Collate resources into lessons with MentorMob

The internet is an incredibly deep learning resource and it seems that you can find tutorials, readings and guides for just about any topic. MentorMob aims to help you organise all of these resources from the web into structured lessons.


MentorMob lets you organise web sites, pictures and videos into a playlist to create a lesson. Students can view the resources in the designated order and skip back and forth between each resource.

An example of a MentorMob lesson

The playlist displays in your browser (see this example lesson about using MentorMob). The lesson can also be embedded in your blog as we’ve done below.

While MentorMob seems to serve a similar purpose to Diigo’sPlay as web slides‘ feature (available in the lists view) it does look like a promising site for collating resources into a structured lesson. Being able to embed playlists also makes for a neat, self contained resource. We’ll be interested to see the quality of publically available lessons put together by MentorMob’s users.

Howard Rheingold talks about being Net Smart

The Circulating Ideas podcast recently featured a fascinating discussion with author and digital literacy expert Howard Rheingold. Rheingold’s book Net Smart explores literacy in a digital age and touches on some of the skills that are critical for learning, particularly in regards to online information access.

You can download Steve Thomas’ interview with Howard Rheingold from the Circulating Ideas podcast stream (Itunes).  In the interview Rheingold speaks about the role of Wikipedia in research, Facebook’s threat to an open web culture and some of the skills that all learners need to find reliable and authoritive information online. Rheingold also advocates for the importance of librarians in teaching critical literacy skills and modelling effective research techniques.

For more of Howard Rheingold’s thoughts about the topic you might also read an interview with him by Henry Jenkins entitled How did Howard Rheingold get so Net Smart? You can find links to the three part interview below and keep up to date with Howard’s work through his website and on Twitter.

How did Howard Rheingold get so Net Smart? Interview: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

 

Moleskine Journal app for iPad

iPad users now have another option for creating and saving notes using the newly launched Moleskine Journal app. This free app lets you create virtual notebooks with text, handwriting, photographs and drawings. These notebooks emulate the style of the iconic Moleskine notebooks.

Moleskine Journal joins a crowded market of iPad notebook apps and challenges popular paid apps like Penultimate and Notability (both $0.99).  But several novel features, an elegant visual style and good integration with Evernote and Dropbox makes the app a worthy alternative.

The launch of Moleskine Journal also coincides with Moleskine’s announcement of physical notebooks that are designed to work well with Evernote.  Page markings within the notebook and special stickers for tagging pages promise to make snapping your handwritten notes much easier. (Find out more at Techcrunch).

We explored the Moleskine Journal app and you can read our first impressions and guide to some of the features in our Storify below.

Download the Moleskine Journal app (Itunes store)

 

Why it’s worth picking Pocket

Pocket is one of the many tools that aims to help you keep track of web content. This free app serves as a good way to save articles and videos and is particularly useful for storing content when you are on the move so you can then explore it at a more convenient time.

Formerly known as Read It Later, Pocket was recently renamed and redesigned. It offers a very smooth interface and a number of useful features. Bookmarks can be added via email, through a bookmarking button that can be installed in your web browser or through a number of different mobile apps that can integrate with your Pocket account.  Many mobile Twitter apps and RSS readers now include a ‘Read Later’ option which will let you save interesting content to Pocket with one click. Considering many people read their Twitter feed when on the move or in a rush, being able to save this content for a more convenient time is very useful. One excellent feature of Pocket is that any links that have been added via a tweet will also retain the content of the original tweet. In this way you can save a link shared by someone, explore it later and then still be able to keep track of who shared the original link.

Saving to Pocket from Tweetbot on iPad

Pocket’s biggest competitor is Instapaper, which has been one of the most popular article saving options for quite a while. While the two services offer similar features, there are enough differences between the two to mean that you could make use of both. Instapaper is more suited for saving longer articles and provides a more elegant reading experience. But Pocket is perfect for saving shorter articles, videos or pictures. The reading list view (below) in both the mobile app and the web interface is also much more attractive than Instapaper. Unread content is presented in a magazine style layout, and once you select and view a link you can choose to either keep it by marking it as read, star it to keep it as a favourite or choose to delete the link permanently from your library. Saved content can also be tagged or searched.

