The Whiteboard Blog

Physics Games

2009-02-25T07:34:00.002Z

I'm delivering an IWB in Science day in London tomorrow and I have been looking around for any new science websites that I might have missed. So I was really pleased to have stumbled upon Physics Games.net this morning.

Physics Games.net provides nearly 50 different flash-based games, all collected onto the one site. A few of these games, like Magic Pen and Fantastic Contraption, I have seen before on other sites, but it's nice to have one place to bookmark to get them all in the same place. There are quite a few games here I hadn't seen before. Physics teachers should definitely add this site to their favourites.

Most of the games are puzzle-type games that draw on aspect of physics - many would be useful to illustrate forces or gravity.

The site also provides embed codes for the different games so you can embed them into your own school website or VLE. There are some fun games there, and even if you don't end up using them in a lesson, there are some fiendishly addictive puzzle games there. Check it out today.

Awen Media

2009-02-23T20:12:00.004Z

Bit of a rush of websites to share today. I stumbled upon this one in a teachers magazine while waiting in the staffroom this afternoon for a training session to start. I think I may have bookmarked it before, but don't think I've blogged about it.

Awen Media is a Cardiff-based multimedia publisher specialising in the creation of fun educational interactive programs for children.

Awen's range of software is popular in primary schools and homes with parents, teachers and children alike. The products are designed to assist teachers and parents in the teaching and learning process, while keeping things fun for the children. All of their products are produced in both Welsh and English versions.

As well as the software you can purchase - they also have a number of fun, free activities that you can download and run offline on your own computers. They are simple flash exe files so there's nothing to actually install - as long as you're allowed to run them :)

These include a fun fridge magnet letters and numbers tool, a sudoku generator, a numnber spinner and a bubbles game. There's also a wordsearch generator.

You can access the free resources here.

Free Teaching Resources

2009-02-23T11:26:00.002Z

I'm always a fan of free resources. I always avoid spending money when I can avoid it ;) So I was pleased to discover Free Teaching Resources this morning.

This website could potentially help you save hours of time searching for lesson plans, worksheets, assessment, tutorials, workshops and assemblies.

The site covers all curriculum subjects, plus teaching ideas for areas such as literacy, numeracy, sats, gcse revision, gcse bitesize tips and many more educational resource tips including interactive resources.

Evolution Animation

2009-02-23T09:41:00.002Z

Here's an excellent animation that shows the history of the Earth, and evolution in all it's glory. I'm a science teacher, so I love stuff like this.

It's produced by John Kyrk and his website is packed with even more great flash animations for teaching GCSE and A Level Biology. Including meiosis and mitosis, cell structure and photosynthesis. Thanks to Clay Burrells blog for the link to this site.

And while on the subject of Evolution, and not really enough to justify a post of it's own, here's some cool Darwin/Obama mashup images from Mikero.com

More on his site, and you can buy Tshirts too! Proceeds go to the National Centre for Science Education in the US.

Five Card Flickr

2009-02-23T07:38:00.003Z

Here's another nice idea for using the internet as an inspiration for creative writing; Five Card Flickr.

Five Card Flickr draws from nearly a thousand photos on flickr tagged with "5cardflickr"

You are dealt 5 random photos from Flickr and you choose one to add to your story. You then repeat this 4 more times until you have 5 photos that you can then use to tell a story.

You can then write your story on the blog itself, or you could display them on the IWB for students to write their own stories individually.

If you have photos on Flickr that you'd like to add to the pool of images used, then just tag them with 5cardflickr.

The 5 Card Flickr idea is based on a game called 5 Card Nancy where you create a 5 frame story using old comic strips. Here's an online version of that game which you might also like to use. Or if you're looking for a non-ict activity and have a stack of old comics or magazines, then here are the rules on playing it for yourself.

A related, but slightly different way of doing things, is the "Tell a story in 5 frames" group in Flickr. Take 5 photographs to tell a story. Again this could be a nice activity to do with students and some digital cameras.

