Create Customised Resource Collections with Gooru

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Catherine Hainstock

Gooru is a search engine you won’t want to miss if you are a Science, Math or Social Sciences teacher. It is free to use and allows teachers to create customised ‘play-lists’ of resources for their students. Gooru’s library of resources is extensive, vetted by learning professionals and includes videos, games, interactive items, texts and quizzes.
Once registered, creating your own ‘play-list’ or ‘Collection’ is an easy search, drag and drop process. Teachers will also appreciate professional touches such as the ability to include key vocabulary and learning objectives in the collection overview, and being able to add voice narration to direct students or highlight points within the collection.
The collaborative nature of the site allows teachers to use and adapt collections that other professionals have created and shared. Initially, any collections you create will default to a private setting, but once the quality of the content has been checked by the site’s experts (they are stringent about inappropriate content), Gooru encourages users to share; it is part of the growing OER (Open Education Resources) movement.

Students need to register to access collections and resources too, but are not able to create content or edit unless collaborator status is shared with them.

Perhaps the most appealing feature of all is Gooru’s ‘smart quizzes’. Students can test their understanding as they learn via enriched quizzes that can offer hints and explanations during the process. Once a quiz is taken, students receive feedback, including suggestions for further resources to enhance their understanding if needed.

Gooru is currently in beta so feedback and suggestions are welcome as they further improve the site. The website promises:

Our machine learning experts are working hard to develop and improve our algorithms and performance and deliver a truly personalized and adaptive learning experience.

Sounds like things will even get better.

Explore Victoria’s history with Vic Heritage

Posted on October 12, 2012 by slvadmin

Today’s guest post comes from Tanya Wolkenberg, Heritage Communications Project Officer for the Heritage Council of Victoria. Tanya introduces Vic Heritage, an iPhone app that lets you explore significant sites across Victoria.

Vic Heritage is an app designed to connect people to the history of the places around them. For years now I’ve been watching the development of mobile technologies with keen interest, thinking of how these technologies can connect people to the stories and layers of history in their streets and suburbs.

There are lots of apps out there doing this really well, Historypin probably first among them. As I work for the Heritage Council of Victoria and we have an amazing database of 2,200 places and objects of state significance to Victoria, that’s where my focus lies. Each place or object on the register has a Statement of Significance – a statement of why that place is so important it should be protected – and these reasons might range from architectural to scientific, to contributing to an understanding of Victoria’s cultural history.

I was also really interested in capturing people’s stories about those places. If we think of the Statement of Significance as the official history of the place, I wanted to know the unofficial history too. Maybe someone saw their first gig there, or their parents got married there…. I wanted the app to reflect the layers of personal and community meaning attached to places.

In order to do that, I worked with our developers, Outware Mobile, to create some custom functionality. This allows users to add their own content to individual places, either a comment or image. Once the content is moderated it is displayed on a tab attached to the place.

We also created some custom tour functionality, which allows users to create their own tours by adding places together and giving them a title (might be related to a theme or location). Users can theme places together by a type of place, style or personal interest (for example, silos, Art Deco or swimming pools) or by location. They can save the tours for themselves or chose to share the tours with others.

The tours functionality is particularly useful for excursions – students can individually or in small groups create their own tours of the city according to buildings on a particular route, by architectural style or era, or by a type of place (civic building, church, etc). They can share these tours with the rest of the class, or report back on the histories of some of the places they’ve seen along the way, having read the Statements of Significance. I’d be keen to get feedback from other teachers using it as part of their classroom or excursion activities.

There are also ‘Recommended tours’ – tours created by us. These include two audio tours – one of the housing styles and social history of St Kilda narrated by Radio National’s Peter Mares, and another on contemporary architects’ re-use of old industrial buildings in the city. The two other tours in this section include one on 20th century architecture, and another which explores, via the built heritage of the city, Victoria’s Framework of Historical Themes. Each of these are easily walkable and lend themselves to excursions.

The app is currently only available for iOS devices, but we plan to rebuild the Victorian Heritage Database with most of the app’s functionality in the near future, and a mobile version of this will be available to all smartphone users.

The Vic Heritage app can be downloaded from the Apple Appstore.

Thanks to Tanya for taking us through some of the features of the Vic Heritage app. Tanya has also recorded a brief video demonstration of the app’s key features.

PLN short course builds your research toolkit

Posted on October 11, 2012 by slvadmin

The next round of the Victorian Personal Learning Network has been announced, with the first ever Victorian PLN short course kicking off on November 12 and running for 4 units. The Research Toolkit course will explore reliable online resources, effective search techniques and tools for organisation and referencing.

The online course is self paced and will feature webinars with research experts. It’s a great way for teachers and library staff to brush up on their skills and keep up to date with new tools and techniques. Research Toolkit is also a good refresher for previous participants in the Victorian PLN course looking to reinforce and further develop many of their own research skills.

State Library of Victoria Research Guides

Research Toolkit is a partnership between the State Library of Victoria and the School Library Association of Victoria. The course costs $85 per person, but group discounts are available for teams of six or more. For more information visit the State Library of Victoria website, or email learning@slv.vic.gov.au

Learning with Gusto

Posted on October 9, 2012 by slvadmin

Today’s guest post comes from Emma Reilly, Education officer at the State Library of Victoria. Emma explores some online resources related to food and introduces a free webinar that will run on October the 16th.

The State Library of Victoria is currently presenting a free exhibition, Gusto! A culinary history of Victoria. The exhibition explores Victoria’s historic and contemporary culinary landscape, featuring gastronomic treasures from the Library’s collections – from the first Australian cookbook, published in 1864, to an actual World War I army biscuit. To support the exhibition, the State Library of Victoria has produced a Gusto! Education resource for Years 3-6 of the Australian Curriculum (VELS Levels 3 & 4).

