Child Safety Settings

The latest episode of BBC Click (9 October 2010) note this might be accessible only within the UK had a piece about child online safety, specifically looking at safety settings and dedicated child web browsers. The article ran in the video from 8min 45sec to 12min 30sec.

Areas covered included:

• Windows and Mac OS and browser settings
• Downloadable browsers
  • Zoodles
• Chrome browser extention
  • Kid Safe by LinkExtend
• Kid-specific browsers
  • KidRocket
  • KidZui (previously featured)
  • PikLuk

Of course there is the other argument that you should help your children to be careful, astute and discerning about their online activities without having to use these control mechanisms to keep them safe, which will be more beneficial to them in the longer term. However, this route might require greater initial supervision by parents of a child’s online activities.

I’d be interested to know your views, so please leave a comment.

Phonics videos my a UK year 1 teacher

There are over 200 free YouTube hosted videos from Mr Thorne, a year 1 primary school teacher in the UK, that can help parents with English, reading, spelling, and early literacy for their children. The videos should be engaging enough to hold the attention of four, five and six year olds.

1066 (and all that)

There is a great history site, called Hands on History, on the BBC covering Norman times. There’s a clickable map that shows up lists of interesting activities across Britain relating to Normans. But of particular interest is the downloads page, which has a host of pdf with things to do with children, including building a Motte and Bailey castle, information sheets with what to look for in Norman churches and castles, and a 1066 Battle of Hastings game for 7-11 year olds to play.

There’s also a free Normans pull-out timeline to send off for.

Perhaps for the older children there is an online strategy battle game of 1066 from Channel 4.

Kahn Academy

I have to take my hat off to Sal Kahn for a truly immense resource. What he has achieved with the Kahn Academy is nothing short of incredible.

He’s single handedly generated 1000+  instructional videos covering subjects including:

• Economics
• Finance
• Chemistry
• Arithmetic
• Pre-algebra
• Algebra
• Geometry
• Biology
• Trigonometry
• Precalculus
• Statistics
• Probability
• Calculus
• Differential Equations
• History
• Linear Algebra
• Physics

What a wealth of information. This has to be place in the category alongside Academic Earth and Udemy.

Flags

With this game, Flags, you have to identify the country represented by the displayed flag from a list of five countries.

futurity.org

If you want to access some interesting and accessible research from universities in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom then Futurity.org is a good place to start looking.

The clear and crisp appearance of this site is very appealing. Five stories scroll through on the upper part of the page, with four drop down categories (Earth & Environment, Health & Medicine, Science & Technology, Society & Culture) providing access to more story. Down the right hand side are two drop down menus, the first listing all the universities’ research stories are taken from, and the second allows you to draw out research stories from any particular month/year combination.

MathTV

The site MathTV.com is brilliant on a number of levels. Firstly, if you’re a student and you want some area of maths explained via a simple, understandable video instruction then look no further. Areas covered are broken down into the topics Calculus, Trig, Algebra and Basic Maths, and then broken down further into multiple sub-topics. With many of the problems there are videos available by different presenters, come in languages other than English, including Spanish. To access these videos you don’t even need to register and log in. What could be simpler?

Additional to all that, if you are a maths tutor and you are wanting to set up a programme of maths to help with your students’ studies, you can create what is called a ‘Playlist’. You do need to register to access this facility, but the registration and login processes are simple and quick; as is the setting up of a playlist. Once your playlist is created, you are provided with a URL to access it, which you can pass on to your students.

Daniel Kopsas has created a screencast tutorial explaining how to set up a MathTV playlist.

Physics explained by cartoons

Marvin and Milo are a couple of cartoon characters on the physics.org website that explain how to do some experiments to display physics principles. The cartoons will engage the kids and draw them into the science. The instructions below are clear and simple to follow. There is a dropdown menu to access all the other experiments in the set.

I really like the look of this site and I’ll be returning to other parts of the physics.org website in the future.

Boysread

Sometimes teenage boys can show a reluctance to read. Well there is some help from boysread.com to engage them more in reading. I thought the assignments were very useful.

This video succinctly explains what the site authors are attempting.

Dr Mike’s Math Games

Dr Mike’s site has lots and lots of printable mathematics sheets for a range of ages. The philosophy is get the kids playing with maths and they’ll enjoy maths.