Welcome to Know IT All, Childnet's multi award-winning suite of education resources designed to help educate parents, teachers and young people about safe and positive use of the internet.
Archival Collection: The March of Time®
From 1935 to 1967, Time Inc's newsreel series, "The March of Time®" chronicled the events of our lives. The March of Time® separated itself from its competitors using its trademark "pictorial journalism," mixing highly-produced, long-form, documentary-style stories with dramatic re-enactments. These award-winning motion pictures recorded global events and brought them to big screens around the world and then later, television. The collection also contains historic footage dating back to 1913.
"This 49-page digital graphic novel is based on Book 1 of the award-winning Middle School Confidential series written by nationally recognized teen expert and anti-bullying activist Annie Fox, M.Ed., and illustrated by Harvey award winner Matt Kindt. This is a native iPad app, designed specifically for the iPad screen. The Be Confident in Who You Are app is available for download on the iTunes App Store."
"Everyone likely has a few photos sitting on their iPhone they'd rather nobody else see, whether it's embarrassing selfies, poorly filtered or edited pics, a picture of a receipt or personal paperwork, or anything else in the realm of private photos. Those pictures can make showing someone another picture on your iPhone (or iPad) an awkward experience, as you're hoping they don't start flipping through your Camera Roll to discover that terrible photo of you after winning the pie eating contest. Fortunately the newest versions of iOS include a new way to mitigate that potential awkwardness by hiding select photos."
"During the month of June, I took a hiatus from blogging so that I could do some fun things and perform professional development. The fun things were:
Watching my daughter graduate PreK.
Watching her win the "Symphony" award. :)
Taking both my girls to great places like the beaches and zoos.
The professional development opportunities included:
Finishing my free resource iBook titled Help! I am an Elementary Music Teacher with One or more iPads! This book is the second in my Help! Series. These free resource iBooks are books for elementary music educators to use to assist them with integrating technology into their classrooms or teaching situations as well as access to numerous lesson plans. My first book was Help! I am an Elementary Music Teacher with a SMART Board!
This new book compliments two courses that I am teaching in the next few weeks."
"And I sincerely hope that Touch Van Gogh, the newly updated, free, award-winning app from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is only the beginning of a larger touching art trend.
Made for tablets, Touch Van Gogh allows viewers to explore the details, technique and history of six of Vincent van Gogh's masterpieces: The Cottage, View from Theo's Apartment, The Bedroom, Seascape near Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Garden of the Asylum, and Daubigny's Garden."
"If you're looking for a subtle, unobtrusive way to introduce a discussion of emotions into your curriculum, the multi-award winning Avokiddo Emotions is the app for your classroom. This bright engaging app will help you teach social skills and awareness through play."
When Sugata Mitra installed a computer in a slum wall in India, he had no idea it would later win him $US1 million to build a school on the internet that could spur an education revolution.
Dr Mitra, 61, was last week awarded the top TED Prize to pursue the promise of building virtual schools on the internet, where young minds can learn, unfettered by adult teachers.
"New York City's public school district is gearing up to scrap a controversial policy forbidding its 1.1 million students from having cellphones on campus. The thing is, plenty of students are already ignoring the ban. It turns out some of the poorest kids in the city are the ones who will notice the change most.
The decision to lift the ban was prompted by safety concerns. Mobile phones aren't just for snapchatting but a way for kids to let parents know where they are. And with teen cellphone ownership rates so high, an ongoing ban increasingly seemed impractical-if not impossible. Civil rights activists call the move inevitable and long overdue."
Malware, as you know is a class of malicious software such as spyware, adware, or viruses that compromise with the system's performance and security. And in majority of cases they infiltrate through general Internet activities --- browsing, surfing, and downloading, or executing programs or files. Hence, most of the virus or malware defense methods are based on encouraging secure Internet access. Though, virus or malware authors are using astute development techniques, keeping a keen eye on the behavior of your machine, can be helpful in winning the battle of computer security. Following are a few notable symptoms, which can be perceived as an indication of virus or malware attack:
"GeoCraft enables schools and local businesses to work together to encourage learning about sustainability through Minecraft, a hugely popular video game set in virtual 3D worlds made up of cubes of different materials. Using Ordnance Survey data, it would stimulate children to think about environmental challenges and ideas to solve these, and could be fed back to the local business to implement. Zoe tells us what's been happened since winning funding form GeoVation."
"The first time linguist and game studies theorist James Gee played a video game, he failed many times over. But instead of giving up, he merrily persevered, choosing to exercise "learning muscles" he hadn't worked out since his grad school days. "Lots of young people pay lots of money to engage in an activity that is hard, long, and complex," he realized. Games were evidence that humans love learning. But why do they seem to love it more during Minecraft than in the classroom?
