Christmas greetings to you all from Seomra Ranga, and best wishes for the New Year. Enjoy the well-earned break and return to the site in 2011 for all your classroom resources. It’s been a busy and eventful year for Seomra Ranga, especially during the past month with the launch of the new site. A lot of this year has been spent researching, planning and creating the new website, culminating in the re-launch during the month of November. After some initial teething problems, the new site has settled down well and is experiencing unprecedented number of visitors. I understand that the layout of the site is very different for many visitors who may not be used to searching a blog-based site, however, given time I’m sure that most visitors will see the benefits of having a more searchable format and layout to the site.
The last month also saw the re-branding of the Seomra Ranga Twitter page (http://twitter.com/seomraranga) and the launch of the Seomra Ranga Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/SeomraRanga). Both of these display the new Seomra Ranga logo. The number of visitors to the Facebook page has been amazing and the number of people who “like” Seomra Ranga grew rapidly in a short space of time and presently stands at over 400. Both the Twitter and Facebook pages are great ways of keeping people informed of what is going on on the site. They are also great ways of informing people of new links and resources that I have come across on other sites. I would strongly encourage teachers to get involved in these Web 2.0 technologies. I would also like again to thank Debbie and James at Logis Media for all the work they did in 2010 in bringing to fruition my vision for the site as well as making many great suggestions and recommendations which are now part of the new Seomra Ranga.
There are more great plans for the site during 2011 which will hopefully add extra dimensions to the site. The project to digitise old filmstrips had been ongoing until work on the new site took over. So, hopefully, 2011 will see some of these old resources given some new life on this site. New content and resources are also being planned to add to the existing bank of resources on the site. Some of the seasonal content from the old site needs to still be transferred to the new site so this will continue to be done during the coming months. Election resources will appear on the site as soon as we know when the General Election will take place in the new year. So the plan for 2011 is to continue to develop the new site and to keep adding resources which are relevant and suitable for the primary school classroom in Ireland and beyond.
With just over a couple of weeks left in the classroom before Christmas, new seasonal resources have been added to the Christmas @ Seomra Ranga website to assist the teacher with classroom planning. Already added to the site are:
Christmas Table Quiz – eight rounds of six questions, a tie breaker as well as all the answers on a Powerpoint presentation
Christmas Bookmarks – four seasonal bookmarks captioned with Christmas 2010 / Nollaig 2010
Letter to Santa – vocabulary on flashcards to assist pupils with writing a letter to Santa
Lipéid Nollag – deich lipéid Nollag ar leathanach amháin
Christmas Lined Pages – eight lined pages with a Christmas theme suitable for presenting seasonal written material
Christmas Alphabets – posters of small and capital letters with a Christmas border
Christmas Numbers – numbers 1 – 10 with a Christmas border
New Christmas Powerpoints – Christmas Customs and Traditions; Christmas Greetings Around the World; Scéal na Nollag; Santa Claus Around the World
Tin Whistle Christmas Tunes – eight new tunes added to the list
All new resources can be downloaded freely at:
http://www.christmas.seomraranga.com/
A number of new summer resources have been added to the Seomra Ranga site today. All are free to download immediately. The new resources include:
- Cois Farraige – 50 posters as Gaeilge
- At the Beach – 50 posters
- Summer Alphabet – small letters
- Summer Alphabet – capital letters
- Summer Alphabet – small and capital letters
- Summer Numbers – numbers 1-20
The Summer Resources page also includes lined pages with a seasonal theme, summer weather sayings, summer noticeboard headers, summer flashcards in English and Gaeilge. Please feel free to upload your own summer resources to the site and I’ll put them on the summer page. Simply attach the resource to an e-mail and send it to info@seomraranga.com All of the summer resources can be found HERE
Winter resources have been gathered together into a new section on the Seomra Ranga website. It can be accessed through the “Seasonal” button on the navigation bar on the left hand side. Posters, flashcards and lined pages with a winter theme can all be downloaded free on the page. If you have some of your own winter resources, upload them to info@seomraranga.com
Christmas greetings to you all from Seomra Ranga, and best wishes for the New Year. Enjoy the well-earned break and return to the site in 2010 for all your classroom resources. It’s been a busy year for Seomra Ranga, especially since September when the site experienced record numbers of visitors. This level of traffic to the site has exceeded all expectations with almost 450,000 visitors to the site during the last twelve months, the past four months being the busiest of all. It’s been so busy with traffic that the site has crashed twice as the allocated bandwidth was exceeded. The hosting plan has been upgraded to try to cope with the level of visitors so hopefully this will not happen again.
A special word of thanks to those who went to the trouble of uploading resources to the site to share with others. It’s easy to do – just attach the resource (in any format .doc, .ppt, .pdf, .jpeg, .pub, etc) to an e-mail and send it to info@seomraranga.com.
2010 will hopefully bring new and fresh changes to the site. Already the domain name www.seomraranga.ie has been secured so the site is now also accessible through that address. The site is also currently being re-designed and will hopefully be launched early in the new year. New content and resources are also being planned to add to the existing bank of resources on the site. Please let me know if there are changes that you feel would add to the design and functionality of the site.
