Free Computer / ICT / e-learning Information technology lesson ideas and resources for K-12 teachers and students
It is coming up to the festive season and no doubt your students will be writing and sending some Christmas Cards. Microsoft Publisher has some great options for creating cards for all occasions and this lesson plan will really give your students a great starting point for creating cards in Publisher. Download the lesson plan here.
Budd:e is a great site for primary and secondary students to learn about cybersafety. It takes students throughout the process of identifying dodgy sites, viruses and malware and most of all teaches them about what information is deemed public and what should remain private.
It also covers cyber bullying in great detail and helps students differentiate between reputable sources of information and content that is unreliable.
The Budd:e Cyber security Education package consists of two activity-based learning modules, one for primary school students, and one for secondary school students. Both modules contain engaging, media-rich activities and resources, developed in consultation with teachers and subject matter experts.
Here you will also find comprehensive Teacher Resources for Budd:e including background and contextual information, a video demonstration of the modules, lesson plans with learning outcomes for each activity, and curriculum maps for all Australian states and territories.
Budd:e is totally free and aimed at creating a safer, more secure online environment for all children.
Mark Warner. A great contributor to the online teaching resources space hs put together some great ICT posters to spice up your computer lab or classroom. You can download the lot for free and do as you wish with them here. Enjoy.
Here are some great photo / image editing options that will works traight out of the browser. Students will find some cool effects and tricks within these I am sure. Be sure to take a look at webification if you would like to know some more great online photo editing tools.
Picnik allows you to edit things in a variety of ways. You can crop, rotate, resize, edit exposure, edit colors, sharpen, fix red eye, and auto fix. The auto-fix tool is cool, because it will take inconsistencies in the photo, and spruce them up a little big. But all of the other tools are pretty much self explanatory. Picnik has many tools found in full-fledged image editing programs such as adjusting exposure, contrast and shadows and highlights. Picnik offers all the basic tools to crop, resize, rotate, sharpen and fix red-eye. It also has plenty of special effects and filters and other advanced controls to fine-tune photos.Whatever tool or feature you use, instructions are provided in pop-up windows at the time you access them.
Aviary’s mission statement is to “Make the world’s creation accessible.” Although their mission is a little vague, their free image editing application is surprisingly robust for tools you can access completely for free. Aviary is a free, online digital editing software application to manipulate photos and images, or create your own. This tool is best suited for people who already have some knowledge of digital image manipulation. If you are a novice or cannot afford to purchase high-end software – the tools are great and worth mastering but expect a fairly intense learning curve.
Pixlr stands out for the depth and breadth of its image design and editing tools and features, combining many of the tried and true tools available in most Paint programs with high-quality features that have become ubiquitous in image editing programs, software-based or not. Pixlr also includes basic layer canvas tools and features, letting users free-hand crop, move, super-impose and interpolate images and rotate and remove entire canvases, all important tools for true image editing.
Photoshop.com is the latest offering for web-based photo sharing and editing. As long standing major players in the imaging software industry for graphics and video professionals, Adobe (US) have now launched an easy to use and free online version of their popular photo editing package, Photoshop. While not attempting to provide all the features of the desktop version of Photoshop, it certainly has a good selection of quality image editing tools for the more common tasks. Including a generous 2 Gigabytes (2000 Megabytes) of space for storing your photos in the free version, you can perform a range of edits including cropping, resizing, adjusting colors and removing that annoying red-eye effect.
flauntR is a privately funded, online photo and effect editor. Their goal is simple, provide an easy to use interface to manage, modify and enhance images without any outside software. They do this with and Adobe Flash driven interface that allows a user to use editR, stylR, textR, mobilR, picasR, and profilR — all flauntR specific enhancements. While the interface of flauntR can be a bit confusing at first (with six different categories of modifications), after a quick 5 minute lesson, most users are good to go. Through a series of questions and answers, the application can transform the images that are put into it into works of art (or whatever the uploader’s heart desires).
I got this brilliant smart notebook file from Michael Ymer that is really handy in showing students how to set up their table for a specific task. You simply drag and drop the items you want students to have out save your voice, time and effort in explaining 20 times.
Woopid is site that lets users watch video tutorials about all things technology. It is an easy to navigate site with hundreds of videos on using software and hardware products on all major computer platforms. A great site for technology trainers, teachers introducing basic computing functions to students, or just anyone who wants to learn something new.
I put together this really handy chart to advise teachers what they should be teaching in ICT / E-Learning and when. It is linked to VELS but really applies to any curriculum and you should feel confident in delivering these activities to the year level recommended. Download the PDF File here.
Computerhope is a great starting point to actually find out what your problem is and then go most of the way to fixing it if your problem is simple. This is a Windows on only site covering all Microsoft O/S's from Windows 95 through to Windows 7. Yes Apple Computers do break down too believe it or not and luckily Apple have a comprehensive help site available here to find a solution to your problem. Many problems are simply annoyances rather than major issues then you need to visitannoyances.org to get fast answers to your problems via forums. To actually watch someone fix common PC problems then you need to visit the eHowTech channel at Youtube. This also has a range of tweaking videos to improve performance. Last but not least and in my opinion the best is just good old Google - just be specific about your problem when you type it in the search box and your solution is never far away. I have never found a computer problem yet that no one else has actually suffered and written something about. Remember also that a computer problem is not a problem until you have rebooted and it still persists.
Sometimes things just go wrong with your computer and you might face a lengthy or expensive wait to get a supposed 'expert' to find the source of the problem. Fortunately there are a few sites on the web that will help you out of your problems whether it be a an annoying niggle or a complete meltdown.
Kevin Cummins