Your unread links are presented in a magazine style layot

Pocket isn’t comprehensive enough to manage a large library of links in the way Diigo does, nor does it provide as smooth a reading experience as Instapaper. But the integration with a number of other mobile apps, as well as an attractive reading layout means it is the perfect option for keeping track of those video clips and short articles that you want to explore when you have more time.

Pocket for IOS

Pocket for Android (Google Play store)

Create interactive stories with Inklewriter

Many of you would remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books which were incredibly popular in the 1980s and 1990s. These novels gave the reader the option of choosing a path through the story and the narrative unfolded in a different way depending on the option selected. This style of fiction was then replicated in some of the early text based adventure games on home computers, however these games tended to be frustrating to play and hard to make. But now writers can easily produce interactive narratives with Inklewriter.

Inklewriter is a non-linear story writing tool which lets you define options for your reader after each section of your story. These options then link to different story sections, so you could end up writing many different stories within the one piece. You can define options which could be as simple as making a character turn left or right, or a much more complicated situation like a conversation with many different options. Pictures can also be added to the story and your writing can be shared.

Inklewriter is quite easy to use and helps you build different story options. You are presented with a first paragraph, and then you can define choices for the reader. Each option links to a new paragraph or can also be linked to an existing paragraph you’ve written. Even a simple story can actually become quite complex once you add a few options, but Inklewriter shows you when you have any loose ends from each story that you need to tie up. In this way, your reader will (hopefully) never get stuck.

This tool would be perfect in creative writing classes or even in other subjects like History, where students might explore the different options available to historical figures. When creating an interactive story students will have to examine the motivations of their characters carefully. It could also lead to some really good discussions about narrative structures, pacing and conversation. Here’s a quick story that we wrote that explains what Inklewriter is all about. It’s not Shakespeare, but hopefully it gives you a bit of an idea of how it works.

The Inklewriter website has some quick tutorials to get you started, and you can begin writing without creating an account (though you will need to create an account to save your work). You can click on Start writing or Read a story to get started. While Inklewriter is still in beta at the moment, it does seem to be quite reliable and is a really interesting option for creating digital, interactive stories.

 

SLAV Conference: Be the expert

The program for the next School Library Association of Victoria conference has been finalised, with Hamish Curry from the State Library of Victoria announced as the keynote speaker. The conference, entitled Be the expert: promote yourself with skill development will be held on Monday the 22nd of October at Etihad Stadium, Melbourne.

The conference schedule includes featured addresses about library displays, concurrent sessions exploring digital tools and a closing address by Gerry Kennedy on e-books.  The conference registration form is available from the SLAV website.

This event follows on from the Global e-literacy conference in July at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The shared notes from this very successful day are available on the Global e-literacy site. You will find details of sessions on screencasting, digital storytelling, iPads and much more. For a summary of this conference have a look at our Storify of the day.

 

Springpad

In recent times there has been a deluge of online tools that promise to help you organise all aspects of your life. Many services keep track of your bookmarks, notes or contacts, but only a few services try to do it all.  One of the best and most comprehensive is Springpad.

On first impressions Springpad seems very similar to Evernote as it organises items using notebooks and tags. Simple text notes can be created and then added to notebooks. However, Springpad has quite a few features not available in Evernote. Items can be manually added and then grouped into types such as recipes, books, movies, contacts, bookmarks or products. You can also make checklists or create events that can be synced with your Google Calendar.