If you are looking for new ways to use technology to tell stories, then here are 50+ Ways to tell a story, collated by CogDogRoo.

Top Ten Flash Bang Demos

2009-02-21T13:24:00.002Z

Thanks to Simon Mills (Twowhizzy) on Twitter for sending this link to me. It's not IWB related as such, but they are really nice Science demos that I just had to share.

WhyNotChemEng is a site for science teachers that is trying to encourage the inclusion of fun, safe and relevant demonstrations to the Key Stage 4 Science curriculum. They have provided a list of their top 10 ways to start lessons with a bang! There's a video of each demonstration, and a downloadable helpsheet that explains how to do it. This includes the Whoosh Bottle, Frothy Foam and Screaming Jelly Babies ;) Take a look here.

While it's nice to be able to show videos and suchlike on the IWB, they shouldn't be used as a replacement for proper demonstrations and experiments if you can do them. Ideally still do them, and then the videos and simulations can be used to supplement the learning or for revision at a later stage. I still don't think you can beat the impact of really seeing an explosion with your own eyes. And as long as you take precautions, and do a risk assessment, then they can be done safely. I would try and do the Thermite Reaction as often as possible when I was teaching.

Even better, why not try some of these demos and make your own videos with a Flip video camera and share them online?

Finger Friendly Art Sites

2009-02-20T12:22:00.003Z

There's nothing better than playing with an art program on an interactive whitboard and literally drawing with your finger. And there are some excellent, free, online drawing packages. Some are quite simple, and others really mimic real-world art materials.

Here are five online drawing applications that I really like;

Sketch
This is a new one that I only discovered today. The brush gives a really realistic effect and you can alter lots of different variables if you want - or just paint away!

As an aside - on this site you will also find a scarily realistic animated spider. It's very impressive and rather scary if spiders are not your thing.

Crayola Digi-Colour
Choose from a variety of Crayola products including crayons, pencils and stamps. If you want to do something more off-line then there are colouring pages to print out as well. The Crayola site also has a lot of information for teachers including lesson plans here.

Bomomo
I wrote about this site a few weeks ago. It's brilliant for making abstract drawings. Some of the pens are really fun.

Imagination Cubed
This has been around a while, but it's still really fun. You can even collaborate with friends on a joint drawing.

NGAKids Brushter
This is a fantastic resource It includes more than forty brushes and customizable size, transparency, texture, and stroke options. A rainbow palette, along with a toolbox of special effects that blur, ripple, smudge, blend, and fragment your designs help make BRUSHster a full-feature painting program. There are many other applications on the site too.

Finger Friendly Websites

2009-02-20T11:31:00.003Z

Last week I was at a college running a session on how to use a Smartboard. One of the questions I was asked was if I knew of any good 'finger-friendly' websites that I could recommend. I demonstrated a few during the course, but this got me thinking about producing a decent list of these kind of websites.

What I wanted was to list sites that work well with a finger (but also with an IWB pen) and were very interactive. As I started going through my delicious links I realised I had quite a lot of sites that met this criteria. Current count is about 50 of them, far too many than for just one blog post.

If you want to see the whole list, I have gone through my delicious links and tagged anything that fits the bill with the tag "fingerfriendly" - you can see the whole list here; http://delicious.com/dannynic/fingerfriendly

I'll try and produce some blog posts that summarise some of the best for different subjects. Watch this space.

Whiteboard Room

2009-02-20T10:50:00.001Z

The Plasma Screen & Whiteboard Room is a free website where teachers in special schools can download teaching resources, created by other teachers, that they can use on their plasma screens, interactive whiteboards, etc. All the resources have been created by teachers and are free to use for educational purposes.

The site provides a mix of PowerPoint and Smart Notebook files as well as web links and a few Word documents. There are some really nice big books and lesson starter activities. Most National Curriculum subjects are covered. Like most of my favourite sites it's free!

