Saturday, December 15, 2007

The Digital Learner

This video from TeacherTube is thought provoking.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Drag and Drop

I like the flexibility of using Word for creating simple but colourful drag and drop exercises.

There is, however, a problem when drag and drop exercises are created using text boxes. The learner has to be able to click on the text box correctly, being sure not to select the text, but just the frame. This requires high levels of mouse control and for some learners this is too difficult.

An alternative is to use WordArt for all text that you want to move. This is possibly easier, but I am still not happy. I get annoyed by the flashing that occurs as the crosshair disappears and reappears when moving between letters. And, annoyingly, the WordArt toolbar pops up whenever I click on the text.

So what do I use? Simple - I create the text in Paint and paste it into Word. Just use the text tool, remembering to change the size and style of the font. You can crop the picture before leaving Paint, or do it afterwards. It takes seconds to create any text and you can use colour as well.

Sometimes it's easy to picture a solution!

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Science fun

This is the reason why I push Youtube as an educational tool!

Back to Blogger!

One of the reasons why I have abandoned this blog is the navigation toolbar which allows visitors to view other blogs at random (by clicking on Next Blog).

Thanks to a neat piece of coding from Derya Netter I have been able to remove the bar and no longer have to worry about visitors navigating away to be faced with inappropriate content.

Nice one Derya!

If you are a Blogger user you can do the same by following this link. If you have been using the same template for a long time you may first want to update it. This will make it easier for you to find the right place in the HTML page to add the new code.

http://tinyurl.com/2sy2mh

Nigel