Flash - the kind of stuff that adds extra value for my students to my lessons

What extra values do learning and teaching resources have to offer to make a remarkable difference to my students' progress? I want to create a win-win situation during in my lessons for me and my students.

Therefore the following points are vital to me:

• Will the resource cut down my workload, because the students are able to make use of it independently?
• Will the resource be able to feedback to my students and create a space for learning by try and error for them?
• Does the resource reduce safety risks? e.g. student experiments.
• Will it give my student the possibility to explore and repeat till he is able to understand?
• Does it combine different learning channels like sound, movies, animations, etc.

Well, flash animations (SWF) can do that for me and my students. 

Don't panic - I will not tell you to create them yourself. I am merely pointing out that there is a universe of free teaching flash animations out there, that just wait for you to find them and give your lessons a boost and fascinating possibilities.

I discovered recently that just googling the desired keyword e.g. photosynthesis plus the abbreviation swf will grant me with a lot of links to interesting flash animations that have been created by helpful people out there in the teachiverse.

So "photosynthesis swf" delivered those two links:

http://dendro.cnre.vt.edu/forestbiology/photosynthesis.swf

or

http://www.wiley.com/college/boyer/0470003790/animations/photosynthesis/photosynthesis.swf


For geography googling "continents swf":

http://www.missmaggie.org/geospy_files/geospy.swf

or

http://www.softschools.com/social_studies/continents/map2.swf

That should already make your fingers twiddle on the keyboard. Just spend 5 minutes to do the same for the keywords of your next topic and the swf abbreviation. There is a ton of english flashes waiting to do some magic for your students.

To make it more "hands on" you are able to combine the touchscreen of students' ipads with the interactive flash content. I am referring to one of my older posts that deals with enabling flash on the ipad by using the browser puffin.



Download the puffin browser right here from itunes - be assured it is worth the few bucks investment.