Dum-de-dum
There’s a new family on the block – The Dums. These are ten animated characters who play different instruments on their own or with others. Move the pointer over these matchstick figures from the guitar to trumpet player and you’ll be offered a brass quartet, percussion band, swing band, pop band, brass band, guitar ensemble, string quartet, recorder consort, vocal quartet and a fully-fledged orchestra.
Clicking on the orchestra, for instance, will give you a selection of string, wind and percussion instruments. Choose one to access information on how to play, where it’s played, what it looks like, the history, composers and players as well as a diagram plus the option to listen to a scale and/or a phrase. Beautifully clear sound too. Click on the Conductor button and your chosen ensemble will play. With your baton you can see what each instrument is called and also tell when not to play.
An excellent introduction to musical instruments, and one which doesn’t just concentrate on how instruments are played in isolation. Look out for free extra resources too at www.thedums.com
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Ratings and details
Ease of use 5/5
Fitness for purpose 5/5
Value for money 3/5
Overall 4/5
Product: The Dums
Price: £50
Requirements: PC/Mac
Ages: 5+
ESP Ltd
0115 944 41 40
www.espmusic.co.uk
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Show-offs
WITH digital and video cameras finding a welcome home in classrooms you could just use the computer’s built-in slideshow features but it might be better to give production over to the children with SlideShow. This lets you combine photos, graphics, movies and sound and the end product could be a photo story in literacy, a sound walk through a school or a presentation of a science investigation.
Pictures, movies and sounds are kept in a library window, a database from which you drag these onto a timeline, although you can force SlideShow to look for files in other locations by clicking on the Browse button and navigating to the folder of your choice. You can add empty frames, supplementing with just text or sounds, or change the position of slides by dragging them where you want them.
Click on each picture frame and you can add text changing font, colour, size or position and choose from a range transition effects to the next slide as well as time on screen. You can also add sound effects to pictures – icons on the timeline show what you’ve added. Each frame can have its own sound file or you could record a narrative – just change the duration number and you can change the effect. Or how about interspersing with a video clip? This does increase the size of a presentation and you can’t add text, sound or change its length – but for this application these controls aren’t necessary.
When you’re finished the presentation you can preview it and then export it as a movie with or without the complementary FilmShow.
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Ratings and details
Ease of use 4/5
Fitness for purpose 5/5
Value for money 4/5
Overall 4/5
Product: Slideshow
Price: £35 (single user)
Requirements: PC/Mac
Ages: 6+
Kudlian Soft
07000 583542
www.kudliansoft.co.uk
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Big Science for Big Boards
Designed with Interactive Whiteboards in mind, each CD-ROM consists of 25 flipcharts comprising a minimum of 25 pages per chart with notes, discussion points and interactive activities to be done on or off the computer.
Taking Year 1 Science for instance, the graphics and animations are large, attractive and colourful. An apple tree offers all six topics set by the QCA Scheme of Work. Choose one and you’re off with a screen of learning objectives. The pages can be used in sequence or as needed and are a mix of teacher-led pages on interactive activities for a whole class or group. Each comes with teacher notes which can be accessed on screen or printed out.
There are a variety of tools for you to use too. Along the top are the ones aimed at teachers – notes, reset and print options as well as a magic box of tools from half and full-sized protractors, rulers, spotlight and blind. Suggestions on how and where to use these are built-in as needed but you can use them whenever you see fit. For instance, choosing the spotlight tool is a good way of introducing a topic, you ask children to recognise materials as you move the spotlight over the page, or raise the blind a bit at a time.
Along the bottom are tools for children which let them write on the board, erase their work, highlight key areas or roll a dice making activities into games and so on.
Very easy to use and a boon to anyone new to using, or unsure on how to use, an Interactive Whiteboard.
