On Monday afternoon, I participated in a session at the CLC on the ongoing transformation of the Key Stage 3 curriculum. I led a session on using technology to enhance learning and teaching. Lindsay Coleman, Secondary Headteacher Consultant, delivered a session on current eLearning initiatives in Wolverhampton. Finally, Rebecca Orszulan from Trinity Primary School shared some of the exciting work going in the school, work which has just seen the school being awarded the Runners-Up prize in the prestigious BECTA ICT Excellence Awards in the Best Whole School category.

After my session, a number of people asked if I could email details of the websites and software I had mentioned. In the best tradition of Web 2.0, I decided to publish them here instead! Where I’ve given an external web link (i.e. other than on the CLC website) I’ve written out the url in full, so that a printed version of this post will be a usable resource.

The presentation

Here is the presentation:

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Wikipedia is a great (OK, unbelievably incredible) resource, but as anyone who uses it regularly knows, not all of the content is entirely suitable for educational use, either because it is more adult in nature, or too complex or expansive to unpick for school use.

Now we have the 2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection, a collection of Wikipedia articles that would amount to a 15-volume encyclopedia, handpicked for their relevance to the UK National Curriculum.

It’s worth pointing out that the articles have not been completely rewritten for school use, so the language and terminology in them is still aimed at a wider audience. However, they have been checked and tidied up, “cyber-vandalism” has been removed, and they aren’t editable by the Wikipedia community, so will stay “as is” until the selection process is repeated.

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I’ve written before on the blog about the power of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in allowing us to automatically receive new content from our favourite websites:

• RSS In Plain English
• Working with RSS Feeds

For some time now, I’ve been using Google Reader in combination with iGoogle as my web homepage. This allows me to collect together all of the content that matters to me (newsfeeds, email, del.icio.us favourites) in one place for easy access.

Yahoo Pipes is a service that takes managing your feeds to a new level. By allowing you to combine together multiple feeds into a single feed, you can effectively create your own view of the world, based on the topics that interest you. Imagine Pipes as like having your own personalised magazine delivered to your door every day. Pipes also gives impressive levels of control over the feeds - you can, for example. filter feeds on particular criteria, reorder feeds, truncate feeds and so on.

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Some great links I’ve collected over the last couple of months:

Picnik - online image editing

Picnik is a fantastic online image-editing application. You can upload images from your computer, or pull images into Picnik from Flickr, Facebook or Picasa. It even allows you to search Flickr for photos from inside the web application, narrowing your search down to Creative Commons images if you wish (so that you can legally modify and redistribute derivative works). Once you’ve opened up an image, you can perform basic image manipulation on it from inside your browser - crop, rotate, resize, brightness, contrast - and more sophisticated changes like removing red-eye, or sharpening the image. There are even some nice effects - black and white, sepia, vignette, frames and so on - that you can apply to your image, and text and diagram tools to annotate your pictures. Once you’re done you can reexport back up to Flickr or download to your computer.

A basic account for Picnik is completely free. A premium account at $24.95 / year, gives you more effects. It’s really interesting to see more and more feature-rich, intuitive applications moving from the desktop to online. Picnik is brilliant - check it out.

There’s more Flickr-related fun at fd’s Flickr toys - a huge set of tools for playing with your Flickr photos to make posters, calendars, CD covers, you name it. If you aren’t using Flickr yet, what kept you? It’s the best image-sharing application on the web.

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RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the most powerful, versatile and efficient way to browse new content on your favourite websites. However, it’s not very easy to explain exactly how it works!

Here’s a fun video that does a great job of describing the basics:

• RSS in Plain English