Using ICT in Further Education

ProProfs provides free knowledge sharing tools in the form of quizzes, flashcards, games and polls.

Create your own examples or simply explore and use the shared content. You can, also, easily embed any of the content on your blog, website, social network or e-learning system as well as downloading it.

Free Online IT Certification Training is also provided, by ProProfs, for the following qualifications:
* CompTIA Certification
* Cisco Certification
* Microsoft Certification
* Prosoft CIW Certification
* SAT Test Training

The amount of ads displayed can be a bit of a distraction but, if you can get past this, there is lots of useful content included! This is a little spreadsheet quiz based on using Excel.

Finding interactive multimedia resources online is a great way for educators to enhance teaching and learning in their classroom. From web apps to interactive whiteboard activities, the Internet is loaded with high quality resources that students will enjoy. Here is a list of 20 free resources for educators to try out this year:

TeacherLED – TeacherLED provides teaching resources for use with interactive whiteboards. The interactive whiteboard resources contained on this site are for math, English, and geography. Teachers can also find information on how to create their own interactive whiteboard resources.

Crickweb.co.uk – This free site offers 169 educational resources that educators can use with interactive whiteboards. Educators will also find 15 free games for kids between the ages of 4 and 11. The site also links to more than 100 other free resources online.

What2Learn – What2Learn offers free game-based learning for students. Teachers can also use this site to track progress, access more than 1,000 interactive resources, and create original games.

Interactives – Interactives offers free interactive games and activities that can be used by educators to enhance learning in the classroom. Interactives cover math, science, language, history, and art.

SMARTboard – SMARTboard provides several free online activities that educators can use with or without interactive whiteboards. The activities cover elementary, middle, and high school education.

BrainPop – The BrainPop educational site offers animated and interactive games that students can play online. There are games for science, social studies, English, math, arts, music, health, and technology. * Small selection of free content. Majority of content requires paid subscription. PD

FunSchool – FunSchool offers free online games for K-6 students. Throughout this site, educators will find hundreds of entertaining yet educational games sorted by grade level.

Visuwords – The Visuwords site is a free online interactive graphical dictionary and thesaurus. To use this site, simply type in a word to find a neural network of word associations and meanings.

FunBrain – Within the FunBrain site, educators can find dozens of interactive educational games that younger students will enjoy. The games help with math, reading, and other subjects.

BGFL – The BGFL site offers free online activities and games that can be used with an interactive whiteboard. Throughout this site, educators will find resources for foundation, primary, and secondary education for English, science, mathematics, and other subjects.

SimplyBox – SimplyBox is a free web app that gives you the capability to capture and organize sections of web pages. The web sections you collect are organized into boxes that can be easily shared with students or colleagues.

Rader’s Numbernut.com – This all inclusive math warehouse offers free online activities that students of all ages can use to improve math skills. The activities can be used on your computer and also work well with interactive whiteboards.

ScribLink – ScribLink is a free online whiteboard that can be used to collaborate in real time with students and colleagues. With this site, you can draw, upload images, chat, voice conference, and transfer files.

PrimaryGames – This fun learning site features games for language arts, math, social studies, science, and more. The site was launched by a science and technology teacher who originally created the games for his own classroom.

eField Trips – eField Trips allows students to take virtual tours of exciting monuments and attractions around the United States. Each tour features a virtual experience, field journal, and “ask the expert” question and answer opportunities. To access the tours, you must sign up for a free account.

Tramline – This site is loaded with virtual tours and field trips that students can take to explore the world of science. The tours explore everything from ecosystems to prehistoric life.

Mathsframe.co.uk – Mathsframe offers several free math resources that teachers can use with interactive whiteboards. The resources cover calculating, counting and partitioning.

BookBuilder – With this site, you can create, publish, share, and read digital books to your students. BookBuilder is perfect for teachers who want to customize learning through original books that will interest students.

Classtools.net – Classtools.net offers free tools that teachers can use to create their own interactive games to embed into blogs, wikis, websites, and more.

Earthtrips – Earthtrips allows students to take a virtual tour into the history of the earth. In this virtual tour, students are presented with raw information so that they can study earth science as professionals.

The Tunisian English Teaching Forum have just published the first issue of their new e-magazine, which is “for and by teachers in Tunisia and abroad“.

Mohamed Salah Abidi and his team have produced an excellent product containing lots of useful information and links.

It is a very enjoyable, informative read and makes for a great practical resource, which can be referenced again and again. You can read it online or download it for offline viewing.

Feedback and contributions for the next issue are welcomed and can be emailed to Mohamed Salah Abidi at med.sahaATgmail.com

The Tunisian English Teaching Forum e-magazine will be publishing quarterly and I am already looking forward to the next issue!

ThinkQuest is an online learning platform that helps you to to integrate learning projects into your curriculum and encourages your students to develop 21st century skills.

ThinkQuest includes a:
* projects area for teachers and students engage in collaborative learning
* competition area for students to participate in technology contests
* library area containing a large online repository of student-developed learning projects
* professional development area offering comprehensive training for educators

Sample lessons and projects are included to help you get started and the library area includes over 7,000 websites created by students from around the world.

ThinkQuest is a fabulous resource for 21st century learning!

The goal of the OER movement is to “equalize access to knowledge worldwide through sharing online high quality content. Open Educational Resources are digitalized materials offered freely and openly for use and reuse in teaching, learning and research“.

In supporting this, the OER wiki provides links to many useful resources including:
* Portals and gateways
* Repositories
* Development and publishing initiatives
* Software and tools
* Teaching using OER

Also, the recent publication “Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace“, which brings together background papers and reports from the first three years of activities in the UNESCO OER Community, is available for download.

This publication captures “the conversations between leaders of some of the first OER projects, and documents early debates on the issues that continue to challenge the movement. The publication will provide food for thought for all those intrigued by OER – its promise and its progress“.

Well worth checking out as well as the OER Commons mentioned in an earlier post.

Open-Of-Course provides a selection of multilingual online courses and tutorials, using the Moodle VLE, with the focus on educational information that benefits daily life.

The available courses relate to computers, the Internet and learning languages. For anyone interested in these areas, there is certainly lots to choose from.

I found the course covering the ECDL syllabus with Open Office, all be it older versions of both, to be quite useful.

However, there is no date on the site, so it is hard to tell just how up to date the materials are. Also, some of the links within the modules are broken but, having said this, there is still lots of useful information and links provided at Open-Of-Course.

You can use the OpenCourseWare Consortium to find course materials from associated OpenCourseWare Colleges either by browsing each site individually or by searching across all the sites.

OpenCourseWare is defined as the “free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses“. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using the shared model.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium seeks to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.

Japan, Spain and the USA are the leading contributors at present. Unfortunately, no Irish colleges involved as yet. I wonder which one will be the first?????

The iLearn ezine created by Kelly Tenkely is a wonderful resource for all Mac Users.

Great layout and design and filled with lots of really useful information and links. You can keep up to date with the latest release through RSS. What a brilliant resource and productive use of the publishing platform Issuu.

Get your copy now!! Thanks for sharing Kelly