Butterfly42

Good to see Solent University addressing the needs of all students, after all not everyone can read a plan well some need all the visual clues possible. Take a look their novel and amusing but well thought out take on a route finder I wonder if the children would be able to write a description of the routes from this video or make a plan.... or even make their own for new children? ( addressing audience, planning, working cooperatively, understanding maps and directions) Thanks to Miles Berry for sharing this .. hope you find your way OK

Its the big 5 0 for Paddington today " 50 Years via kwout He's having a tour of the London in a Black Cab to celebrate and there's a photo competition for those lucky enough to see him, (see the site) Think of the number of children who have laughed about and enjoyed his stories over the years, he was certainly a regular visitor to my classroom over the years, and how many of them knew where Peru was on the world map but not their own town! Off to drag my duffel coat out of the cupboard to wear while I drink cocoa and eat marmalade sandwiches virtually with, Simon Mills who has just let me know about it via Twitter, and anyone one else celebrating.

" WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier via kwout I am beginning to visit the wonderful blog WWI Experience of an English Soldier with trepidation. We do not yet know if he survives the war, this has not been revealed but the war is coming to an end.......

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 :-)