We’ve found that schools really like this feature, so today I’m going to be showing you how to add a Google Translate button to your website using the Embedded Code widget. First of all, you’re going to want to enter your site in Edit mode and visit the page you’d like the button to be displayed on. Then, click Insert item > Embedded Code.

It’ll ask you where you’d like to put the button, just click on the location as you would with any other Jotter item. You’ll then get this window:

A little background information on what we’re doing here – basically, this is the “free HTML” box that we’re adding. It’ll let you add any snippets of things you find across the web, such as interactive content, videos or anything else. You can paste these into the Custom box at the bottom left, though do be very careful what you paste in – code can be malicious!
What we’ve also provided, however, is a group of pre-made widgets for you to insert. The image above shows search widgets, so you can quickly access sites like Google, Wikipedia or Wolfram Alpha. Where we’re looking today, however, is in Miscellaneous.

Just click on the Google translate rectangle there and you’ll be done! It might look a little off at first, but once you’ve saved and published your page you’ll have instant access to Google’s translation services – a lifesaver for ESL students and their parents.
Using the widget is as simple as picking a language – Google does the rest. I’d show you an example using my demo site, but it’s full of Latin dummy text, so it wouldn’t really work!

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Advance notice – Jotter Tips of the Week will not be publishing over the Christmas holidays. We expect to publish the last post of the term next week on December 17th. After that, the next update will be on January 7th, nice and ready for the new year!

The tradition of Christmas in fiction is one that has permeated throughout the ages, and many famous stories and poems have been written with a festive theme as a core component. Here our our favourite examples, and ideas for lessons based around some of the most cherished Christmas literature

A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

This classic ghost story of a withered, mean old man realising that he should embrace the joy in life and be a good person, else face the scorn and misery for the rest of his life, is one of the most adapted stories of all time. The structure of being visited by the three ghosts of past, present and future is a wonderful literary device that essentially gives us the life story of a character without breaking the flow of the narrative or becoming long winded. While the prose is a little advanced for some younger children, KS2 upwards should be able to read the story, and then discuss it. Here are a few ideas for lessons for A Christmas Carol:

I ain’t afraid of no ghosts – What is Scrooge really frightened of?

Although this is a ghost story, not all of the ghosts are scary. Do the ghosts represent something other than supernatural beings? Ask students to investigate what is really scaring Scrooge, and ask why ghosts are used to make this point. If they were to be visited by the ghosts of past, present and future what would they be scared to see? Get students to write a short story about their own visits from the three ghosts, and what lesson they would learn.

Bah Humbug – How A Christmas Carol has become so important

A Christmas Carol is one of the most referenced books in popular culture, with turns of phrase such as “Scrooge”, “Bah Humbug” and “God bless us, everyone” becoming part of everyday conversation. Get students to investigate how many times A Christmas Carol has been adapted or parodied by setting them a research task of finding 10 different versions of A Christmas Carol. Then ask them to discuss why they think the story is so popular, and how the phrases in the book became part of the language. Can they think of any other examples of great stories that people tell over and over again, or any phrases that originally came from books?

A Visit from St. Nicholas (The Night Before Christmas) – Clement Clarke Moore

This classic poem is not only a great read, but arguably the origin of what we now consider the modern Santa! The first reference of Santa being all dressed in red, accompanied by Reindeer and his chimney exploration habit all come from this poem. Here are a few ideas for activities:

Twas the night before… – Parody and Understanding Form (KS2)

A Visit From St. Nicholas has been rewritten and parodied over 1000 times. You can find the full list of recorded parodies here. It’s a very fun poem to imitate, so let your students have a go! More importantly, ask them to carefully examine how the poem sounds and where the rhymes are. Demonstrate to them the AABB rhyme scheme, and (if a high enough level) discuss stressed and unstressed syllables. This poem actually has the same rhythm and syllable stress as a limerick, but not the same rhyme scheme. Get everyone to write their own night before christmas verse, and then ask them to examine how accurate it is in using the form of the original.

The Tailor of Gloucester – Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter’s personal favourite of her stories, The Tailor of Gloucester tells the tale of a humble tailor who has been hired to finish the waistcoat of the the town mayor for his wedding on Christmas Morning, only for his cat to hide his last piece of twist from him out of spite of the tailor releasing the mice he caught. The mice display their gratitude by fixing the waistcoat in the night, and save the tailor from humiliation. It’s a sweet, short story that shows how a little mercy can save you in the long run.

