Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Two new IWB tools

Well these two are not new to many people, but they have stumbled across my RSS readers and random googling recently, so they are new to me!!


How calm is your room?
Try using the Calmness Counter to find out



Plug in a microphone and adjust the microphone sensitivity and let the noiseometer do the work. This is a great way to demonstrate both datalogging, but also it is also a very exciting and novel behaviour management tool.

It is a feature of the brilliant ICT Games website, where there is a wide variety of IWB tools to support Literacy and Numeracy.


Random Name Generator
The other is the 'Random name generator' from ClassTools.net. I used to use a less graphically pleasing site a few years ago. The tool I used was called something like the 'Randomiser'. The premise was simple, to avoid always choosing the same child to answer a question or (the very coveted) take a message to another room. This tool is also great in an unconference environment, as Ewan Macintosh showed us in TeachMeet 08. The fruit machine was activated after each speaker as a way of choosing the next contributor.Of course, it doesn't have to just names that are inputted into the generator, key words for spelling or science vocabulary could be inputted. This could then be used a revision starter to a lesson.I suppose you could have two generators running side by side on the board.

Oh and you can embed Class Tools into blogs!



Click here for full screen version


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