Thunder

My ibook’s have gone mobile and have landed at Barrow CE Primary school, the pupils are busy playing around with Comic Life.  You can check out pupils progress on the school blog.

Well, that’s a convenient initiative allowing you to get the best commercial software titles - for free. Every day we offer licensed software you’d have to buy otherwise, for free! Yes, we are giving away software, and you can download it from our site, right now and right here and our goal is to give away every good piece of software, sooner or later. Want to learn more about our project?

For game giveaways check out Game Giveaway of the Day.

For the latest freeware check out our freeware library.

I have been a user a Flickr for just under a year now, I mainly just use it as a place to share my photos with friends and family.  more recently I have started to use it as the first place I search for copyright free images.  How many times to teachers and students go to Google Image search, find the image they like and download it to use in their work without even considering the copyright implications - ‘nobody will ever know’ attitude.
Today I was looking for an image of Ironbridge and using the advanced search feature of Flickr I found 160 images, and I don’t have to worry about copyright.  What is better I can even leave a comment to the photographer to let them know I liked the picture and I will be using it for some work….

Via Lifehacker I have found another creative use for Flickr. Gickr produces animated gifs using your flickr photos, just type in your username and the tag you wish to use then select the photos you wish to include and the animated gif is produced.

Then you just need to decide how to share it with others, either by linking to the URL or embedding into your blog/webpage.

THE SEARCH IS ON……..
Pupils across the country are being encouraged to try their hand at journalism thanks to an innovative online tool, Making The News, where they can enter national competition and win some fantastic prizes.

Making The News, created and hosted by the Regional Broadband Consortia, allows pupils to research, write and publish news reports, interviews, articles and flash-blogs online.  With advice and tools to create fully designed “newspapers” and tips on writing styles, Making The News encourages creativity, communication and literacy skills.

For the second year running, the RBCs have launched ‘The Making The News National Competition’. The competition aims to showcase the best budding journalists in schools throughout the UK by giving pupils the chance to write their own news material based around ten categories. The categories range from, Best Local News Story and Best Field Trip to Best Personal Story and Best Overseas Report.

Schools can register now online (http://mtncomp.e2bn.net) and enter their news stories from the 1st December to the 16th December 2006 via the MTN competition website.

Sumit Software have just released their FREE ‘Typing Assistant‘ program.

With Typing Assistant, a smart prompt window will show you the possible words list as you typing anywhere, then with one key stroke it will AutoComplete the word for you.

I wonder if this would assist students with low spelling ability or would it just be confusing?

While checking on what my friends tag on their del.icio.us accounts, I came across the ‘One Red Paperclip‘ blog. What a great idea, I am going to try and keep an eye on that blog to see what the guy eventually ends up with. Why does everyone else some to come up with these cool ideas and I don’t, it was like the buy a pixel for a $1 website - report from The Times can be found here.