Public Squeaking – Anthropomorphism (KS1)

The Tailor of Gloucester is a story that has lots of characters that are different animals, and they’re all portrayed in different ways. Ask students to look at how the animals act in various “human-like” ways, including how the mice dress up in their specially made clothes. Do we find the characters more or less sympathetic and lovable once they wear human clothes? Why do we care about the cat eating the mice, and why do we think Simpkins actions are bad? As students to consider in what ways the animals are like people, and then get them to write a short story from the perspective of an animal of their choosing.

Resources like these can be stored inside our School Jotter Resources app, where you can share your own creations with other teachers and work with the community to create lessons plans. You can learn more at SchoolJotter.com

As the UK’s largest provider of school websites, website security is of course an issue of utmost importance to us, and your security as customers is paramount. Here’s a list of our recommended tips to help keep you safe online!
1. Never give out your password to anybody.
This is the single most important piece of advice we can offer. It doesn’t matter how strong or weak your password is, keep it to yourself. Never send it in emails or store it in text files on your PC. And remember, Webanywhere staff will never ask for your password!

2. Make sure you know where you’re entering your password.
Ensure the website you’re using is the correct one at all times – sometimes login pages can be “spoofed”, so you might be taken to paypal-com-log.in, rather than paypal.com/login. These are sites designed to capture your username and password.
3. Use a different password for every site.
If you use the same password on every website, don’t. Don’t do this. Often, attacks on websites are “dictionary” based, meaning they’ll take existing lists of usernames and passwords from other hacked websites and try them on new ones. If you use the same password for everything, this makes all your accounts vulnerable if one of them is compromised.
4. Use a password manager.
In conjunction with point 3, a password manager can help generate and store secure, unique passwords for every site you visit. We can recommend LastPass for this.
5. If you see something, say something.
If you think your account has been compromised, contact us as quickly as possible on either helpdesk@webanywhere.co.uk or 0800 862 0131 (free from landlines and mobiles). Similarly, if you get an email asking for your password, let us know – again, official Webanywhere emails will never ask for your password! Students can also report problems using the Jotter Safety Shield button.
It’s important to always be careful what you’re doing online – the Internet can be a potentially dangerous place, but by following these tips you should be able to keep yourself safe from the vast majority of attacks out there. If you’d like more information, please contact us at education@webanywhere.co.uk.

We’ve recently had a lot of new schools sign up to our Spellings app, so it seems like the perfect time for a rundown of how to get started using the Spellings platform. Want to find out more? Drop us an email at education@webanywhere.co.uk and we’ll sort you out with a demo.
Users of Spellanywhere can also have all their content migrated for them – we’ll take care of this, so if you’re a Spellanywhere user you really have no excuse for not upgrading!
Anyway, for those of you who are currently using the platform, here’s a basic rundown of how it all works.

There’s two sides of the Spellings app we can deal with – the admin view and the user view. We’re going to focus on what the admin sees today, but if you’d like us to cover the students’ perspective, please do let us know. Logging in as an admin, here’s what you’ll see:

Assuming your permissions have been set properly, you’ll see this screen here. Note that I’ve already added two types of test in here, so it should be blank for you.
Now, we’re going to start with the easiest way to add spelling tests to your site – using our premade bank of them. Click on “Preset Lists” in the menu to the left and you’ll see this screen:

These are all lists we’re providing to you for free – there’s over 70 of them, categorised by numbers of syllables. They’ve been created with the curriculum in mind, so you shouldn’t have any issues using them. To see what words are in a test click on View list, to practice taking a test yourself click on Preview, and to copy it to your library so you can set it yourself, click Copy. Note that the Community Lists tab contains a near-identical interface, but is populated by custom lists submitted by other schools.
This will bring up the “New Spelling Test” dialog, which we’ll discuss below. For now, it should have appeared in the Spelling Lists tab to the left. Before you can set it as a test, you’ll need to assign it to some groups – this is done through the standard Jotter groups dialog; type the name of the group and it’ll auto-suggest one. Once that’s done, click Set As Test to give it to those groups specified before.
But what if you want to create your own tests? That’s easy too – click Create Spelling List at the top of the page to get this dialog.

