Shaw Scientific gave me a lend of this Tuff Cam that they are thinking about selling. They also gave me some spare batteries and it was a good thing that they did. The Tuff Cam is made by a company called TTS that make affordable but solid educational technology. They are the company behind one … Read more
Edware have been around for as long as I’ve been in teaching, when the author was still a student in college and the first “Know Your Ireland” was out and I met him at the Education Show that used to be in the RDS. At the time, I was involved in another software project, Who Took … Read more
Scoilnet, an NCTE initiative are providing Irish schools with Blog hosting. I tested it out at the excellent CESI conference this year and I must admit, Scoilnet have got it right.
Interactive Literacy 3rd Class This is CD-ROM and Teachers’ Handbook series from Prim-ED, it is available for 1st- 6th Class. It is based, I am presuming on the English Curriculum as it uses the word “Literacy” and also uses the terms ” Speaking and Listening”, ” Text work”, “Sentence work” and many other terms that … Read more
Introducing Text Types CD-ROM (Prim Ed) Introducing Text Types is a CD Rom published by Prim Ed. It’s a very simple presentation package which outlines the 6 different types of writing the average senior primary student will encounter – Discussion, Explanation, Narrative, Procedure, Recount and Report. To be honest, I was a little disappointed. There’s … Read more
The Constructing Narratives is a photocopiable teacher and student resource. It is an upper level and is suitable for 5th and 6th Class. The book is part of a 3 book series – there are lower, middle and upper levels available to cover the whole primary level. There are full lesson plans and photocopiable pages for the child to keep in their Creative Writing Folder or Copybook.
This publication contains your long term plan for one genre, the narrative genre and it does a pretty good job of covering this. There are 7 sections based on the different components of the writing process, character, dialogue, genres&setting, planning, drafting, revising and presenting.
Name of publication: Speaking and Listening (Upper) Primary by Prim-Ed. Summary: Speaking and Listening is a 3-book, photocopiable series which aims to cover a range of speaking and listening topics. It is broken up into 2 pages of student worksheets and 1 teacher notes page/lesson plan. Relevance to curriculum aims: 4.5/5 This publication is the … Read more
It’s not often I’m blown away by web sites. It’s not often that I recommend them either. In this case I’m also going to break my “Irish-only” rule about recommending a web site because this is one of the first web sites I’ve found where you can use it to teach Comhrá Gaeilge and make it very very fun!
Writing a web site is not as daunting a task as it used to be. I remember trying to write a web page for the first time with only Window’s Notepad and a sheet of paper with various commands as my companions. My first web site contained a title with some text under it followed by a picture followed by more text. It was one page long because I couldn’t understand how to link pages to each other. Over 10 years later, creating a simple web site requires little more than a bit of time and a bit of planning. There are a number of pieces of software and even web sites which “do the coding” for you. I intend to look at a few of these discussing their merits and downfalls.
My school recently purchased a piece of software called Literacy Activity Builder. You can create word searches, cloze tests and other literacy-based games for your classroom. It’s really easy to use. I made a wordsearch puzzle where you must find all the months of the year. It took me about 30 seconds from start to … Read more