I found this interesting international art project for schools, sponsored by iNet.

International Networking for Educational Transformation is an international network of schools, organisations and individuals who are committed to transforming learning through innovation.

The Paintpals project is an international collaboration between schools in the UK and Australia, helping primary schools to develop digital art skills.

The schools work with Windows Paint toolkit to create a variety of artwork, which they can then share through an online art gallery. The aim is for schools an dpupils in different countries to also take part. The online gallery is well worth a look with some amazing pictures.
 

In follow up to my post about the BA Festival of Science, the CurriculART website is now live. When it is fully up and running the site will provide:

illustrated instructions for hands-on, creative arts and crafts projects linked closely to the National Curriculum.

The website won’t be free – there’s a subscription for full access, with details available on the site.

I’ve recently discovered a couple of interesting and useful websites that discuss animation in more detail, particualry as it relates to the primary curriculum.

First of all, there is the Film Education site, which has a specific section on using animation in the classroom. The site provides an introduction to animation and gives project ideas across Key Stages 1 and 2. It also includes a historical context. As the site says:

Animated films and the skills needed to produce them can provide a stimulus to learning across the curriculum – especially in Art and Design, History, ICT, Science and Literacy.

Also, interesting to note their definition of ‘animation’, which I think makes it clear that the graphical skills required are secondary to the imagination and creativity of the animator:

‘Animation’ is a performing art rather than a graphic art. The drawings and models replace actors and actresses, so when children are creating their own animation it is important to approach it through the creative skills they would use in drama rather than graphical skills.

The second site I found – Learn-ICT -  also has an animation section, with some fantastic examples of children’s stop-motion films in the animation gallery. I particularly liked The Spider!

I’ve been pointed in the direction of CurriculArt by my friends at bestsciencelessonever. The CurriculArt website is an on-line resource for primary schools with art and craft ideas linked to every curriculum subject.

The website isn’t live yet, but will be launched in York this September at the BA Festival of Science.

When objects are drawn as overlapping in Moovl, then they are joined by invisible ’springs’. This is what the ‘tight-loose’ slider controls. Make the objects very ‘loose’ and the springs that join them together will be slack. Make the objects ‘tight’ and the objects will stick close together and interact strongly.

You can use this property to build visible ’springs’ by joining small objects together, eg small circles or triangles. Although clearly younger children need to explore the properties of springs using real objects, Moovl allows experimentation and prediction (Unit 3E: Magnets and Springs from the QCA Science Scheme of Work gives practical examples and activities).

In the drawings here I’ve used series of small triangles and circles joined together to form ’springs’. I think the ‘robot on a trampoline’ amply demonstrates my point…

I thought it would be good to share links to some of the other educational blogs out there, particularly the ones related to the primary curriculum in the UK. These are ones that I find useful and insightful – they’re mostly by ICT practioners.

First up is Primary Teacher UK, which is my all-time favourite. The site is edited by Andrew Ross, a primary teacher (soon to be Deputy Head). The site is a good mix of news, opinion, recommendations and fun. It’s well-written, well-designed and updated often. To give a sense of its eclectic mix, at time of writing there was a post entitled ‘White underachievement in schools‘, right next to one called ‘Bring your granny to school‘.

Next up is Keith’s ICT Teacher Blog, which has been running for over a year and focuses on the use of ICT in the Primary Curriculum. The posts are a blend of classroom practice, technical tips, and hardware/software references. The posts are well tagged, so they’re easy to navigate, and updated often.

Finally (for the moment) is Simon Mill’s ICT Inspirations Blog, which I’ve name-checked a couple of times already on this site. Simon is an ICT subject leader in a Primary school in Bristol. His blog tends to have longer posts with good insight into how he’s using ICT in his primary school. At the moment he’s writing a series of articles about his use of think.com with his Key Stage 2 students.

Naace have recently re-launched their website - it’s much more accessible, better organised and with a better search facility. They also have a separate blogging site, though when I looked there wasn’t much there yet – no doubt it will build over time. In case you don’t know Naace, they describe themselves as:

… the professional association for those who are concerned with advancing education through the appropriate use of information and communications technology. The association was established in 1984 and has become the key influential professional association for those working in ICT in Education.

And what does ‘Naace’ stand for?

Originally the letters stood for ‘National Association of Advisors for Computers in Education’. NAACE merged with MAPE and CEG in January 2004 and more recently in 2005 with ACITT so we now have a broader membership with teachers, lecturers, consultants, inspectors and other ICT leaders in our membership in addition to Advisors.

Moovl gets a mention in the latest Naace newsletter – though you need to be a member to receive this.

Inspired by Primary Teacher UK’s blog post about Diglot, I suddenly realised (sacrebleu!) that the text tool in Moovl, along with the physics could be a great way of learning some vocab.

I typed in the words, then adjusted the physical properties to give the desired effect. Works best with verbs and adjectives, but I could see it might also work with adverbs and some nouns. I hope this could help with remembering the vocab, by relating the word directly to its meaning in a very visual way.

Learning and Teaching Scotland hosts an online ICT in Education website, which ”provides educationalists with an informative knowledge base full of useful advice and resources relating to the use of technology across the curriculum. The site provides examples of teachers experiences of using a variety of ICT for teaching and learning.”

The service highlights Moovl and gives guidance on how Moovl supports A Curriculum for Excellence:

• engaging and motivating all learners
• supporting the development of problem-solving and thinking skills in an open-ended environment
• helping learners to make meaningful links between subjects and enabling teachers to use ICT across the curriculum
• encouraging children to hypothesise and discuss what might happen, aiding the development of talking and listening skills and a collaborative approach to learning
• suiting a range of learning styles: thereby supporting personalised learning
• giving children a unique means of communicating and developing their ideas.

Hope School is a school for boys with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties, in Liverpool. All of the learners have a statement of special educational needs or are undergoing assessment. Most have a history of disrupted schooling and poor attendance at other schools. This school epitomises real personalised learning in every sense of the term – they need to tailor for a wide range of abilities in some very challenging circumstances.

The ICT Manager at Hope School, John Lewis, started using the demo version of Moovl on the Futurelab website. The school subscribed to the schools version of Moovl when it was first published in May 2006.

The school has found that the key benefits of using Moovl are that:

• It is very engaging; hugely important given that the learners suffer from severe behavioural difficulties. One learner had not sat through a complete lesson since he started (3 years ago), until he used Moovl.
• It is the only resource that learners keep coming back to and want to use again and again. Learners find it instantly rewarding as animations can be created quickly and easily.
• It lends itself to science and helps develop some difficult scientific concepts in a fun way.
• It helps develop thinking and investigative questioning, learners have begun asking questions such as ‘What happens if I do this or this?’ and ‘How can I do that?’
• It encourages learners to take control of their learning and gives them the confidence to articulate themselves. The teacher is only a facilitator.
• It provides learners with a challenge (which boys thrive on) and this gives their learning momentum and purpose.
• Learners help each other – Moovl support true collaboration.
• It is easy to use – learners use the tools confidently, grasp functionality very quickly and often tell teachers how to use it.