Museums of the World – online

An excellent resource is the Museums of the World online webpage. Featuring museums organised by country, then by alphabetical order within the country, there are hundreds of museums for you and your students to explore.

Some museums (there are art galleries too) are interactive or have virtual tours. Some allow users to download audio tours before their visit (such as the National Gallery of Victoria). Some provide links for teaching resources related to their exhibitions (such as Questacon). Others are simply webpages with information on exhibitions. However, if you are looking for a one stop shop for museums, Museums of the World online seems to fit the bill.

School Library Websites

The School Library Websites wiki provides examples of best practice school library websites that covers Elementary (Primary), Middle School and High School (although there doesn’t seem to be any examples of High Schools as yet).

School lib web site 1

Many of the sites featured are from the US, but any school library professional is welcome to join and submit their own websites to the lists. As the wiki states:

This site is meant as a wiki-clearinghouse of effective practice.  It is, by no means, a comprehensive list. Rather, it represents the collective recommendations of participating colleagues. Please join us by contributing your own suggestions of exemplars of effective practice.)

In addition, there are links to

Our practice:
Reports
Book and Reading Promotion
Digital Storytelling
Inquiry/Information Fluency Instruction
Pathfinders
Digital Citizenship
Presentations
Building Tools
SchoolLibraryBloggers
SchoolLibraryTweeters
Knowledge Building Centers

This wiki is well worth a visit.

TL Virtual Cafe

The TL Virtual Cafe wiki is the home of Webinar events for teacher and school librarians worldwide.

tl virtual cafe

These events are listed on the wiki and are free for anyone anywhere. As long as you have Java installed on your computer and you have a headset with microphone, you can be a part of the action via the Elluminate online conferencing platform. The events will be held on a monthly basis.

One nice little surprise is that these events are held out of school hours for US participants, which means they occur at around 12noon AEDT or 9am Perth time. The event held on 1 March (2 March in Australia)  – School Library Web Presence – had 177 participants and was extremely stimulating.

All  links for the Webinars are available on the wiki. Organisers are keen to have input on forthcoming topics, so stop by, join up and have your say.

Shahi visual dictionary+

Shahi is a fantastic tool for ESL students, language and literacy learners.  “Shahi is a visual dictionary that combines Wiktionary content with Flickr images, and more!”

Shahi 1

A number of definitions are provided and are categorised into nouns and verbs. Visuals from Flickr, Google Image and Yahoo assist users in grasping the meaning. Hover over a photo and the photo is enlarged. Click on a photo and that takes you to the photographer’s site.

Shahi 2

Even words or phrases that are not recognised by the dictionary section are recognised by the photo section:

Shahi 3

Thanks to the wonderful Audrey Nay for alerting Bright Ideas to Shahi!

Consultation on the draft Australian Curriculum: English, mathematics, science and history

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority have just released the” draft Australian Curriculum for English, mathematics, science and history (K-10). It will be available for consultation and comment from 1 March 2010 to the end of May 2010.”

The website continues to explain the process:

How you can get involved in the consultation process

ACARA’s consultation processes for the draft Australian Curriculum will be conducted in partnership with state and territory curriculum and school authorities.

ACARA encourages involvement of all stakeholders during this key stage of curriculum development.

Opportunities will be available to provide feedback on the draft curriculum through:

  • Completion of an on-line survey
  • State/territory and national consultation forums
  • Some short-term, trialing activities with teachers and schools using the draft curriculum materials.

On-line survey

Teachers and other stakeholders in the broader education community will be able to review the curriculum materials and provide targeted feedback through an online survey. This will include the options of annotating the work, posing questions and providing written comments.

Stakeholder consultation forums

State and territory consultation forums

Throughout the consultation period, ACARA will conduct forums in each state and territory to gather feedback on the draft K-10 curriculum.

Participation in these consultation forums will be coordinated by the relevant state and territory education authorities.

National forums

In addition to the state and territory forums, ACARA will convene national forums during the latter part of April 2010, inviting nominated teachers, national professional associations, education and discipline academics, to provide expert feedback on the draft K-10 curriculum.

Trialing activities

ACARA, in collaboration with state and territory education authorities, have selected schools to be involved in some short-term trialing activities. About 150 schools will undertake a range of planning, teaching and assessing activities using the draft K-10 Australian Curriculum. The 150 schools include a cross-section of schools based on jurisdiction, geography, size, sector, and socio-economic status.

Schools will participate by developing teaching program/s and assessments, teaching part of the content and providing student work samples, and testing the functionality, accessibility and usefulness of the online curriculum.

This practical application will provide ACARA with very useful feedback to review and improve the draft materials.

All educators are urged to investigate and comment on proposals within the time frame.

