MrWarner.com

Phew.. what a week! Over the past seven days, I’ve been busy with an Ofsted inspection at school, our summer fair, and a visit to (including a short presentation at) the Kent ICT conference 2009.

The conference was a chance to learn new ideas from the many speakers and talk to suppliers of educational / ICT resources. I was also asked to provide a brief presentation about the Myst work that we’ve been doing at my school.

Highlights from the day included:

• A presentation by John Davitt – John shared a range of tools and ideas, including his Learning Event Generator. There is also a Homework Generator, which sounds useful. As I’ve been using Edmodo to distribute homework recently, I’ve needed to find more generic homework activities (because of copyright issues), so this will give a handy selection of ideas.

• Animations from psycho65… Matt showed a Prezi presentation (watch it here) which included a number of his pupils’ wonderful stop-motion animation.
• Presentations by Tim Rylands… Tim came back to Kent to share lots of new sites that I’d never heard of before. Some of these included Fighting Malaria (an incredible site with interactive photos and sounds which transport you to some amazing locations), Wordsift (which ’sifts’ through your passages of text, finding definitions, images, synonyms and more) and Switcheroozoo (a wonderful site which lets you create your own creatures). Tim also recommended the Wii game ‘Wild Earth – African Safari’ which inspired me to make a new ‘Games to Enhance Learning‘ presentation on Ideas to Inspire.
• Tim also asked a few Kent teachers (including myself) to share some of the work that they had been doing with Myst since his presentation at the last Kent conference. It was really interesting to see the amazing work that other schools have been doing, and it was also nice to be able to share some of my own children’s achievements. You can view the Prezi that I used here.

Find out more about the Kent ICT conference on the Kent ICT blog and Tim Rylands’ blog.