Butterfly42

Having played about with Blockposter I then went to Textease Studio CT which, if you have it, allows for the creation of posters equally simply and quickly Take a Print Screen of the map and paste into Studio, select the image and use the blue tags to crop it . Go to the Tools menu Page tab, where paper size A4 is selected and select Poster Mode change to Landscape change the size of paper to the size required select Scale to screen. the whole page should be visible with a grid representing the sheets of paper needed. stretch your image into the size required, save it print The poster facility is useful at all ages but especially with younger children when real authentic images can be used for vocabulary development and story making , pictures of a child for body parts, of a flower from the school garden for naming the parts. Go on be creative and let me know what you do.

I’ve only just seen Blockposters on the Ictopus news blog post of 7th September but it looked like a way of supporting a group of people in using ICT as part of a school visit to a river! (It’s not the only way we’ll use ICT ) Using this we could make a very large poster of the route of their walk and have it as the background to a wall display. I hope too that it will become one of those hooks that start people off on a creative use of ICT for learning . First the test your idea… I tried a jpg of a river photo first (not bigger than 1mb) and produced a reasonable 3 x 2 ft poster. So next make a map background.... I first created a jpg of the area I wanted. I found it on Google maps , took a ‘screen print’ of the page, pasted it into Microsoft Paint (could have used Irfanview and any other of the free picture editing application that allowing pasting), cropped it to get just what was needed. Then saved the final image as a jpg and created a landscape poster 4 pages wide.

... there is great excitement in the world of science as after Wednesday there will be a whole new set of knowledge and understandings about the building blocks of the universe ( and I'll be really surprised if the answer is 42) when the Large Hadron Collider is finally switched on. CERN - The Large Hadron Collider via kwout BBC Radio 4 are having a 'Big Bang day' , the web site has Professor Brian Cox, involved in the project, answering questions. On the other hand you may find this rap below more informative, words here . (Thanks to Karl Fisch) who also has a link to some super images. So see you on Thursday???

....... be different .. lots of other new beginnings . There’s a group of students getting excited about beginning their Initial Teacher Training with the London Diocesan Board on Monday and I’ll be joining them on Thursday for a day focused on e-learning so that should be fun ….. ......that's of course if there is a Thursday :-)

.....week in which Google launched it's new browser Chrome . Its new, sleek, innovative, fast, allows many more web pages to be open at once and doesn't go into a complete crash when one of them has troubles. It's built for today’s e-users. I know this because I’ve read the comic book explanations , downloaded and installed it and then like many many others failed to read the licence I agreed to!! Read all about it on Doug' blog I'm just too ashamed to go on...

... that Wales , following overall European trends in early education began the phased introduction it's new foundation stage with huge emphasis on play and outdoor learning. The BBC News reports the education minister Jane Hutt: "The foundation phase takes a different approach to learning and a key feature is using the outdoors to encourage children to learn about conservation and the environment ….(we have) drawn on experiences in Denmark, New Zealand and Italy and believed the "radical new way of learning" would have a long-term impact."

.....over but not forgotten. September 1st 2008 and the new Early Years Foundation Stage came into force for ALL nursery schools, playgroups and registered child minders, despite the concerns of many and best efforts of the Openeye campaign and it’s many supporters some seen commenting below. An article in the Telegraph On Line answered a question for me, What about the Montessori and Steiner Waldorf Schools? “Montessori and Steiner Waldorf schools, which have an ethos of development through play, say they have been assured by ministers that they will not be forced to compromise their teaching methods.” So if they need not compromise why then do the rest of the country have to do so?