Each week in our newsletter we highlight a favourite free or low-cost app/tool/resource/piece of software that we think might be useful or fun in your classroom or school. Every few weeks we round them up here on the blog.
We’d love to hear what you think about them if you give them a go, and any others you’d like to share – leave a comment in the box below. Catch up with all the tools in Give it a try, part 1 , part 2, part 3 , part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10 , part 11, part 12 and part 13.
Don’t want to wait for the roundup? Sign up to our newsletter to get a new ‘give it a try’ in your inbox every Thursday lunchtime.
AR insects
Google has added insects to its AR search results. Search for the name of the insect and click the ‘view in 3D option. Android users can hear them, too. You’ve a choice of rhinoceros beetle, Hercules beetle, Atlas beetle, stag beetle, giant stag, Miyama stag beetle, shining ball scarab beetle, jewel beetle, ladybug, firefly, Rosalia batesi, swallowtail butterfly, morpho butterfly, atlas moth, mantis, grasshopper, dragonfly, hornet, robust cicada, brown cicada, periodical cicada, Walker’s cicada, and evening cicada.
DIY Radio
Hunt & Darton is a long-standing collaboration between artists Jenny Hunt and Holly Darton and they have set “a challenge from us to your family”: A downloadable pack providing everything you need to record your own family radio show. Sounds like fun! Download the pack here.
Lo-fi player
We always like a digital music tool and this lo-fi pixelated music mixing experience is very simple and curiously relaxing.
Shared piano
A cool new tool has been added to Chrome Music Lab. It’s a collaborative keyboard! It lets people play on the same virtual keyboard from different devices at the same time. There’s potential here for teachers to use it either during school closures or when some pupils are isolating at home.
Tone Transfer
Another musical treat, this one from Google’s research team. Tone Transfer takes any audio, from a hummed tune to a dog’s bark, and uses machine learning to convert it into what it sounds like played on a flute, saxophone, trumpet or violin. There are pre-selected inputs, such as birds chirping or pots clanging, or you can add your own. It also explains how it works.
Covid Symptom Study
You may well have heard of this excellent project from King’s College London, which tracks Covid symptoms using daily reports from millions of people across the UK via an app. The project is now calling on headteachers, offering regular Covid data insights for schools in return for contributing to critical scientific research into the impact of Covid on children. The callout is currently flagged up on the front page of the project website.
Blacklight
Blacklight is a free public tool that can be used to inspect websites for potential privacy violations in real time. Put in a website address and Blacklight reveals the trackers loading on the site – including methods created to thwart privacy-protection tools or watch your every scroll and click. There are also tips for what you can do about it and more background on the pervasiveness, and possible implication, of online tracking.
Scratch: Match the patterns
A quick activity that illustrates the basic building blocks in Scratch
Scratch: Voice and motion
Can you make Rowan sound like a robot?! Explore this project and see how we can generate sounds through movement in Scratch.
Why do we need https?
Let Certificat, Compugter and Browserbird explain how https works in this fun comic – a great way in to teaching about the web and privacy.
What’s the rule?
This week we are (virtually) hosting teachers from across Northern Europe as part of our Co-make Erasmus+ project exploring computational thinking in kindergartens. We really like this idea of using ‘what’s the rule’ to think about categories and patterns. (Thanks to Aaron Davis for sharing it in his excellent Read Write Respond newsletter)
Cartoonizer
Turn your photos and 10-second-long videos into cartoons with an AI-based cartooniser. Unlike many AIs, this one also seems to work well on people of colour.