Would anyone happen to have any old Buntús filmstrips and/or accompanying teacher manuals in their school that they don’t want. I’m interested in seeing if they could be digitised/recycled/changed into Powerpoints etc. and made available to teachers on the Seomra Ranga website. I’m willing to have a try at this to see if it will work. I know that some of the stuff will be seriously outdated but with so little Gaeilge resources out there, it’s worth seeing if we could get any benefit out of these old filmstrips. I’ve had a look for some of these filmstrips in e-bay and elsewhere on the ‘net to see if there are any but without any success. If anyone has any of these filmstrips/teacher manuals that they are willing to part with, I’m willing to pay for the cost of postage. You can let me know at info@seomraranga.com I recall that schools also had other nature filmstrips, so if anyone has any of those, I’m also interested in seeing if a resource can be created from those.
All the resources are free to download. If you have resources that you have created for teaching ancient Egypt, perhaps you might consider sharing them with others on the Seomra Ranga website. Simply attach the resource on an e-mail to info@seomraranga.com and I’ll upload it to the site.
The Lined Pages section of the Seomra Ranga website has grown recently with the addition of many new lined pages with decorative borders. They’re great for presenting written work, especially the final draft of a story. Some have a theme which may tie in with the piece of written work. Some are seasonally themed, so there are pages with a winter theme, Celtic patterned pages for St. Patrick’s Day, summer themed pages and pages with a Valentine’s theme. All are free to download and hopefully more new resources will appear in this section in the near future. All these resources can be downloaded here:
A very successful CESI Conference was held last weekend in Portlaoise. “Creative Technology for Challenging Times” was the theme of the conference. The Heritage Hotel was the venue on Friday night for the CESI Teach-Meet where there was a great variety of two-minute, seven-minute and fifteen-minute presentations. This is a fantastic format as everything was quick-fire and it certainly held your attention. The venue on Saturday was Portlaoise College where the keynote address was given by Joe Dale, author of the award-winning “Integrating ICT into the MFL Classroom” Blog. The general consensus at the conference seems to have been that the journey would have been worth it to listen to his address alone. Joe threw out a myriad of ideas for integrating ICT into the curriculum in a very casual style. His address was certainly inspirational and challenging. Simultaneous workshops made up the rest of the day so it was impossible to make it to all of them. Feedback was generally positive about all of the workshops. Congratulations to the Executive and the Conference Committee of CESI for organising a great conference.
To give a flavour of the conference, some of the following were recommended by various speakers:
Clonezilla- A free software disaster recovery, disk cloning and deployment solution. Allows a user to clone an individual machine or many computers simultaneously
Twin Space- A multilingual tool designed specifically for eTwinning projects.
Google Maps- using Google maps to look at World Heritage Sites in 3D
Format Factory- free download to convert .wmv files to .flv files and to then upload them to Podbean, the podcast hosting website. This programme is also a multifunctional media converter.
Live@Edu- Live@edu provides students, staff, faculty, and alumni long-term, primary e-mail addresses and other applications they can use to collaborate and communicate online.
E-Teach Network- an interactive network where teachers can find out more about the use of ICTs in education, share ideas, experience and resources, engage with other teachers and promote good practice.
Flickr Slidr- allows you to easily embed the classic flickr slideshows on your website or blog
Voicethread- group conversations are collected and shared in one place from anywhere in the world
Winter resources have been gathered together into a new section on the Seomra Ranga website. It can be accessed through the “Seasonal” button on the navigation bar on the left hand side. Posters, flashcards and lined pages with a winter theme can all be downloaded free on the page. If you have some of your own winter resources, upload them to info@seomraranga.com
This is amazing to watch an 11 year old teaching a class of her peers. It’s featured on the Teachers TV.ie video website. I haven’t used it much but maybe I should start to look into it more. The site is brought to us by Scoilnet and is hosted and moderated by Digilogue. It promises to vet all videos uploaded to the site and further promises to feature only videos with an educational content. The videos can be searched by category on the site. There aren’t a huge amount of videos on the site yet, but hopefully they will grow in the future. As far as I know, this site should be able to get around the Schools Broadband Network. The site is worth a visit: http://teacherstv.ie/
With the bad weather crippling the country, what better way to fill in the time than with creating new resources for the Seomra Ranga website. Twenty new resources have been added to the site in the past few days. They include:
Am rolla – phrases to use during am rolla
An Teach – powerpoint for teaching seomraí sa teach
Siopaí – posters for teaching the different types of siopaí
Ag Siopadóireacht – flashcards with useful phrases
Four new lined pages with a decorative border
Shops – illustrated posters to teach the names of the various types of shops
An Sneachta – flashcards with vocabulary for discussing/writing about An Sneachta
Irish Bogs – flashcards with the names of flora/fauna/wildlife found in Irish bogs
Working Scientifically – flashcards naming the skills necessary for working scientifically
19th Century Traders – flashcards with the names of various types of traders in Sligo during the 1800’s
Positional Vocabulary – flashcards with vocabulary showing positions of objects
Red Things – powerpoint showing a variety of red objects
Green Things – powerpoint showing a variety of green objects
Christmas greetings to you all from Seomra Ranga, and best wishes for the New Year. Enjoy the well-earned break and return to the site in 2010 for all your classroom resources. It’s been a busy year for Seomra Ranga, especially since September when the site experienced record numbers of visitors. This level of traffic to the site has exceeded all expectations with almost 450,000 visitors to the site during the last twelve months, the past four months being the busiest of all. It’s been so busy with traffic that the site has crashed twice as the allocated bandwidth was exceeded. The hosting plan has been upgraded to try to cope with the level of visitors so hopefully this will not happen again.
A special word of thanks to those who went to the trouble of uploading resources to the site to share with others. It’s easy to do – just attach the resource (in any format .doc, .ppt, .pdf, .jpeg, .pub, etc) to an e-mail and send it to info@seomraranga.com.
2010 will hopefully bring new and fresh changes to the site. Already the domain name www.seomraranga.ie has been secured so the site is now also accessible through that address. The site is also currently being re-designed and will hopefully be launched early in the new year. New content and resources are also being planned to add to the existing bank of resources on the site. Please let me know if there are changes that you feel would add to the design and functionality of the site.
Go raibh maith agat do Dolores Stewart don nasc seo. ‘Sé dán do chuid Máire Mhac an tSaoi atá oiriúnach don am seo den bhliain. Is féidir é a thaispeáint do na hardranganna go háirithe, ach mar sin féin, tá an dán léite as Gaeilge agus as Béarla. Bain taitneamh as.
