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This is a wonderfully simple maths quiz site with a good collection of activities for the 4 operations. Choose your category and get 10 randomly generated questions to answer. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

Very interesting app if you're using Edmodo and have ipads. Here's what it will do as per the company who contacted me: "It's a versatile mapping tool for creating timelines, and an assessment platform for Edmodo users.     myHistro Extended in a nutshell.  - What makes it better than other apps out there? Its comprehensive digital archive with stories created by historians. An unique way of generating tests. Hassle free and easy grading system and evaluation of students' answers." MAny teachers are using Edmodo and Timelines are important prewriting and graphic organizing tools. I'm very fascinated to see how this works and will see if there is someone out there using it so we can link to it from my blog.  - Who's it for? Teachers. First and foremost History, Social Studies and Geography teachers. And for everyone else, who are looking for innovative ways teaching their subjects through dynamic storytelling.   - What is the coolest feature? Generating tests with a few clicks. Removing the location, time, description or/and the title from all the public stories, and forming it into tests. 

You can help them think deeper but it takes time and sharpening the saw. Great article. "A common occurrence in classrooms is that the teacher, when he or she sees the students struggle mightily to "think out of the box" will precipitously step in and give the students the answers, or throw the deeper learning activity out all together, thinking that the students aren't ready for it. What these students and the teachers need is to be patient, practice and build those mental muscles over time. One thing that helps teachers and students is a better understanding the nature of the advanced thinking tools."

This is a must try site which provides an amazing 3D world which teaches English and maths core skills. Players race against two other randomly chosen online players of a similar level. The questions start out very easy and adapt to the performance of the player. The questions are read out and some are displayed on the screen. The player just clicks on the correct multiple choice answer to increase their speed. There is a download for PCs and Macs as well as apps for iPad and Android. There are teacher accounts which allow you to make logins for lots of children quickly. When there log in students will be asked to design an avatar. Because the resource requires a sizeable download it takes a little time to set up, but because it runs on your local device game play is very smooth and quick. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Testing students over material that is NOT in the curriculum is not fair. I think that states should have a way to mark things not covered and just take the hits across the board for not having it in their curriculum instead of causing children to suffer through feeling ignorant. Common Core may be great, however, if it isn't in the curriculum it is unfair and shouldn't be done. What can we do? Do we cause children to stress out unfairly because adults can't get their act together or it takes time to change the curriculum? I don't know the answers, but the thought of a child looking at a test and knowing that some things didn't happen in the classroom and the impact of "feeling dumb" that will happen just turns my stomach, literally.  From the NEw York Times. " And they are likely to cover at least some material that has yet to make its way into the curriculum. The new tests, given to third through eighth graders, are intended to align with Common Core standards, a set of unified academic guidelines adopted by almost every state and goaded by grant money offered by the Obama administration. They set more rigorous classroom goals for American students, with a focus on critical thinking skills, abstract reasoning in math and reading comprehension."

The free tool, called Your Privacy Type, requires you to take a brief quiz. Microsoft uses your answers to categorize how much you may, or may not, be concerned about online privacy. The supporting website supplies guidance on how to more proactively gain some measure of privacy.

Start your students on a roll with this fun multiplication game iPad app. Roll the virtual marble to the correct answers to complete the level. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

This is a daily quiz from National Geography where users answer 10 questions about geography and more. There are two levels of difficulty and each question is multiple choice. It's a fun way to improve your children's knowledge of the world. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/PSHE%2C+RE%2C+Citizenship%2C+Geography+%26+Environmental

This is a wonderful site for designing lesson plans and collating resources to push out to an iPad app for students to access and interact with. You can put together websites, videos, audio, documents, images and instructions. You can make quizzes for your students to answer to provide you with instant feedback about how they are doing. Your students can make their own notes about the lesson from within the app. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Planning+%26+Assessment

A new website that many are discussing. I love using BAckchannels in my classroom and thus far have used Chatzy and Ning chat, however, this website is designed for real time chat for classrooms. You can mute and remove comments, it has a profanity filter and also a full transcript so you can go back and assess participation and weaknesses. You can set the chat to discontinue when you leave. When I review for tests, I always like to use a backchannel because I can ask questions and we can document answers and the students can save as notes. This is a great tool. I'll be testing the free chat room this week. I've heard from some of our Flat Classroom(r) certified teachers that this is a create tool.

Use this site to make a jeopardy style quiz online. Choose your categories and input the questions and answers. To play you can either embed on a site or share the link. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

I used to be a massive advocate of using mobile phones in lessons; the ways they could be used are just endless. I had students use them to research topics; find the answers to a question we didn't know, even as voting devices. I used them just rarely enough that students didn't take it as a given and rarely tried to use their phones for uses other than I intended. I even use them to avoid printing off sheet after sheet of homework, instead having students take a picture on their phone (with the added bonus that they can't lose the sheet).

So, if restricting access to these devices isn't the answer, how do we address their presence in the classroom and use these devices to engage rather than disengage students' attention? Here are a few suggestions…

Displays can take up vast areas of wall space and many hours of adults' time, therefore teachers and leaders must be sure of the impact that they are having on learning so that what is on display is justified and not simply a waste of time and space.  Put simply, before a display goes up, we must ask: What will this display do to improve outcomes for children?  For this to be answered with any sort of reliability, the question must be framed within a sound knowledge of how children learn and what learning is - a change in long-term memory...

"This idea has been developed from an idea in Talk-Less Teaching by Isabella Wallace and Leah Kirkman. I used it in the context of a SPAG lesson where Y6 pupils were answering test questions in preparation for the SATs test."

We all remember science lessons from our school days. Whether the lessons were with the more 'characteristic' teachers in the school, or whether you all released the gas taps when the teacher foolishly left the room, we all seemed to miss the link that science is life! And what an opportunity science teachers have in releasing the magic of life to their pupils, answering BIG questions like "Why am I like my parents?", or "What will my life be like in 2050?", or "Why is Pripyat a deserted town?"

"Create quiz questions for your pupils to answer on their own devices via the browser using a class code or a link. Unlike many another platforms, you create a quiz by ticking individual questions, which gives you much greater flexibility. See analytics of your pupils' performance instantly."

A flipped classroom is one where the lectures become the homework and the traditional homework tasks take place in the lesson time. This enables students to attend sessions with an understanding of the subject and to conceptualise and build upon it through doing exercises in class, with you, as the tutor, on hand to answer questions and explore the topic in more detail. This moves the tutor from the "sage on the stage, to the guide on the side" (King, 1993).

In reading tests at school, girls tend to be ahead of boys, in all age groups and in all countries. But in young adults, there is suddenly no longer any difference between men's and women's reading skills. Why is that? Could the answer be in the way the tests are designed?

"Children often seek answers from parents, friends and media to better understand their racial identity. Middle school boys who feel secure about their race during this ongoing information gathering will likely befriend diverse people, according to a new University of Michigan study."