A game, most simply defined, is nothing more than a set of problems that a player must solve in order to win. And whether played on a board, cards, a computer, an iPad, or a console, games have the ability to intrinsically shape the way we teach and learn language and literacy. "
My students learn about writing mostly as they are writing. They learn very little from a failing grade, except that they can’t write.
Because I have access to their documents so early, I learn much more about my students’ writing and the issues that they need to overcome. This positions me for better teaching. It positions the students for better learning. That’s a win-win.
Revision History feature, GDocs tracks and preserves all edits to a document
"This week Epic! offered classroom teachers and school librarians in the U.S. and Canada free, forever, single subscription access to its iPad app, an "ever-growing library of high-quality children's books from some of the world's best publishers."
Epic! calls itself the first "All-You-Can-Read" eBook service for kids. It currently offers thousands of digital titles from 40 publishing partners, including HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, National Geographic, Kids Can Press, Blue Apple Books. The growing digital collection of titles for ages 2 through 12 includes many recent and award-winning books and represents a mix of fiction and nonfiction. New titles are added each week."
"Join high school-aged girls from around the world as they try to better their community through technology and collaboration in this thrilling, heartfelt documentary.
By 2017, the app market will be valued at $77 Billion. Over 80% of these developers are male. The Technovation Challenge aims to change that by empowering girls worldwide to develop apps for an international competition. From rural Moldova to urban Brazil to suburban Massachusetts, CODEGIRL follows teams who dream of holding their own in the world's fastest-growing industry. The winning team gets $10K to complete and release their app, but every girl discovers something valuable along the way."
"About two decades ago The MIT Media lab introduced the concept of block-based programming. The idea was to develop an interface that allowed computer programs to be built by simply dragging and dropping puzzle blocks to represent complex programming constructs and commands. With this new method for teaching and learning computer science, the hugely popular Scratch platform was born. This approach lowered the bar for experimenting with programmatic thinking, making it possible for students to create interactive animations and small games without writing a single line of code. This simple concept removed the need to learn the syntax of a formal programming language, and made teaching and learning the basics of computer science accessible to younger learners and to teachers with no formal coding background.
Outside of the classroom though, coding has always been, and still remains, a process of typing letters, numbers and symbols. This text-based programming, used in programming language such as C, Javascript and Python, requires coders to obey and conform to formal syntax. Despite the pain of dealing with typos in names of variables and inevitable syntax errors, no other coding method designed to be more "user friendly" has really caught on. Tools have been offered for managers to define business logic through a graphical user interface without writing lines of codes. Or for web developers to add interactive behaviors to their websites without learning Javascript. But in reality, neither of those substitute the power and flexibility of text-based programming. And with neither winning significant adoption, the demand for the classic skill of text-based coding continues to grow and grow."
"It is a challenge to seize children's attention and not to let it go. Some teachers experience great difficulties in keeping students engaged and involved in the educational process due to objective reasons. Luckily, there exist some tricks to help resourceful teachers, one of them being visual aids. Looking at bright and colorful images, students are more likely to digest the material without boredom and remember it afterwards. But why are visual aids so effective and how to create them?
First of all, visual aids are helpful, because they show the data visually. Some facts, connections and outcomes are much easier to understand when they are represented as a picture. For example, some statistics, shown as a diagram will be much more winning than its detailed descriptions in words. Then, as visual images have the sense of modernity, they easily grab children's attention for some time. Thus, they are useful for highlighting some essential points and setting true accents. And finally, visual aids and pictures boost children's creativity. By looking at something beautiful and challenging, by perceiving the right way of data organization, students can get inspired and come up with new and outstanding ideas. "
"One perk of working in so many schools across the world is seeing the inventive ways teachers are creating inspiring learning environments for their students.
Seeing these unique and thoughtful designs has given us an idea: Create a challenge for the community to share the inspiring spaces they've curated.
Share and gain ideas from fellow teachers and you'll be automatically entered to win sweet prizes each week until December 11th!"
"The use of 3D printers is becoming increasingly prevalent across the workforce, from medicine to confectionary, aerospace to sportswear. The mere concept of them can seem daunting, and it is therefore easy for school leaders to overlook the benefits a 3D printer can have for their pupils. We've put together a list of strong arguments in favour of this fantastic investment in a bid to help you put forward a winning pitch to your school decision makers!"
"The use of 3D printers is becoming increasingly prevalent across the workforce, from medicine to confectionary, aerospace to sportswear.
The mere concept of them can seem daunting, and it is therefore easy for school leaders to overlook the benefits a 3D printer can have for their pupils. We've put together a list of strong arguments in favor of this fantastic investment in a bid to help you put forward a winning pitch to your school decision makers."