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Catroid is a visual programming language for Android devices that is inspired by the Scratch programming language for PCs, developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is the aim of the Catroid project to facilitate the learning of programming skills among children and users of all ages. No desktop or notebook computer is needed.

"Kodu is a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone. The programming environment runs on the Xbox, allowing rapid design iteration using only a game controller for input."

Also free microsoft programming language for kids. We use Scratch in the LRC from 7th grade on, but need to move it down to 6th. We also want to begin programming clubs for creating games and apps. This might be a good starting point for Primary.

"GameMaker for Mac, based on the GameMaker 7 framework, offered a drag-and-drop interface for rapid design and iteration of gameplay features, graphics and sound, as well as an integrated development environment (IDE) and a flexible, built-in scripting language (GML, GameMaker Language)."

"Blockly is a web-based, graphical programming language. Users can drag blocks together to build an application. No typing required. "

Evernote is a great web service and software application that we can use in education. A lot of ink has been shed on this topic and just one click in a search engine is enough to get hundreds of links to guides and tutorials about Evernote. I have been going through so many of these resources and have collected ideas, videos, notes and many more. If you are a loyal reader to my blog ( I am glad most of you are ) you would clearly notice that guides I write here are different in that they are simple. to the point, address teachers and students direct  need, and most of all written in an easy and simple language. In this regard, I am working on an ebook that will contain all the guides I have posted here so far but will be available for free only to my subscribers. Without any further ado, let us get back to our guide.

This unit was created to cover the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence, Experience & Outcome pertaining to Game Production. I use the unit with students ranging from Primary 7 to S2. Students are taught to create a basic game in the programming language Scratch (available free from http://scrat More…

" "Helping Students Motivate Themselves: Practical Answers To Classroom Problems," was published in the Spring of 2011. You can read many free excerpts to it here Look for its sequel in early 2013! MY BOOK ON TEACHING ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS "

Vicki Davis 26 May 11 06:58:34 Google Cloud Connect is available in over 30 languages for PC's running Windows 7, Vista and XP. (Not available for Mac yet.) It integrators using Google Apps for domains should work on this over the summer.

"What Publish or Perish is for Publish or Perish is designed to empower individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage. We would be concerned if it would be used for academic staff evaluation purposes in a mechanistic way. When using Publish or Perish for citation analyses, we would like to suggest the following general rule of thumb: If an academic shows good citation metrics, it is very likely that he or she has made a significant impact on the field. However, the reverse is not necessarily true. If an academic shows weak citation metrics, this may be caused by a lack of impact on the field, but also by one or more of the following: Working in a small field (therefore generating fewer citations in total); Publishing in a language other than English (LOTE - effectively also restricting the citation field); Publishing mainly (in) books. Although Google Scholar performs better than the Web of Science in this respect, it is still not very good in capturing LOTE articles and citations, or citations in books or book chapters. As a result, citation metrics in the Social Sciences and even more so in the Humanities will always be underestimated as in these disciplines publications in LOTE and books/book chapters are more likely than in the Sciences. "

This is a MUST TRY site. It's not often that I'm amazed be an educational resource, but I am with this one. Pora Ora is a stunning educational virtual world for Primary school aged students. Play truely fun educational games which practise skills in English, maths and many other subjects. The graphics and useably is superb. Online safety is at the heart of this site. The parential admin account can set the student's account to free chat with everyone to completely locked down where they have the world to themselves and everything in between. The site has a language filter and users can report any incidents of trouble. Also, the first task requires the user to complete an online safety task. The site is free with a few premium features coming out later. You have got to try this one! http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

This is definitely something the Primary school should be looking into