Early Years ICT Interactives at the British Council + How to Use the embedded .SWF files

Over at the British Council there are series of pages dedicated to learning English and it's in a range of languages to aid those starting out just for good measure.

In terms of ICT in the Early Years the stories are great for those children in Reception, Year 1 and 2 to listen to and complete the interactive lessons by downloading the accompanying .PDFs available underneath the flash games/ interviews or puzzles.

A lot of teachers will solely go to the page and play from there although there are several options available to those who wish to use the games in other places: blog/ class pages/ learning platform or ripped and stand alone. To do this you can use the following method:

If you use the Ctrl+U function (to get the page code) while on the pages showing the interactive then you can see the source code. Use Ctrl+F to search through the text to find .SWF in the page of code then you should come across something like this image here:

I'm using Google Chrome here but it will be almost the same in Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer

Copy the .SWF URL in the page. Then, use the embed code from a YouTube video and replace all the URLs in there like I have below. The you can then embed this amended block of code into your pages/ blog/ learning platform. Very handy if you use Frog or Studywiz types.

Alternatively you can drop the URL ending in .SWF into a browser and it should play from there without all the distractions. Which, if you're with the little ones is marginally better for them and classroom management as you can make a desktop shortcut for them to hit up directly.

In bold are the URLs to be replaced from the search in the source code page below in hyperlink format.

<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/8kSCxwam2DU?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/8kSCxwam2DU?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>

"http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/sites/kids/files/short-stories-the-haunted-house.swf"

New Downloads: Images, vocabulary posters and Assessment tools for ICT.

Very quickly,

Hop on over to the downloads section and grab a copy of the full poster pack and assessment tools that we use in school. These are: a full set of Vocabulary posters for ICT and an assessment pack that allows teachers to create full sets of assessment sheets for all aspects of ICT in primary.

The files are on the large side so you might want to use a download manager of some description.