eSkeletons: an interactive website where you can explore and compare skeletons of mammals using high quality images of specimens.
Just a quick post that may interest the Biologists today.
eSkeletons also provides a variety of printable teaching resources including puzzles and life-size skeletons (although Lord Sugar wouldn't be impressed!).
Thursday, 29 January 2015
Tuesday, 27 January 2015
GifYoutube: create short looping .gifs from YouTube clips
GifYoutube is very easy to use, just find your clip on YouTube, go to the GifYoutube website and paste the YouTube link into the box on the front page. You can then set the starting point of your gif using a sider or typing in the time in the box, with a handy preview of the video to help you. Use the right-hand slider to set the length of the clip (maximum 15 seconds)
Skip to gif start point
And here is the end result:

Click to open on GifYoutube site
I'm sure there are many uses people can think of for this, but I wanted to show some short video clips as part of a starter activity: showing the clips through YouTube would have meant timing the starts, restarting the clips manually and possibly even showing each clip one after the other. What I decided to do instead was to create a table to display my four clips, side-by-side and ask students to sketch an energy profile diagram to represent what was happening in each.
Example
First I select the YouTube clip for my source video:Skip to gif start point
And here is the end result:
Click to open on GifYoutube site
I'm sure there are many uses people can think of for this, but I wanted to show some short video clips as part of a starter activity: showing the clips through YouTube would have meant timing the starts, restarting the clips manually and possibly even showing each clip one after the other. What I decided to do instead was to create a table to display my four clips, side-by-side and ask students to sketch an energy profile diagram to represent what was happening in each.
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Reaction A | Reaction B |
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Reaction C | Reaction D |
Sunday, 18 January 2015
Making Posters Interactive with ThingLink
Making posters is a tried-and-trusted activity that students enjoy and is ideal for review of a topic, consolidation of ideas or just allowing a student greater freedom over how they present their work.
Both an advantage and a possible drawback of posters are the fact that limited information can be conveyed - so why not make the poster interactive to allow a topic to be explored in greater detail, or how about adding audio and/or video to your poster! You can achieve this, for FREE, using ThingLink!
With ThingLink you can quickly and easily create accounts for students by copying and pasting in your class list - you can even group them into classes. For each class you can have one or more 'channels' to keep images organised.
As part of the review from a recent test I had students work through their test paper with a RAG self-analysis sheet. Once they had identified an area to target for improvement they were then tasked with creating a poster on that topic, using text books and their own notes to help them. Once completed I photographed each poster and added them to a channel for that group - named 'Poster Photos' - this would allow students to find their own poster quickly and easily.
Once students have located their poster they can 'remix' the image to add it to their account and then add a series of tags to the image. I then had students add their remixed poster to a second channel - 'Interactive Posters'. This effectively allows students to submit their work to me but also keeps all of the completed work in one place. I can then publish the link to this channel on Moodle so all of the interactive posters are available for students for revision.
Finally, the ThingLink interactive images work well on phones and tablets so why not create QR codes for the best posters to stick on to the original paper copy when you put it up in your classroom?
Both an advantage and a possible drawback of posters are the fact that limited information can be conveyed - so why not make the poster interactive to allow a topic to be explored in greater detail, or how about adding audio and/or video to your poster! You can achieve this, for FREE, using ThingLink!
With ThingLink you can quickly and easily create accounts for students by copying and pasting in your class list - you can even group them into classes. For each class you can have one or more 'channels' to keep images organised.
As part of the review from a recent test I had students work through their test paper with a RAG self-analysis sheet. Once they had identified an area to target for improvement they were then tasked with creating a poster on that topic, using text books and their own notes to help them. Once completed I photographed each poster and added them to a channel for that group - named 'Poster Photos' - this would allow students to find their own poster quickly and easily.
Once students have located their poster they can 'remix' the image to add it to their account and then add a series of tags to the image. I then had students add their remixed poster to a second channel - 'Interactive Posters'. This effectively allows students to submit their work to me but also keeps all of the completed work in one place. I can then publish the link to this channel on Moodle so all of the interactive posters are available for students for revision.
Finally, the ThingLink interactive images work well on phones and tablets so why not create QR codes for the best posters to stick on to the original paper copy when you put it up in your classroom?
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