed here.

It is a simple series of video views through windows around the world and as such has so much potential for use in learning.

Each window lasts ten minutes and includes sound, which can be switched on or off. You can move on to another random window by clicking the bar at the bottom of the screen and the name of the place where the window is appears in the top right of the screen. The one you can see here is in Hazelbrook, New South Wales, Australia.

Here’s a Jamboard with some ideas for using WindowSwap and you can see it as a Jamboard here. I’m sure you will have lots of other ideas too – why not add them as comments below?

A blog for students on the FDLT and BALT courses at the University of Northampton

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