Tips for Teachers

I was going to use this page as a depository for Tips for Teachers but, having recently rebuilt MrPortman.co.uk as a more flexible site, I will be putting my tips there.

For various reasons, the internet is massively under-used by teachers in KS1 and KS2. Here follows a number of tips and anecdotes for teachers and ICT coordinators wanting to make more use of the internet while developing their pupils' ICT skills beyond those outlined in the National Curriculum.

What is web-based learning and how does it improve teaching and learning?

Any learning which involves the use of the internet may be called web-based learning, but I refer here to learning involving materials supplied by a teacher via the internet.

At KS1 and KS2 there are several methods for doing this:

  1. Pupils working in pairs in an ICT suite, or using a mobile laptop trolley, access resources on the internet as directed by the class teacher.
  2. Using a projector with or without an interactive whiteboard, the class teacher and the pupils access resources on the internet.
  3. Following direction from the class teacher, pupils access internet resources at home under the supervision, and sometimes the collaboration, of parents.

Hosting planning resources on your website

Coming soon...

Using the forms toolbar in Word

This toolbar comes into its own when the teacher starts using it and hosting the results on your website. How often have you given the children a task to do in Word and they spend half the lesson arguing over and changing the font, colour scheme, etc, rather than getting on with the task? Using the Forms toolbar eliminates this, by restricting what areas of the document they can edit. Check out my example, Monkey Verbs.

Typing a copyright symbol in any program

Press CTRL + ALT + C then hold down ALT and enter 0169 on your numeric keyboard.

Beginning the day with your interactive whiteboard

Greet the children as they walk in and instinctively look for instruction on the whiteboard while you see to other things. What could be better? Try something like my Coming in the Door Smartboard file.

The online incentive system on mrportman.co.uk (aka WIRBs)

Coming soon...

Using the school website instead of the network drive

Coming soon...

Using Cool Book Reviews

Coming soon...

What makes a good school website?

Clear navigation, as few pages as possible, lots of work from the children and contact details for the school are the most important things.

A review of the guidelines for using photographs of children on your wesbite

Coming soon...

Creating class questionairres using the forms toolbar in Word

Coming soon...

Extra characters appear when my site is viewed using IE6

According to BingBangBoom this happens when several adjacent floats cause a bug in Internet Explorer 6. The link suggests this can be rectified using CSS only, by setting the background of the floated elements to transparent. However, this didn't work with the mrpdesigns homepage. Instead I had to add some whitespace to the XHTML before the last link's closing tag.