The Internet is home to a huge number of well designed high quality learning activities. These offer many ways of engaging learners, they present information in countless creative ways, and they offer learners a wide variety of ways to interact. A few very special sites contain large collections of well organized activities that support learning across the curriculum. I’m sharing one of these comprehensive resources here. The quality of this one is exceptional!

BBC Bitesize is really 7 distinct sets of online learning activities organized around the UK’s National Curriculum. There are sets of activities for ‘Key Stage 1′ (Years 1-3), ‘Key Stage 2′ (Years 3-6), ‘Key Stage 3′ (Year 7), ‘GCSE’ (secondary students aged 14-16),  and ‘Higher’ (senior secondary). As well, there are two sets of activities–’Scottish 1st Level’ and ‘Standard Grade’–that specifically target Scottish learners, and another, ‘TGAU’ that appears to be entirely in Welsh for learners in Wales. The starting point of BBC Bitesize is shown below.

KS1, KS2, and KS3 activities are organized under the three headings of Literacy/English, Maths, and Science. Secondary activities are organized under an extensive  list of subject areas.

BBC Bitesize offers flash activities, videos, games, quizzes, and more. Sometimes information is presented with text, and this text works well with Speakit! in Google Chrome. Lesson plans, worksheets and other resources are available to teachers throughout the Bitesize site. As mentioned above, the quality of everything on BBC Bitesize is superb.

The secondary videos that I tried to open appear not to be available to viewers outside the UK. This is unfortunate, but it is even more unfortunate that the many excellent flash activities will not run on Apple’s iOS devices. Many of these activities would be ideally suited for use on an iPad. This serious deficiency in Apple’s product is one of a growing list of reasons that I believe schools should seriously consider choosing Android tablets over iPads.