Where Springpad really shines is the search function which helps you to automatically add an item to your collection. You can search for a book title, then add this to your collection, add a short note or review and mark the item as ‘read‘ or ‘want‘. Notebooks can be shared and collaborators can be invited, so you could have students creating their own wishlist of books or building a shared page with reviews of their favourite novels. With categories for film, television, books and recipes Springpad would also be a useful tool for shared curriculum planning for teachers across many subject areas.

Adding a book using search

Adding a book using search

One brilliant feature is the barcode scanner in the mobile app (available for IOS and Android), which lets you scan product barcodes and then add the item to your collection. It’s a great way to quickly index your personal library as the app will also search the web and find cover art and details of the book. This function would also be useful for students keeping track of their research. The app also includes a QR code scanner.

Barcode scanner in the Springpad mobile app

Barcode scanner in the Springpad mobile app

When saving a web page the Springpad clipping tool does a good job of recognising the type of resource you are saving. However, in terms of saving the full text of webpages Springpad is not quite as powerful as Evernote or a dedicated bookmarking tool like Diigo. It doesn’t clip an entire page and then allow you to search within that saved page.  What Springpad does exceptionally well is saving recipes, books, films or products and then automatically adding the details of the item.

Saving an item with the Springpad toolbar

Saving an item with the Springpad toolbar

The lovely visual nature of notebooks combined with easy sharing and collaboration options means Springpad definitely deserves a place on your device. It’s the perfect tool for keeping track of many aspects of your life. With some minor improvements to the web bookmarking feature Springpad may well become the all in one organisational tool that many people have been craving.

Interview series explores the impact of technology

Ryerson University in Toronto is running a web series called rdigitalife. The series is hosted by Ramona Pringle, a member of Ryerson’s New Media faculty and explores a range of topics related to the impact of technology on our lives. The recently published topic of Community is particularly interesting and includes interviews with people such as Clay Shirky, Sherry Turkle and games journalist Leigh Alexander. Here is an introduction to the Community topic.

You can view the full interviews for this topic and also explore the other published topics of Environment and Robot evolution from the rdigitalife page. Other topics such as Storytelling, Culture and Identity will be explored in future interviews.

Interactive Images with ThingLink

Today’s post comes from regular contributor Catherine Hainstock of Vermont Secondary College.

Cliché: A picture is worth a thousand words.

But wouldn’t it be great if your students could embed those thousand words into the image to demonstrate their understanding or to elaborate on sections of an image? Well now they can.
ThingLink is a simple-to-use website designed to make images more interactive. Originally created for fashion marketing in Europe, it works similar to tagging photos on Facebook or Flickr but goes one step further by allowing the user to embed ‘media-rich tags’ into the image that link back to any web content.

Ulla Engestrom, founder and CEO of ThingLink said:
ThingLink is changing how people engage with photos by transforming them from a static image, into a navigational surface for exploring rich, relevant content that enhances the viewer’s knowledge and experience.

Scroll your mouse over the map of ancient Rome (below) from the ThingLink Gallery and you’ll begin to see the learning/teaching potential of this ‘in-image interaction tool’.

Enhanced images can be embedded into blogs or emailed for people to view. Site registration is free with a limit of 50 images. Once signed up to the site tagging the images is a simple upload, copy and paste process.
Imagine the possibilities for students to create character studies, enhance mapping, curate content, elaborate on mind-maps, or explain a  design or creative processes. It could be a whole new way to annotate or a new platform for interactive storytelling.

Diigo user guide now available

We’ve now posted a user guide to help you get started with the bookmarking tool Diigo. This brilliant service allows you to save, tag and search your own bookmarks. Diigo also lets you create public lists of links and share your bookmarks with other people in groups, such as the #VicPLN Diigo group. Diigo is the perfect way to share bookmarks within your faculty, your class or your learning network.

You can find the guide to getting started with Diigo under the Guides menu, or visit it directly here. The video tutorials are also available as a YouTube playlist which you can watch below. Remember to subscribe to Bright Ideas on YouTube to stay up to date with all of our new videos.