The site is aimed at SEN teachers, but most primary teachers will find useful resources here that they could adapt or adopt. If you have some of your own resources to share, the site will also accept your resources to share with other teachers.

It's a great resource, and I strongly suggest you check it out today at http://www.whiteboardroom.org.uk/

Apologies

2009-02-20T10:10:00.002Z

Apologies for messing some of you around over the last few days. I tried to move this blog across to WordPress. I've done this with other blogs and had no problems at all.

I managed it all OK, and everything seemed to be working. But I could not add long blog posts - I kept getting timeouts and connection errors. Was very odd.

Today I did a reinstall and tried again, and managed to lock myself out of the site.

So luckily I'd kept the blogger backup, and moved the site back to Blogger for the time being.

If you had updated your RSS feeds, I'm afraid you may need to redo them again. Sorry.

Prezi

2009-02-20T09:35:00.003Z

I've spent an hour or so this afternoon playing with a new website called Prezi. I first saw the site mentioned on Mark Warners blog, and I signed up for the beta. This morning I got my Beta invite.

Prezi provides a very different way of producing presentations and maybe can change the way we think about presentations.

Rather than working on separate slides, you add different elements to your page. At the moment you can add text and images and also drop videos and pdf files onto the page. You can surround these elements with a frame or leave them as they are.

It takes a while to get used to the user interface, and it's well worth watching the introductory videos first. But once you get the hang of it, it's quite intuitive to drop items, rotate them, scale them and move them around.

Once the items are on the page you can link them up into a path using the path tool. When you view an item full screen you can then move forwards and backwards along the path to the next item. Alternatively you can just zoom in and out and select different items in any order. Great for non-linear presentations where you just have slides which can be viewed in any order.

I've had a quick play with Prezi just to get my head around how to make it work. You can view my sample presentation here: http://prezi.com/9991/

If you like the look of Prezi, you might be able to get on the Beta test. Contact details are on the site and explain you are in education. Either that or wait until the site goes live, whenever that may be. You might also like to take a look at the Prezi blog which explains more about the site.

Need a Hero?

2009-02-20T09:34:00.001Z

The Hero Factory lets you produce your own superheroes. You can choose the gender and look of your character - what outfits they wear and then select their super powers. It’s great fun. Once created you can output your hero onto a mock-up comic book cover, or just screengrab from inside the creator. Remember you can use the desktop capture tool in Smart or Promethean software or just Print Screen, paste into Word and then crop down.

This would be great to inspire creative writing - students could make a character and then write about him/her. Or you might like to create Captain Maths who you use in your IWB slides to give the students maths problems or Doctor Atomic to provide a question to test in a science investigation.

Creative Writing Ideas

2009-02-20T09:33:00.001Z

Mark Warner of Teaching Ideas deserves a lot of kudos for starting off another brilliant collaborative presentation. This one aims to provide ideas for inspiring writing in the classroom. Like the others (listed below) it starts with a few ideas and then relies on the teaching community to pool their knowledge via Twitter or by sharing the presentation and adding their ideas. It was 21 ideas when I started writing this, it’s now 24 ideas and growing (Fridge Magnet Poetry is #22)

Take a look and hopefully get inspired. and if you have any ideas to share, contact Mark and let him know.

A reminder that there are many more collaborative presentations produced by Tom Barrett (and friends)

They are packed with ideas, and if you have any more please add to them!

Fridge Magnet Poetry

2009-02-20T09:32:00.002Z

Here’s a fun activity from the Magnetic Poetry website - Fridge Magnet poetry. There are several sets of words to choose from. Drag the words and phrases onto the page to create your own poems. This is an activity you could make yourself in your IWB software with a lot of text boxes, but this site saves you having to think of all the words.

Student Editions

2009-02-20T09:29:00.001Z

Wouldn’t it be great if you could save all the notes you had written on your interactive whiteboard during a lesson and then give it to the students to revise from? Or to give to students who missed the lesson? How handy would that be?

