THIS BLOG IS MOVING!!!!

Soon we will be moving this blog onto another domain and onto our own servers so we can enjoy all the other features and benefits of wordpress…. polls, more multimedia, podcasting, etc.

You can get a preview of the work in progress and update your blogrolls and feeds at: http://blog.prometheanplanet.com

Google Earth looks skyward!

Google Earth needs renaming…to Google Galaxy.. The latest version lets you view the sky above as well…

Search for constellations and stars, animate the orbit of the planets – or if you are feeling ambitious – perhaps simulate how early navigators used stars to cross the oceans!

For those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere a visit ‘down under’ can be surprising – I remember my first night camping at Mount Cook on the Southern Island of New Zealand – and waking up before dawn to an amazing starfield I simply had never seen before… It was like I had stepped onto an alien planet – no familar ‘plough’ pointing the way north!

Take it from me – you ain’t seen the milky way if you have not seen it from there!

Now I can relive the experience on my Activboard!

Mothergooserocks – ‘Kids at the speed of creativity’

I found this and just had to post it… Nursery Rhymes done in the style of Sting (Stung), U2 (Me2), Madonna (Mad Donna), etc.   The site has a few online examples you might want to bring up on the Activboard for a different take on ‘music time’…

http://www.mothergooserocks.com/contest/mad_donna.htm

http://www.mothergooserocks.com/animations/head_and_shoulders.html

The Heads Shoulder’s knees and toes – is possibly the funniest thing I have seen this month…. watch out when George Bush joins in!

Open University – LearningSpace… HE on demand!

Fancy a brush up on your teacher training?  Open University might have the ideal solution.
There are 31 units under Education alone covering everything from teaching ideas (visualisation in Maths example) to working with colleagues. Broken down into short chunks – they are an ideal way of catching up with new (or old) ideas and being online it is truly anytime, anywhere learning.

If you are subject teaching – then complete HE courses on Science, Art, Technology, etc. can be browsed. I am a trained Primary teacher but I could actually see myself using some of the introductory materials used in classteaching or to refresh my subject knowledge – being well written, clear and supported with good questions and media. Virtually all of the material is licensed under a Creative Commons Share alike license for England in Wales – so you can also reuse it or adapt it quite freely within flipcharts for your Activboard as long as you make the appropriate references and don’t try to sell it.

Open University are not alone in making their courses ‘open to all’. The renowned MIT are offering similar – so if you need to catch up on your quantum physics or global economics – then you do not have to take a four year career break.

MIT are clear in their mission: “A key MIT OCW audience is educators, and for them, we are hoping that by providing the syllabus, reading lists and lecture notes, we are offering a chance for them to jumpstart their own pedagogy and improve the way they teach their chosen discipline.”

Links:

• Open University Learning Space
• MIT OpenCourseWare