The use of the Blackboard Discussion board

I feel that this discussion board is very helpful for the course as it is easy to discuss things, access it without having to know everybodies blog addresses, a simple way of submitting work and getting feedback from peers and if used properly a good source of information that is easy to access from home.

SBT1

I have a bit of a dilemma in my first school placement.
I am about to enter into my first placement and have started planning for my first week of teaching. The problem I am facing is that my classroom's internet access is not currently working and is not likely to be fixed in the near future. Now I know that IWB can be over used, but there is such a wealth of good ICT resources (games, audios, videos clips etc) that can complement certain lessons, but can not be downloaded. I also feel that many of the children that I am teaching are very visual and hands on learners and ICT resources, that the children never get the chance to use in this class, will help them turn complex abstract ideas in to contextual concrete understandings.

The use of Spreadsheets in school

The use of spreadsheets in school, is from my experience, mainly an administration tool used by the teachers. This is unfortunate, but I have to admit that the idea of spreadsheets have had me running to the hills to avoid them for many years. This is probably because many years ago I was trained in the very first version of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet ever created in my first job, and there was no short cuts, all formulas had to be typed and remembered in full. (Very scary!!!) This was only a little over ten years ago and I can understand why teachers may feel daunted at the prospect of teaching this to the children in their class. However, there is so much help out there on the web and already made resources and applications that with a little bit of time playing and trial and error a lot can be learnt.


Some suggestions and Ideas from the web of how to use spreadsheets:
Excel spreadsheets
If you have Excel version 5:0/95 or above, you can use these sheets directly. Click on the underlined links in blue to download. To use off-line, you need to save into a folder or onto a floppy disc.
The Doubling Machine
Click on the blue cell and enter a number. To reset, click Undo on the Excel toolbar:
The Halving Machine
http://www.kented.org.uk/ngfl/subjects/numeracy/sheets/double-double.xls

This sheet is used in the same way. It aims to show the ease of finding four times a number by doubling it twice. To reset, click Undo on the Excel toolbar:
What's my number?
This is a book of three sheets which give the sum and product of two mystery numbers. The numbers in the coloured cells can be altered to control the difficulty, by setting the maximum and minimum values for the two random numbers. Changing these values gives a new problem. Alternatively, click on the Sheet2 and Sheet3 tabs.
If you scroll the sheet down, the answers are revealed!
For more spreadsheets and MyWorld screens, visitDeal Parochial's web site

What is SKYPE?

What is Skype?

Skype is a free internet software for phoning and messaging. It can only be used if you have a broadband connection. You will need a good-quality headphone/microphone, and, after installing, you will be in contact with all other users of Skype on the Internet. You can phone or message them for free for as long as you like! Not only, you can still use Skype through your computer’s broadband connection to phone land or mobile phones in many countries of the world at extremely competitive prices. A phone call from the UK to Italy currently 0.017 euros per minute!

Information from
http://www.lexiconline.com/skype.htm

What are embedded links?

Links and URLs

From http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~hla/G5BIAW/lecture4/

HTML documents often have hypertext links in them which mean you can click on the highlighted text and the WWW browser automatically retrieves and displays the document named by the link.

The "hypertext link" is a clickable piece of text that retrieves and displays the object described by "http://myurl".

The source of the link is the text between the A tags, and the destination of the link is the value assigned to HREF inside the opening A tag.

The value assigned to HREF is usually a Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

---

URLs

URLs are names given to almost every chunk of information on the WWW. Most information on the Internet can be addressed with a URL.

A URL has four main components

1. a protocol specifier, e.g. http, ftp, gopher, mailto, file etc
2. a site/domain locator
3. a file locator
4. an optional within-file position locator

E.g.

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~hla/HTF/proceedings.html#session2

If no within-file position locator is given, the position defaults to the top of the file.

E.g.

http://www7.conf.au/cfs.html

points to the top of a page.

The above example showed how to link to a specific position in another document.

To link to a specific position in the same document (i.e. source and destination are in the same document), the value assigned to HREF can leave out everything except the position identifier.

How do I compress a file

This is how to compress a file using windows

Compressed files use less disk space so they are easier to store and quicker to send via email. Files that are compressed cannot be modified without first uncompressing them.

To compress files

• Open My Computer (just called Computer on Vista)
• Browse to find the file you wish to compress
• Right click on the file
• Select Send To from the menu which appears
• Select Compressed (zipped) Folder from the list of options

This will create a compressed folder with the same name as your file and in the same location. The folder will contain your compressed file.

To uncompress files :

• Open My Computer (just called Computer on Vista)
• Browse to find the file you wish to uncompress
• Right click on the file
• Select Extract All from the menu which appears

This will open the Windows Extraction Wizard.