But did you know you can already do that?

Both Smart and Promethean have produced student editions of their software. These are cut-down versions which allow students to view the files you produce in a lesson.

Promethean’s ActivSoftware Student edition can be downloaded here.

Smart Notebook Student Edition can be downloaded here.

Both versions are free to use, and your students are licensed to use the software as long as your school has purchased the corresponding IWBs

All you need to do is come up with a way of giving that file to the students. If you have a shared area on your network you could save your file to that. Name it accordingly (Teacher name, class and date would be good) and then students can take it home on a USB stick or email it themselves. Alternatively you could put the file up onto the school VLE if you have one.

Both Promethean and Smart software also lets you export files in PDF or PowerPoint format - if you just want students to have a static record of the lesson notes. Because you’re dealing in digital files it can be easily shared

This is a very handy way of making your lesson notes available to your students after the lesson. Try it now!

A look at ActivSoftware Inspire

2009-02-12T08:31:00.009Z

I've written a few times to mention the forthcoming new software from Promethean, the rather unwieldly titled ActivSoftware Inspire Edition. I downloaded my trial edition from the Promethean Planet website and have finally had a chance to play with it.

You can view my video about the new software here. I can't seem to embed these files into my blog :)

Whereas with the past versions of ActivPrimary and ActivStudio, each new version was more stuff added on top of an older version, Inspire Edition is a complete rebuild. This has allowed Promethean to look at how teachers are using the software, and may be using it in the future, and build this in to the software now. In theory this should mean the software can be a little leaner and meaner. There are still a few bugs in the version I was trying out, but on the whole it seemed pretty slick - apart from when dealing with videos and flash files.

The headline news is that you now only have one version of the software to worry about. There will no longer be one product for primary and one for secondary/college. Inspire edition has two different "skins" so that you can use either the Primary or Studio workspace.

Using the Studio Workspace

Using the Primary Workspace

You can change between workspaces via the Dashboard. Click on Configure and then tick the box next to "Launch next time using....". When you restart the software it will switch to the other view.

The first real difference you'll notice is that ActivInspire has adopted the more "windowsy" feel that you could achieve in AS3 with file menus along the top of the screen. This makes it easier to use, and find the menu items you want to use. It also puts the tabs across the top for the various flipcharts you have open.

The sidebar that you used to get on the side of the flipchart has now gone. The forward and backward page icons are now on the main floating toolbar. There is now a Browser panel which floats on the side of the screen. This shows the pages in your document, but also becomes the resource browser, properties inspector, actions panel etc etc.

The other big change is to the icons that appear when you select an object on the screen. The resizing anchor points in the corners are now larger and easier to grab. Instead of having to double-click to bring up the icon panel, it appears automatically. This quickly allows you to group, ungroup, resize, change transparency etc. You can see them in this screengrab;

This is easier than the older system. A similar toolbar pops up when you select text.

Handling text is also a little easier. Firstly when writing text the formatting toolbar appears at the top of the page, similar to where you'd expect it in something like Word. Also, from a Science/Maths point of view it's nice to finally get a decent Superscript and Subscript tool. Good for formulae and SI units etc.

Adding an action to an object is now easier. Simply click on the object, go to the browser panel and select actions. You can then choose an action to add to that object - such as make the calculator appear or bring up the keyboard. You can see how this looks in the ActivPrimary skin here;

Another feature that could be interesting is the fact that it is now possible to submit your files to Promethean Planet directly from within the ActivInspire software. Simply click on File and then Submit Flipcharts to Promethean Planet. Hopefully this will encourage more people to share the flipcharts they have made and help to further develop the resources available to Promethean Planet users.

Oh, and a big hooray that we finally have an eraser that actually erases. The old, weird think that makes the ink transparent but doesn't remove it is now renamed Magic Ink. It's still there if for some reason you still want it... but finally Promethean have seen sense and brought in a decent eraser. (OK I know it's a minor thing, but it's been bugging me on training sessions for years!)

