For many teachers, this week sees the return to the classroom and I have found that there are so many places to get great ideas and resources so I thought I would share some that I have been using lately. Some are old favourites, some are relatively new sites.

Literacy Shed – http://www.literacyshed.com (created by @redgierob)

I love this site. It is beautiful and I can’t believe how quickly it has grown. The site comprises of a range of videos covering different areas of Literacy such as Adventure, Fantasy or Mystery. There are also loads of other videos that cover other cultures or inspiration or animation and there are often ideas of how to use these videos in the classroom. One of the earlier examples was the animation from Pixar showing the birds on the telephone wire. This video could be used to discuss bullying. This can be found here. Another example is the clip from Finding Nemo that shows Nemo going to school for the first time. I will be using this tomorrow with my class to discuss feelings about the new school year and talking about any worries the children might have about joining Year 3.  (I must say that not all of the videos are from Pixar!!)

Videos are on YouTube and/or Vimeo so providing that is allowed in school, you’ll be fine.

7PuzzleBlog – http://7puzzleblog.com/ (created by @7puzzle)

This is a site that I will be using every week. Each day there are three (or four) challenges posted related to various different areas of Maths. These challenges are great for the start of a Maths lesson to get children thinking. I will be using these with my top-set Year 3/4 and although the site is only a few months old, there is a huge stack of challenges already.

An example challenge is below.

From the following list:

3   7   10   11   15   16   17   27   30   32   36   48   49   56   64   72   80   81

find the ONLY number left remaining when you eliminate:

• square numbers
• multiples of 8
• factors of 60
• prime numbers

Teaching Websites – http://www.teachingwebsites.co.uk/ (created by @markw29)

This is a collection of sites created by Mark Warner that include useful appz for tablets, great videos and also teaching news. There are loads of great tools here and it is well worth having a look.

Ideas to Inspire/Interesting Ways – www.ideastoinspire.co.uk (also Mark’s site)

I love the Interesting Ways series and these could be used for staff meetings and you’d still not be able to use everything in one year. There are tips for using tools from Wordle to Prezi and from Nintendo DSs to Visualisers. These are great crowd-sourced tips to get anyone started.

QuadBlogging – http://quadblogging.net/ (created by @deputymitchell)

We will be blogging (via www.stjohnsblogs.co.uk/class8) and one of the first things I did this Summer was to sign-up to the Quad Blogging movement started by David Mitchell. The aim is to link your class blog with 3 other classes to help promote the blogs to an audience. This project has had a massive impact to schools across the world and this term there are over 100 quads that will hopefully be blogging and commenting! Our quad consists of schools in Australia, New Zealand and the United States so it will definitely be bringing our learning to a wider audience.

100 Word Challenge / 5 Sentence Challenge – http://100wc.net (created by @theheadsoffice)

Another project that I have never really got involved in before is the 100 Word Challenge. This is a weekly challenge where Julia will set a prompt containing a few words or a picture and the children then write 100 words on that prompt. The 5 Sentence challenge is a similar concept, but for less-able writers. The children then write a blog post containing their 100 words and post the link on the 100WC page. Our aim will be to blog as many of the entries as we can but we may start by using it as a morning activity during the register.

Rethinking ICT – http://rethinkingict.wikispaces.com/ (created by @chrisleach)

There has been a lot of talk about the ICT curriculum and thinking about how we can approach this in a new way. Chris’ site has been developing a lot recently and is well worth a visit. As the year progresses, more content will be added and it will be a key tool in planning exciting ICT lessons.

And a few of my sites…

ICT Planning – www.ictplanning.co.uk

I have been trying to get this up and running for a few months now and it is coming together now. I have been adding some how-to guides, lesson plans and blog posts about different tools that we are going to use. I have also linked other ICT curricula on the site too. I hope that it will be useful for anyone that is thinking on changing their ICT curriculum this year.

Under Ten Minutes – www.undertenminutes.com

Another job in the coming weeks is to add more videos on to this tutorial site. I have added a couple lately and the idea is that there will be videos to cover a range of software and websites that we use in school.

What sites and resources will you be using this year?