Book trailers with Chrissie Michaels

ustice and SurvivalChrissie Michaels* is a teacher of English, Drama and Humanities at a Gippsland school. She is also an author of YA fiction. She has been using book trailers in class to enhance teaching and learning. She explains more:

Why did you begin using book trailers as part of your teaching?

I’m always on the lookout for new ways to make tasks interesting and engaging for my students. This seemed a new and novel way to have them respond to a wide-reading activity; a change from the basic written review or oral presentation. A book trailer requires a different approach: working out how to portray the selected book in such a way that someone else is persuaded to read it. The task sets a multilayered challenge―to create visuals, audio and text.

Recently I was involved in the production of a book trailer for my YA novel In Lonnie’s Shadow. After doing a bit of my own You Tube and publishing-house research, and enlisting some willing helpers, I discovered it wasn’t that hard to put together a short film. A great big cheer for Windows MovieMaker which is the program we used. It’s readily accessible on most PCs. At home we had already been using MovieMaker to put together family DVDs. Making the book trailer was just the next step.

Which trailers did you use?

In the classroom I used the trailer for In Lonnie’s Shadow as a starting point. Being an author/teacher has its pluses! I also showed a simple student trailer from TeacherTube which used the basic MovieMaker elements. This provided enough background for the students to work on their task, which was to create a book trailer to market their chosen wide-reading novel to a new audience of readers (i.e. without giving too much of the plot away). First, students spent a period creating their own ‘test’ sample, using a set of photographs on a range of general interest topics (surfing etc.) and adding some audio/music clips. Teachers do have to remain aware of copyright issues of course. Students inserted text onto these pictures or made separate text frames and played around with transitions and effects.

How did students respond to them?

Since we started they have been really engaged. It’s still early days, but I’ve been delighted with their interest! Of course they picked up on how to use the program within about five minutes flat. Two students already knew how to use MovieMaker. Some could use Vegas (another movie-making program) which is a more complex program (at least for me). I gave those students the option to use it if they wished. Teachers may prefer to use Photo Story 3 as another simple option.

Have they made their own trailers?

Many are well on the way but they are still a work in progress. All have picked a key line of narrative or brief interpretive piece of dialogue from their chosen novel to work with in a new way. I dutifully bring in a video camera and the digital camera for this section of the task. Many still haven’t got their own pictures ready (part of their homework) so I am going back a step for some students where they have to map out a short storyboard. A website with some starting pointers can be found at: http://www.squidoo.com/booktrailers.

We are planning to show the finished clips (1-2mins duration) in a class presentation probably in a fortnight’s time.

If so, what skills did they learn?

I think that being able to weave together a multilayered storyline using the visual, auditory and textual has been a great creative exercise. Of course, students start by reading. They pre-write: plan their response and storyboard those visual images to create a narrative line. The task makes it so important for the students to understand the key imagery and themes for each story they have read and then they have to work out how best to convey these in an original way. They decide on transitions and effects. They seek peer review. They revise and refine.

We are all looking forward to the presentation. Students have been discussing with each other how to best represent imagery, themes and characters. They have teamed up with others to film snippets of dialogue. Hooded students have been chasing each other down corridors (for the sake of the film clip of course!).

Can readers see what the students have developed?

At this stage the students have elected for a once-off viewing of their book trailers for the class only. I guess the next time we may be more adventurous and do something for a wider audience.

Since you mentioned a book trailer for your novel, tell us a little about it…

My new YA novel is called In Lonnie’s Shadow, and is out in May 2010. It is published by Ford Street Publishing.

The novel is about a group of teenagers living in Little Lon, Melbourne in 1891. Lonnie, Pearl, Daisy and Carlo are trying to make a fair go of life, although many things are conspiring to make their life difficult. Sometime it’s hard to know who they can rely on. Secrets are kept and promises made. There’s plenty of action and the characters find themselves facing many hot spots – theft and kidnap, gang warfare and murder – and they have to make some pretty serious choices. The narrative structure draws upon artefacts (some real and some imagined) found in the contemporary archaeological digs of Little Lon. There’s a wonderful collection at Museum Victoria. In fact this is what first inspired me to write the story. So I hope you will read the novel and most of all, enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Check out In Lonnie’s Shadow trailer here or through Vimeo, Blazing Trailers, or go straight to Chrissie’s author website or Ford Street Publishing which has a number of other book trailers readers might like to use in their schools.

There are new essay questions for In Lonnie’s Shadow on Chrissie’s author website: http://sites.google.com/site/chrissiemichaelsorg Themes covered:

  • Justice and survival
  • Identity and belonging
  • Imaginative landscape

Thanks Chrissie. We would love to be able to show the students’ book trailers on Bright Ideas if at all possible.

*Chrissie Michaels is an author pen name.