Free Educational TV Channels

I've just spotted 'Online TV Channels' which has a huge collection of free channels which can be accessed from their website.

There's a large collection of educational channels which look quite useful. They are collected from around the world, so not all in English, so if you are looking for educational materials in other languages this could be a good place for you to come too.
Other sections include;

• Sport
• News
• Cartoon
• Music
• Entertainment

There's also a sort by country feature, so if you want something from a specific country for a specific language or accent, you might find something useful here.

Here's the link to the Educational section
You can find the selection of country sources here

For the rest, just use the navigation bar along the top.

Hope this is useful

Best

Nik

Blogs from Mars

It's amazing isn't it that only yesterday (25th May) NASA'a Pheonix spacecraft landed on mars, and already we can see the pictures, read the blog and follow the twitter?

• Wired have blog on their Wired Science section
• You can follow the Mars Pheonix Twitter
• Have a look at some of the first images on the NASA site
• Or there is a dedicated website Pheonix Mars Mission with an education section and lots of other features

This is all great stuff if you have students who are interested in astronomy, or space.

Hope you or they enjoy it.

Best

Nik

Get your own Google site

That's right. Now anyone with a Google account can create their own site for free! Of course Google aren't the only people who offer this kind of service, but the service they do offer looks well worth checking out, especially if you or your students want to create a quick site to get a class project live, or even if you just want a class site or personal CV page. Here's a video tutorial they created showing how it is done.




Just click on the play button.

Hope you find this useful.

Best

Nik Peachey

YouTube for IWBs with PicLens

While I was checking links yesterday for the posting to my learning technology blog, I was delighted to see that PicLens have added YouTube support for their browser plugin.

Click here or on the image to watch a movie showing how it works (2.2 Mb)

This is one of my favourite plugins and I think it's a fantastic teaching tool, especially for those with IWBs (interactive whiteboards) or data projectors in class. (See my Learning technology blog posting for teachging ideas for ELT).

This addition of YouTube support means that we can now get full screen Youtube videos direct to the classroom without any of the distracting text or advertising that lives on the web page, and in the fantastic PicLens 3D immersive interface.

If you want to use PicLens then you can download it for free from here:

• Version for Internet Explorer 7
• Version for Safari 2 + 3.0
• Version for Firefox

Love it

Best

Nik

The WorldWide Telescope

I've just downloaded Microsoft's new WorldWide Telescope from:

• http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/experienceIt/ExperienceIt.aspx

I have to say that it is pretty impressive. My daughter is pretty keen on astronomy and she loved being able to zoom in on planets and constellations and move around them. Here's just a very quick video clip I created to show you how it looks in action.

Click to watch the video clip (859Kb swf)

The download (about 20Mb) once it's installed also gives access to some pretty impressive tours of different star systems that come complete with audio commentary.

You'll need a reasonably up to date computer (PC or MAC with Bootcamp) and a good quick connection to get the best from it, but if you have a data projector and some speakers, this offers a great multimedia interactive experience for your students.

Nice one Bill. Hope you enjoy it.

Best
Nik

Video sharing for young learners

Youtube isn't the place you'd really want your young students browsing, though as we all know there is some great stuff there for kids, and that's why Totlol is such a great idea.

It's new video sharing site and community which allows parents and teachers to set up their own channels and share videos for ages 6 months to 6 years and above ( Found quite a few that I liked). The videos are collected from Youtube, but are shared through the Totlol community site so there's no danger of your students clicking through to something unsuitable.

The site is still in beta, but it looks like there's some nice content there already, so this would be a good place to start looking or get your younger students in the habit of looking for good, safe, educational content. You can also sign up for your own free account and start contributing towards the community.

Well hope you find this useful and hope you enjoy this alien song!