With a team of dedicated engineers, Google is building tools that make it simple to tell the stories of our diverse cultural heritage and make them accessible worldwide. Google have created a visually rich and interactive online experience for telling cultural stories in new ways. Visitors to the site can discover exhibits by expert curators, find artifacts, view photographs, read original manuscripts, watch videos, and more.

The site contains over 40 online exhibits which tell the stories behind major events in the 20th and 21st centuries including The Holocaust, Apartheid and D-Day. They’ve worked with 17 different institutions around the world including the Imperial War Museums, the Steve Biko Foundation and Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

It’s a fantastic resource, containing some very powerful images and stories.

Apparently future developments will allow anyone to create their own exhibitions – so you could create local history resources for your own area.

History teachers should definitely take a look, but there’s resources here for other subject areas too. You can find the institute at www.google.com/culturalinstitute/

Let me know what you think in the comments.

The Google Cultural Institute : Archive of Historic Resources The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

The application provides teachers and students with an online environment in which they can create sketches on their tablets easily and then share them with one another. The system works through a browser, so can be used on any web-enabled device. It doesn’t use Flash, so works fine on an iPad.

To use it, first the teacher creates an account and a class name. They can then set up each child as a user with a different password.

Sketching tools includes freehand drawing, straight lines, rectangles, color selection, erasing, and magnification.The teacher can then share these sketches with the children in the class. Children can log into their SketchLot accounts using the class code and the assigned passwords.

They can also create sketches of their own, and then share them with the teacher and / or other class members selectively. In this way a teacher could set a task for the children to complete, such as show their working on a maths problem, and then have all the images submitted to their dashboard to check/mark.

As well as using it to submit answers to questions it could be used for collecting ideas and brainstorming or collaborative mindmapping.

It’s an interesting idea, and if you have a class set of iPads or other tablets, I can see some useful ways that it could be used with a class.

The site is free to use, so it’s well worth setting yourself up with a teacher account and trying it out with a laptop or two.

Check out Sketchlot at : www.sketchlot.com

Sketchlot – a shared web whiteboard for tablets The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

Simply enter your text, then hit preview to see your text, complete with the famous theme tune.

The site provides an embed code and a direct link so you can access your crawl in the future, or embed it into a blog or other website.

It’s great fun.

It would be a great way to provide a story opener, or to give the introduction to a science or maths investigation. Children could use it to write summaries to their own stories.

Check it out now via the Star Wars website here.

The Star Wars Crawl Creator The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

Well, if you have been using it, you will be interested to know that MIT have just released version 2.0 of Scratch, and the interesting news is that this new version runs right in a browser with no downloads or installs required).

The programming environment is embedded in a sharing and shareable community, with millions of Scratch projects ready to be downloaded and remixed.

With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community.

Sadly it does need Flash, so this does mean it won’t work on an iPad. You’ll have to stick with Daisy the Dinosaur for now.

This is especially important in UK schools, where programming is becoming a lot more important in the new ICT/Computing curriculum.

You can get onto Scratch here : http://scratch.mit.edu

Scratch 2.0 : Programming for kids via a web browser The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

Built by Dassault Systemes, the people who created the 3D Paris Tour, the site lets you go on guided, interactive tours through ten different areas of the Giza plateau — allowing you to wander the necropolis, explore shafts and burial chambers, and enter four of the site’s ancient temples, including Khufu’s and Menkaure’s pyramids. With full control over the camera, you can fly in and out of different regions at will, and click on objects for more info.

Each area also contains an object gallery and photo gallery, as well as a link to a database of relevant documents.

The site’s creators have worked with real archaeologists to ensure that the models are as accurate as possible.

If you are teaching Ancient Egypt, then this is well worth a look.  Visit Giza 3D Here.

Visit the Pyramids of Giza on your Interactive Whiteboard The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

Whimsy has been very popular at the training sessions I’ve taken him to. He works well on the Smartboard. I was worried that the end would feel too heavy, but it’s not really an issue. The soft back slides across the whiteboard very well.

I was also a little worried about durability, but he’s spent a few weeks in my laptop bag and nothing has fallen off yet. He seems to be pretty robust.

Teachers in primary or special schools have often come up with ingenious ways of helping their children to reach items on the SmartBoard. I have seen drum beaters being used, paint brushes and wooden hands. In special schools I have also seen tennis balls being used with children who can’t hold a regular pen.