I've been pretty impressed with the software so far. The only issues have been with video and media handling. I've tried adding videos and I either just get an icon rather than have it embed - or the software crashes. Similar things have happened when adding Flash files. I've tried dragging Flash video files onto the flipchart page, and it doesn't know what to do with them.. but when I insert via the menus, they do appear on the page OK. I like to drag things onto the page in the same way I do in Smart Notebook, it's annoying ActivInspire doesn't do this. Maybe this will be fixed with the full release, I do hope so.

If you want to try the software for yourself you still have about a fortnight to do so. You can download it from here, and try it out until the end of February. The full version should be out in March.

Please take a look at my video to see the software in action.

If you want to know more you can also check out Chris Betchers great blog, and also the ActivInspire blog where they are running a blogging competition (Be quick as it closes tomorrow).

Enjoy!

Announcing SMART Notebook Math 2009

2009-02-12T06:41:00.003Z

I received this email from SMART yesterday. It should definitely be of interest to secondary maths teachers and KS2 school teachers. UK teachers, just stick an "S" after each use of the word Math ;)

"Math tools for SMART Notebook software are high on educators’ wish lists. This June, SMART will grant their wish with a beta version of SMART Notebook Math.

SMART Notebook Math extends the capabilities of SMART Notebook collaborative learning software by incorporating math-specific tools for teachers. With SMART Notebook Math, teachers and students can now create, solve or graph mathematical concepts directly in SMART Notebook.

SMART Notebook Math features include the following:

Equation creation and editing
Equation handwriting recognition
Graphing tool
Real-time linked relationships between tables, equations and graphs
More shapes additional to those that come with SMART Notebook 10
Shape manipulation and feedback
Advanced-measurement tools
Ability to launch and operate Texas Instruments™ emulators from within SMART Notebook

Details on pricing and sales tips for SMART Notebook Math will be provided later in the year.

To find out more. visit this page to sign up to receive the beta version of SMART Notebook Math."

I've signed up for the Beta, so hopefully will be able to let you know more about what this entails later this year. I would guess it's a suite of tools like the Lesson Toolkit - but it may also be something that "plugs into" Smart Notebook like the Senteo software does.

Watch this space.

What is it?

2009-02-11T21:32:00.002Z

Inspired by something my friend Laura made ages ago in Powerpoint - here's a quick presentation using that shows what happens when you mix Photopeach, a handheld digital microscope and someone with too much time on their hands.

The first presentation shows the images - show it to your class and guess what the different things are.

What is it??? on PhotoPeach

The second presentation has the same images, with the answers added as captions.

What is it? - The Answers on PhotoPeach

The microscope I used is the Easiscope, from TTS.

Enjoy!

Build your wild self

2009-02-08T13:21:00.002Z

Here's a fun activity I used with my Science students the other week when we were looking at Science and ICT. It would fit in nicely into a lesson about adaptations, or variety of life.

With the Build Your Wild Self you can create an online version of yourself - then add animal parts such as antlers, wings, tentacles, different mouthparts and other odd body parts.

What I asked the students to then do was to take a screen grab of their creation and paste it into Word (or you could use the camera tool and grab it into IWB software).

Once in Word, we can start looking at our animal scientifically. I asked them to think about what their animal would eat. Where might it live? Based on its body parts how did it find food? Did it hunt? Think about each of the body parts they had added and describe their purpose.

You could also open this up into a larger creative-writing task and write a story about their animal.

If you like Build Your Wild Self, you'll also like Switch Zoo, which can be used in a similar way.

Have fun!

PhotoPeach

2009-02-07T13:40:00.005Z

Here's another website that can be used to make photo slideshows. It's called PhotoPeach and it seems pretty easy to use, and like my favourite websites it's free!