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Ratings and details
Ease of use 5/5
Fitness for purpose 5/5
Value for money 3/5
Overall 4/5
Product: EDpaX Whiteboard Lessons – Science Years 1-6
Price: £150 each or £750 per set
Requirements: Prometheon ActivBoard, Smartboard, PC
EDpaX
Tel: 01294 316535
www.edpax.com
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Big Jack
Impressively produced, what you get for your money is an audio CD and CD-ROM as well as a handbook of links across the curriculum from literacy to citizenship for Years 2-6 via music, science and geography all based on the narrative poem - Jack and the Beans Talk.
The CD-ROM provides an animated book, whiteboard activities and a bank of resources. The book can be used on standalone machines as well as on an interactive whiteboard and children can be read to or read the story themselves. Good animation, sound, rhyme, pace and graphics make for an engaging tale and the basis for masses of literacy activities.
Using this on an interactive whiteboard gives you access to ten activities all based on the poem. These are open activities, for instance by showing a page at a time you can use the built-in tools to mask words and replace the rhymes, using the pen tool to circle letter strings, or the spotlighter and reveal tools to discuss how words are constructed. Alternatively, you can have a page free of text and create your own version of the story, or one without colour or words allowing a totally new story to be told. Other activities provide just the backgrounds and characters, or speech bubbles attached to the characters.
For older children, they can develop script writing by masking out words in speech bubbles and writing new conversations or working on or off the screen with a playscript scaffold. Other activities offer labelling, sequencing of events, instructions, alliteration, character passports all supported by differentiated photocopiable worksheets.
The ideas in the handbook encourage teachers to integrate the themes into other areas enhancing creativity and enjoyment and to help with this the resource bank provides the tools with which to make your own whiteboard activities, displays, group and independent tasks using the backgrounds, characters, objects from the tale as well as photographs of real runner beans, theatres and puppets.
The audio CD holds the author’s introduction to this version of classic fairytale, the story, as well as songs and instrumentals with which to create you very own Mini Bean Operetta while dancing to the Bean Polka. This package could be dipped into for specific needs or as the basis for a term’s work but would work really well as a whole-school or Key Stage project.
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Ratings and details
Ease of use 5/5
Fitness for purpose 5/5
Value for money 5/5
Overall 5/5
Product: Jack and the Beans Talk
Price: £285 (site-licence)
Requirements: SMART or Prometheon whiteboards – other boards present ten activities as PowerPoint documents which you can use your whiteboard tools with in the normal way
Ages: 6-11
Shoo-fly Publishing
Tel: 0191 519 1800
www.shooflypublishing.co.uk
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All you wanted to know about IWBs but …
A book with a CD-ROM rather than the other way around, this is a down-to-earth guide for those new to interactive whiteboards in their classrooms. While this version is available for primaries, look out for a secondary school version due any time now. With examples from ‘real’ classrooms which apply whatever IWB your school uses, there are also practical resources on the CD-ROM to give you a headstart.
The book divides into 3 sections – the different types of boards available, what you’ll find an IWB can do for you and finally lesson resources for English, Maths and a smattering of ideas for science, geography and citizenship.
The book has a realistic approach when it comes to teaching and the technology. Although the SMART and Activ boards are the ones covered much of what the author says applies to all boards.
As well as giving examples of good practice, the book also sets out some of the pitfalls which can easily be avoided, once you know they are there. And this is the strength of this book - it allows you to learn from others, not re-invent the wheel.
Full of practical tips, this book doesn’t try to over-awe you with all the features, but rather to take you from familiarising yourself with the basics to a point where the IWB is integrated into your teaching in a seamless and stress-free way. This is an extremely useful addition to a school library for teachers and learning assistants - in fact it does what it says on the cover!
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Ratings and details
Ease of use 5/5
Fitness for purpose 5/5
Value for money 5/5
Overall 5/5
Product: How to use an Interactive Whiteboard Really Effectively in Your Primary Classroom by Jenny Gage
Requirements: SMARTboard or Prometheon ACTIVboard
Price: £18.00
Tel: 0208 996 3610
David Fulton Publishers/Granada Learning
www.granada-learning.com |