Smartmoves – Fun Pointers for your SMARTBoard The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

In partnership with My Learning, the M&S Company Archive eLearning Hub will be available to schools and educational establishments free of charge.

These themed classroom resources are inspired by objects, photos and documents held at the M&S Company Archive in Leeds. They offer a cross-curricular approach to teaching and learning by…

• examining the people who made M&S the high street name it is today
• exploring innovative practices and merchandise at M&S
• challenging students to think about their own values and ambitions

The eLearning Hub is an online portal comprising imagery, videos, documents and games that will allow children to engage with and understand the company’s rich history.

The materials have been selected to be applicable to a broad range of school subjects including business studies, history, science, design and technology, maths and English. Resources are suitable for KS2-4. All content on the site can be incorporated into interactive whiteboard resources.

It’s an interesting resource, and even better, it’s free!

You can access the M&S Company Archive eLearning hub here. Take a look and let me know what you think in the comments.

Marks and Spencer Education Resources The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

You can work on photographs taken directly with the iPad camera, or load images from your Camera Roll. You can also carry out a Google Image search or pull an image in from Facebook from within the app.

You get a range of effects and filters to apply to your photos from the basics like blurs, glows, and drop shadows to stylized looks like Old Photocopy and Glass. If you use regular Photoshop a lot of these will look similar.

Applying adjustments to any photo is easy – you can just select the effect from a series of thumbnails and then drag your finger horizontally on the slider to increase or decrease the strength of the effect. You can also add text to your images quite easily.

You can also save your images to the cloud with a free Adobe Creative Cloud account. This will let you sync your files or wirelessly transfer your work to other devices and to Photoshop CS5 or later on a Mac or Windows PC with your layers and resolution preserved to take your ideas even further.

Processed images can also be saved back to your Camera Roll or shared via Facebook, email or sent to a printer.

Teachers who are using iPads in their classroom should take  alook at Photoshop touch if you want something to allow your students to work with photographs, but at £6.99 for the iPad version it might not be something you’d buy for the whole class, rather for specific needs. The iPod Touch/Android versions are cheaper though, at £2.99 so might be more within your budget.

It needs to be mentioned that Photoshop Touch requires at least an iPad 2 or iPhone 4S and iOS 6. It won’t work on the iPad 1 or earlier iPhones.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Photo Manipulation with Adobe Photoshop Touch for iPad/iPhone The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

I Can Present can be used in three different modes including video only, video and script and script only. The split screen mode allows users to hold the iOS device, and record footage whilst still being able to read the script for a flawless performance. You can switch between the front and rear cameras – so you can either act as a presenter speaking to the camera or a narrator of something else.

With the teleprompter mode on, it looks something like this :

The app saves the video to your camera roll – so you can then do other things with it afterwards, such as export to YouTube or edit in other software such as the desktop version of I Can Present. You can preview your recorded video inside the app.

The app has a number of cross-curricular applications for all age groups. They could present items from history as news reports, or present the results of a science experiment or speak “live from the scene” on a field trip or school visit.

The teleprompter features are very nice, but I’d like to see the app do a little more for your money. Being able to load up pre-recorded videos for narration would be good – as would being able to make a photoslide show for narration. Green screen features would be welcome too. Hopefully these features can be added in future updates.

The I Can Present app costs £1.99 and you can download it here.

Be a News Reporter with the I Can Present iPad App The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom

I wrote about it a few months back, with instructions on how to get the Extreme Collaboration plugin. Go here and take a look first.

The extreme collaboration plug in has obvious uses for class brainstorming – collecting ideas from the class, random polling of opinions, language work, question/answer etc. It’s perfect for a “Bring your own device” classroom, or one where there are class sets of iPod touches or iPads. The plugin goes onto the teacher machine, the children just need to open a web browser to contribute to the lesson.

Here’s a short video I’ve put together that shows how the collaboration features work in practice:

I should note that I’ve been given access to the additional features, which lets me upload images amongst other things. I think the version you’ll download at present doesn’t have that feature.

For some ideas on how this is being used in a class, take a look at this blogpost from Mr Orr’s class webpage from the Halton District School Board, Ontario. He’s got some great ideas there. I like the idea of the students drawing diagrams, then photographing them and sending the images up onto the board at the front of the class.

If you’ve used it, and have some other ideas on how it can be used, let me know in the comments!

Smart Notebook Extreme Collaboration : A closer look The Whiteboard Blog - Supporting the use of technology in the classroom