You can upload photos yourself, or take them from a set added to Flickr or Facebook. It doesn't look as flash as Animoto, and there is less choice of music. But it does seem quicker to use and compared to the free version of Animoto you can use more than 15 photos. You can add text captions to each image if you want. Slideshows can then be embedded into your blog or Facebook profile. Here's a nice guide to making a slideshow on PhotoPeach from Allanah King.

As an example, here's a slideshow I made this morning of some photographs of my home town, that I took on a few walks along the seafront last Summer.

Here's the slideshow as a regular slideshow

And here's the slideshow as a "Spiral" which is an interesting way of browsing a stack of photographs and would work well on an IWB in full screen mode.

There are many different ways you could use this. One would be photo montages of images to introduce a topic. Students could take photos around their school or on school trips/field trips. Language teachers could add captions to images to teach vocabulary. Maybe present a series of images from a digital microscope and ask the students to guess what each thing is.You could even use it as another way to do digital storytelling

If you already have a Flickr account it's really quick to produce a PhotoPeach slideshow. Head over there now and try it out.

Dr Who Notebook Game

2009-02-06T13:11:00.002Z

Just a very quick post to point you all towards this excellent Smart Notebook file to teach dictionary skills. It demonstrates an excellent use of linking to sounds produced by Lynne Horn.

If you click the correct answer K9 will say affirmative. If you click the wrong answer a Dalek will exterminate you.

Even if your subject is not languages, it's worth taking a look just to see how you could adapt this idea for your own subject. Would make a nice quiz for a plenary or starter.

You can record your own sounds or download them from one of the myriad of sound effects sites out there.

Remember - in Smart Notebook if you want to link an object to a sound, all you need to do is right-click on the object, select Sound and then browse to the sound file you want to play.

In ActivStudio it's a little more involved but still straightforward. Right click on the object and choose Properties. Select Actions and from the drop down box choose Play Sound. Click the Set button and choose your sound. Then click OK.

Teachable

2009-02-06T08:53:00.004Z

When I went to the ASE conference in January I was given a demonstration of an excellent website called Teachable.

Teachable.net is a high quality resource sharing website for teachers, where you can browse, download and adapt Powerpoints, worksheets and other interactive material for your class. All the files are contributed by other teachers, and have been quality-checked and tagged under easy-to-find categories.

There are over 1000 different lessons to download, ranging from high impact KS3 starters, to in-depth interactive A-level worksheets.

Unlike some other sites, Teachable is not free. Access costs from just £15 for a 10 file bundle, or there is a special offer for schools for access up to 400 files and get some training bundled for free. Charging does mean they can employ people to check the quality of the uploaded resources, which is fair enough.

Alternatively if teachers submit their own resources to the site they can get credits which they can spend on download other resources. And if your resources sell to other teachers then you will get a cut of the proceeds as well. So there is a benefit to sharing your materials with the world! Here's a list of the types of resources they are looking for.

You can preview everything before you download the full version, and when you do download the full version they grant you a Creative Commons license the right to copy and share the resource (for educational use).

At present the site deals mainly in PowerPoints and Word files. There's no facility to upload Smart Notebook or Promethean files. I discussed this with the representatives of Teachable at the time and they say they've had no call for this facility yet. Teachers are sticking with PowerPoint. While a lot of the powerpoints I saw were interactive with the use of Macros and suchlike, this did seem like an opportunity missed.

So, if you do have any high quality Smart Notebook files or Promethean flipcharts then I suggest you get in touch with Teachable to create some demand. In the meantime check out the bank of resources that are already there and perhaps share some of your good work too.

Teachable also runs a cool blog that is also worth adding to your RSS reader. From a post recently here are 10 Top Physics Videos. Well worth a look.

SMART adds "touch recognition" to SMART Boards

2009-02-03T12:48:00.004Z

According to this post on Engadget, SMART are releasing an upgrade to their boards that allows them to distinguish between a pen, a finger and the side of your hand.

Touching the board with a pen will write, your finger will move things, and your hand will erase.

