I came across a fabulous little Hue HD webcam in the animation workshop with Oscar Stringer yesterday. They are very small, and very cheap (at less than £20) When teamed up with I Can Animate and Windows Movie Maker we were getting some fabulous animations. A great little device that almost has the picture definition of a visualiser (on a flexible mount, it almost suggests itself as a mini-visualiser). Lets just say it compares very well to its more portly blue rival. Highly recommended.

Confused about how to arrange your ICT scheme of work in school? Have a look at the KentEd ICT Themes. When you see the five themes as an overview, you can see that it makes wonderful sense. Use this, as KentEd say, to maximise opportunities to embed ICT in the curriculum and to make use of new technologies.

I came across the fantastic free suite of tools called Creaza . Don't know how I could have missed Creaza at BETT , but I did. It comprises four fantastic tools: Mindomo which is a mindmapping tool; See this video demo clip about Cartoonist the cartoon drawing tool; Movie Editor has ready-made video and sound clips and uses movie editing conventions. With Audio Editor can splice together your own version of a newscast, a radio commercial, or a radio interlude, play it back later. Fantastic free tools from this Norwegian company which could be integrated into your learning platform. Truly amazing!

The National Education Network has a wealth of free resources to support the curriculum. Click here to select the subject and key stage you are interested in. If you are a subject coordinator looking for ICT-based resources, why not click here for an updated list via RSS...or you may want to look at the PDF below.

NEN_Brochure.pdf (1.14 mb)

We found an interesting resource where teachers who make their own resources can share and earn “credits” towards other shared resources. Users can browse and search for relevant resources by subject, topic, age group and ability level.  

Everybody is talking about Comic Life but there are many free comic strip applications online. Have you seen Artisancam's Super Action Comic Maker? MFL? "Pow! Je suis un homme avec les pouvoirs sensationnel !" Does anyone know of any others?

Have you often wished you had access to a video-based site like YouTube where you could quickly, easily, safely upload educational films that your children have created? It may be your class have created an animation; it may be a short film with a digi-blue camera. Have you seen Films for Learning? You don't need a lot of expertise to upload. In fact, here is a video tutorial on how to upload. There is a growing library of educational films (its all moderated) and the interface is very high quality. Find out more.

Are you using Audacity, Garageband, Podium..Photostory, and finding yourself limited for suitable music files? Are you sure that what you use is okay from a legal point of view? Have a look at Soundzabound. I had a talk to them on the TAG Learning stand at BETT. They are well established in the US and have a huge wealth of MP3s specifically collected for education use. Copyright is a real issue with sound file use in school. Fair Use has limitations in use and states the you are liable, should there be a claim. Soundzabound Royalty Free Music supersedes Fair Use in that they fully license the music with unlimited rights for education and sign off that you are protected.  Soundzabound could be very useful.

Really useful sources of historical data at Histpop with census data - complete population data for England between 1801 and 1937. Down at a local level you can find very useful data..here for my local area.