I’ll go through the sections bit-by-bit (as I always seem to do!):

• Name – What the spelling test is to be called
• Description – A bit of descriptive text to tell the pupils (or staff) what it’s about
• Folder – You can create and specify folders for organisational purposes
• Mode – There are three modes you can choose from:
  Audio: The audio file of the word will play (see below)
  Flash Card: The word appears on a flash card that disappears once typing begins
  Delayed Flash Card: As above, but the card does not disappear immediately
• Options – Choose whether it’s active and whether you’d like the question order shuffled to prevent cheating/rote memorisation
• Words – the actual words you’d like to test

Spellings has an audio option for some words – if audio for a word is available, the symbol to the left of it will change to a speaker. Not all words have sounds associated with them, but this is something we’re actively working on with common ones. Add more words through the Add Word button below, and once you’re done click Create.
Of course, testing is all well and good, but you need to be able to see results. Luckily, Spellings can offer that in a very detailed way – click on Results in the left menu to see a detailed breakdown of all who have taken the tests.
And that’s pretty much it! We’re really pleased with how Spellings has come out, and we hope you are too. Don’t have it but are interested? You can get a free 30-day trial in your App Store – try it out with your students!

Image taken from Element14

Today, Raspberry Pi announced and launched the PiZero, a tiny £4 computer that can be reprogrammed for a variety of purposes and can even run programs like Minecraft. It’s an astonishingly tiny and cheap computer, and it opens up the possibilities for coding in the classroom.
The machine is so small and cheap that they’re even willing to give it away for free on the cover of MagPi magazine, meaning the tiny tech toy will be one of the most easily-acquirable computers ever made. This is something that your average KS2 pupil can buy with their pocket money, and it opens up a world of technology that will help them become the coders and programmers of the future.

Continue reading →

Our Messages app lets students and teachers privately and securely message each other within the School Jotter platform, and is a fantastic communication tool. It can also be used to teach a valuable lesson in staying safe online, as we’re about to show you here.
The crux of this lesson will be that you as a teacher are going to create some fake “spam” messages to send out to your class. Since these aren’t real emails, there’s nothing actually at stake, and the purpose of the lesson is to teach pupils not to trust messages from unknown or suspicious sources. Continue reading →

With this week being Anti Bullying week in the UK we thought we’d help you teach students about bullying with this brief but clear presentation on what bullying is, what to do if you’re being bullied and the golden rule on being happy. It’s about 10 minutes long and includes some fun animations suitable for primary school children, KS1 and KS2. Click the link below to request a download of the presentation.

Anti Bullying Presentation

Tables are one of the most helpful, but also infuriating aspects of web design. They can be invaluable for organising items on your page, but can also be a bit of a headache to set up. Here’s how tables work in the School Jotter interface.
You can insert tables into any regular text object in Jotter, click where you’d like to put your table, then click this button in the toolbar at the top:

The easiest way to put in a table is through the “Insert table” option, mouse over it and this matrix will pop up.

You can then pick how big you want your table to be – bear in mind you’ll need header rows at the top, sides or both. If you’ve used Microsoft Word, this should all be pretty familiar to you.
You can then type the text into the cells which have appeared. You can adjust your table’s properties in various ways. First of all, the Table properties.

By default, the table will fill the width and height of the space you give it, but you can change that here. Additionally, cell padding determines the distance between the cell contents and the cell borders. Alignment determines whether it’s left, centre or right-aligned. Note that, by default, your table will not have any borders – you’ll need to add these in both the table and cell properties menus.
You might also want to take a look at the Advanced tab for some more interesting customisation options. Note that these are also available for individual cells and rows via the other options in the table menu:

If you’re familiar with HTML markup, you can put custom styles in the box at the top – otherwise we recommend leaving this blank. The other options are relatively straightforward – Border width is how wide the cell borders are, Border style is what style they’re in, and the two colour options determine border and background colours of the table.
Some of the more advanced capabilities of the table are available through the Cell, Row and Column menu options. These will allow you to perform actions such as merging cells, for example to provide info like below, for Mr W:

Want to add or remove rows or columns? Again, under the Row and Column options you can insert/remove these. Note that, in the case of inserts, they will be inserted above (rows) or to the left of (columns) your current cursor position.
And that’s pretty much all there is to it! Tables are one of the oldest text items still used on the web, and it’s not hard to see why!