I don't know yet if this is only on new boards, or is a firmware upgrade for all (or recent) Smartboards. I also don't know how this will affect people who have become used to using different pointers on the board (such as paintbrushes)

I can't find any info about this on the Smart website, but if I hear anything I'll post it here. Likewise if you know about it let me know too!

Update. This is now on the Smart Website. All Series 600 boards will come with Touch Recognition. An older 600 series board or a second- or third-generation 600i board can be upgraded by replacing its SC9 controller with a new SC9 controller from SMART. Only the SMART Board 600 series can be upgraded, and Touch Recognition cannot be activated on a first-generation 600i . More here.

Google Earth version 5

2009-02-03T08:53:00.004Z

Yesterday, Google announced the launch of Google Earth version 5, the brand new version of the already excellent Earth viewing tool. For those of you that have never played with it, I can highly recommend it. It's free, and you can download it here.

As an application to use on your interactive whiteboard, this really is an essential piece of software to have. Combine it with your desktop capture/camera tool and you can grab images from anywhere in the world and annotate over the top.

The obvious use would be for Geography lessons - it gives you an amazing globe at your fingertips which you can spin, zoom and see pretty much everything on Earth. The search facility lets you find a place almost instantly. You can also add weather information, radar images and recent cloud cover information. One of the new features is an ocean view where you can explore the sea floor and obtain information files about ocean life.

History teachers might want to take tours of Rome, or Athens and see where the monuments are. Many famous buildings are rendered as 3d structures. Street level view even lets you take tours of some of these areas from a visitors eye view - visit the Colosseum from the comfort your classroom!

For Science teachers I love the Sunlight feature, where you can view light/dark areas over time. Drag the slide to change the time and see how the area of light and dark moves. This is really nice for showing how we get night and day (use alongside a demo with a torch and a football/globe)

For some inspiration on how to use this feature here's an excellent idea from Tom Barretts blog. He used his Twitter network to tell his class where they were in the world. The students then had to find where they were using Google Earth and to then use the shadowed layer to find the length of the day at that point. This was a great way of making the search relevant since they were looking for places that real people had suggested.

As well as views of Earth, Google Earth also has a detailed map of Mars which can be explored, as well as a fully featured Sky mode which lets you explore the universe. Again it's fully searchable and perfect for Earth and Space or Our Place in the Universe areas of the curriculum.

Another new feature is Historical View which lets you view past images of an area, if they exist, to see what it would have looked like in the past. This works better in some areas than others and does depend on how many times that area has been photographed. For example the area where I live has been surveyed last year, and in 2005 so I can toggle between seeing how my house looked before and after I moved in ;)

You can find out more about Google Earth from the Google Earth blog. And also from Tom Barrett, here's 22 interesting ways to use Google Earth.

Here's a neat video that explains some of the new features;

Again Google Earth, like all my favourite pieces of software, is free and I strongly suggest you download it now!

Tree of Life

2009-02-02T11:16:00.004Z

Not that I need to take advantage of a Snow Day to mess about on the internet, but since the UK has ground to a halt because of the weather, I've been surfing.

From the Bad Science forums I found a link to an excellent video of the Tree of Life. This is taken from a BBC show about Charles Darwin broadcast to celebrate his 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species and was produced in association with The Wellcome Trust.

The video of the tree of life is available in YouTube version, but you can also download a copy for your own use. It's licensed under a Creative Commons licence so you can use it in your schools as long as you attribute the source and don't use it commercially.

There is also an interactive Tree of Life which allows you to trace the ancestry of many different creatures and also makes it easy to find the common ancestors between pairs of animals. So if you want to find the common ancestor between Man and Penguin, then you can (something called Amniota, in case you were wondering).

This is a beta version and so will develop over time. Again you can download a standalone version if you want to use it in schools.

Science/Biology teachers who are looking for a resource to use when teaching evolution or diversity of life should definitely check it out. And the creative commons licence means you could even get the students to put it into movie maker (or similar) and record their own narration over the top.