Welcome back to the new term. The beautiful sunshine always brings mixed feelings when starting back, but never mind here a couple of ideas for your blogsite this term:
Google Forms
I have written a short piece on how to embed a Google form
into a blog. Google forms are incredibly useful and powerful tools as
they capture data straight from a form into a spreadsheet. This makes it
extremely easy to design relevant data handling activities using live data
captured from your blog. Here is an example
of a form I did for cycling and so far I have collected 75 responses. I can
think of a myriad of ways you could use Google Forms in the classroom:
·
Traditional data handling type activities where
you survey and analyse the results;
·
In a science lesson each group undertakes the
same experiment and uses a form to record the results;
·
Evaluations of teaching sessions;
·
Creation of homework activities with boxes to
fill in as a result of research undertaken.
·
Pupil voice and surveys by school councils etc;
Creating and embedding a form is incredibly simple as
you will find out here.
Wordle
Wordle is one of those brilliant and simple ideas that everybody loves. Here is a brief post about it. And here is my blog displayed as a Wordle:
Note: when you finish your Wordle you save it to the Wordle
website. The website provides the link to the image, but if you want to display
the image, as above, you need to use a screen capture. I always use Jing for screen captures – a free and
powerful application that can either take pictures of portions of a screen or
record video of you using your computer.
Welcome to Plymouth Grove
Plymouth Grove primary
school in Manchester are the latest recruit to the Creative Blogs family.
Please take a moment to visit their site and say hello. I’m sure they will
appreciate it.
Stuff that’s caught my eye
Not necessarily related to blogging, but interesting,
nevertheless:
An interesting piece in today’s Telegraph online about new teaching
methods producing dramatic results. My thanks to Mirandanet for bringing this to my attention.
A thoughtful blogpost by Anne Collier about online safety
and how we are in danger of losing the message.
Quizlet: a brilliant
online flashcard generator for memory games, vocab quizzes etc. Apparently they
are embeddable, I just need to find out how: more soon.
