Butterfly42

An acrobatic version of Swan Lake with a little licence. The first section 'dance of the frogs would be great to show during a 'frog' topic for any age. Such energy and not at all sissy. Stimulation for their own dance of the frogs, but on two legs of course

There's been lots of twittering and blogging from people over the last week about Wordle a word cloud generator, Joe Dale and Doug Dickinson included, so I thought I would add my fivepenny worth. Wordle says about itself "It is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and colour schemes." First it was fun dropping in some text, organising it at at the click of a button, deciding on fonts and colours and arrangement on the page and I could see creative applications for it in the classroom. Where's this from? But then It became more serious , looking at how, in making the most uses words bigger, a sense of the content and its mood could be determined. I read on José Picardo's Box of Tricks how he used it with 6th form students and the comments on left on his blog. So tried s...

This term I'm visiting tutor for a small group of students on their final teaching experience and for the moment I know that the standard Q25 says 'trainees can teach lessons and sequences of lessons .......using a range of teaching strategies and resources .... So when I read Nick Peachy' blog I could immediately see that the teaching strategies used in his video clips were not in the range that my students were using. I would not commend the students who are about to join the school system to acquire them :-) However for some people who have different learning styles and who are plotting their own learning pathway ( Heutagogy ) then these may be ideal teachers, it would seem that many people do look at these videos. Read Nick's blog carefully before looking at the video.

Both Simon Mills and ictopus have blogged last week about StoryPhones a really good looking resource aimed at the Early Years, although I would imagine lots of other people could use them. The site tells us that " StoryPhones are a complete wireless audio system that allows children to access audio resources and to record their own stories, songs and thoughts. StoryPhones can be used to set up independent listening activities or group tasks using the Remote Console. Since they don’t have any wires, they can be used anywhere, indoors or outside. The Console features a built-in microphone for adults or children to record their own ideas and stories. StoryPhones come with supporting software so that you can download stories, manage audio resources or buy new resources online." They look and sound wonderful, for young children to be able listen under the trees outside or sitting on a cushion in a quiet corner, recording stories and recounts, jokes in fact ...

I’m thinking of Douglas Adams . On one occasion he said ‘ I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by’ and here in my office I hear the beginnings of a small whoosh. I remember reading in The Salmon of Doubt. . I’m sure it was the Salmon of Doubt but I can’t check because I lent it to someone and I can’t remember who… that once his publisher was so desperate for a book who’s deadline was extremely overdue that he (the publisher) camped out at the bottom of Douglas’s stairs, not letting him out until he had delivered the manuscript, which he did page by page. I'm not at that stage yet.. I think.. Coincidently while ferreting around my hard drive valiantly looking for something that was relevant for my deadline I came across the link to a 1999 article How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet ( don’t know why the question marks in diamonds are there ). It’s here that I originally found his quotation about ‘the way thin...

Looking again at some past blog posts yesterday I saw Ian Usher’s link to MUTO, a wall painted animation by Blu something I had first seen on The Carrot Revolution one of my favourite blogs Here it is.. enjoy and admire MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo .

One of the PGCE primary students I’m visiting this term had a new maths site in her planning as an extension activity. She was enthusiastic about it as it provided calculation practice using the four rules at different levels with the added bonus of competing against children all over the world. The name Tutpup was immediately familiar I’m sure I’d read about it only this week. Looking through the obvious suspects in my reader I found it on the Kent Teachers blog which reassured me that it was safe, children don’t use their own name to compete. Then yesterday morning it popped up on Ewan McIntosh’s edublogs . Have a look at these blogs .. they give a very clear view of the how and why and what and then try the games.