When we consider the Masterchef phenomenon, issues of global food security, health, well-being, ethics and nutrition, it is fair to say food certainly plays an important role in the lives of students today. In an upcoming free professional learning opportunity, educators from the SLV and Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation will explore engaging learning experiences through the themes: Food and Identity, Food Supply and Eating In.

Some of the highlights of the webinar will include:
• Get some Bright Ideas about bringing to life online media using simple thinking routines.
• Be introduced to engaging digital learning tools such as Glogster, Story Scrapbook, bubbl.us and Google Maps.
• Learn how to access extensive digitised resources for the primary classroom using the SLV catalogue and Gusto! research guide.
• Get a backstage pass to the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation Professional learning community, The Shared Table.

Have we tantalised your tastebuds? Sink your teeth into this Blackboard Collaborate session on October 16th at 4.00pm-5.00pm.

SLAV & NGV explore art, literature & stories

Posted on October 5, 2012 by slvadmin

The details of the final SLAV conference for 2012, Art, literature and stories: exploring sharing across cultures have now been announced. This partnership between SLAV and the National Gallery of Victoria will be held at NGV International on Friday the 9th of November, 2012.

The program features two keynote addresses. The first by Anne E Stewart will explore storytelling as a sharing of heart and spirit. Helen Kent and Dr Larissa McLean Davies will discuss Literature in the Australian Curriciulum in a socio-historical context. The session will also explain some of the ways in which the NGV can be used with students studying Literature and English.

Explore NGV’s learning resources at their website

The conference also features a number of concurrent sessions that explore many aspects of literature and art. The day will finish with an intriguing discussion about the significance of frames and the choices made when presenting paintings to the public.

The full conference schedule is now available and registrations can be completed through SLAV. As always, you will also be able to participate in the event on Twitter using the #slavconf hashtag.

Explore the Creativity of Indie Video Games

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Cam Hocking

As part of the Off-Book series exploring cutting edge art and internet culture, PBS has released a fascinating video examining the Creativity of Indie Video Games. The video makes some interesting observations about the changing culture of gaming, which organisers of the Freeplay festival argue is “the dominant art-form of the 21st century”.

Indie games are seeing a surge in popularity and are seen by many as a reaction to overblown, overhyped or overly violent big budget games (often referred to as Triple A titles). In contrast to Triple A games, Indie games place emphasis on visual styling, innovative game mechanics and storytelling. Games like Passage, Papa & Yo or Journey explore complex themes and aim to create an emotional response in the player, while games like Bastion place an emphasis on the importance of story.

PBS Off-Book: The Creativity of Indie Games (YouTube)

While the use of gaming in education is a developing field, these Indie titles certainly present some exciting prospects for exploration in the classroom in terms of storytelling, art and game development. The other benefit is that many of these titles are relatively inexpensive and run on mobile devices or low specification computers, so have a look at this video and then jump in and try some of these fantastic indie games. The full list of games featured in the documentary is available in the video description on YouTube.

Learnist: visual literacy in action

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Kelly Gardiner

You may be familiar with the addictive pinboard site, Pinterest. Now comes Learnist, which takes many visual clues from Pinterest, builds on similar organisational principles, and adds a whole range of functionality.

Still in beta, Learnist is designed around the idea of collecting resources on topics or themes and presenting them in a visually appealing and social format. Resources such as videos, images and links aren’t just collections in Learnist: they are arranged in step-by-step lessons or processes, so you can work your way through the information or tasks and tick them off as you go. It’s not only for formal education, but has an Education category and we anticipate it’ll be perfect for quick online learning projects, introducing students to new concepts, or for digital storytelling.

You can share resources and collections uploaded by other teachers or librarians, and add your own. (At this early stage, the ability to curate collections isn’t provided for all users, but it will be.)

Here’s an introduction to Learnist from its creators:

Request an invitation, have a play, and let us know what you think.

Online learning takes off

Posted on September 21, 2012 by slvadmin

Online learning has been around for a while now, and most major tertiary institutions have some kind of online course management system, even if only to help manage classes presented in the real world.

But over the last few years, online education has really taken off, with course software designed to support teaching and learning online. You may be familiar with Edmodo, which is designed to look and feel like a social media platform and can be used with secondary students.

Lore is similar in intent to Edmodo, and offers similar functionality, but looks much more suited to adult learning (it’s developed for tertiary students, was previously known as Coursebake and has big names such as Harvard and Yale attached to it). We’ll be testing it in the next round of the PLN course.

Coursera is a platform that provides online courses from a wide range of providers: this week Coursera announced partnerships with a further 17 universities including University of Melbourne and Columbia. You’ll hear much more about this and other MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) which provide mostly short courses for free from major education providers all over the world. MOOCs provide an amazing opportunity to undertake professional development online – for free.

Here’s a brief introduction to MOOCs:

Even more Pinteresting…

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Yen Wong

Recently we had a post about Pinterest – a social media platform for pinning images to virtual boards. Pinterest has really taken off, most likely due to the lovely presentation and the way it allows for browsing of images rather than text.

To give you some more inspiration about how you might use Pinterest, we’ve collated a few articles and posts about how Pinterest is being used in libraries and in other fields.

See some examples of how other libraries have used Pinterest at this article: 25 Libraries we love most on Pinterest (OEDB).

Have a look at this Pinterest board put together by Laura Gentry about Libraries using Pinterest.

The fabulous Joyce Valenza recently wrote about how she harnessed the power of Pinterest to overcome her Bulletin board anxiety and search for great library display ideas.

Pinterest also has uses in the field of cultural heritage: Pinterest for Cultural Heritage (Archives Info).

We hope you can use this collection of ideas as a launch pad for something amazing at your library or classroom. We’d also love to hear how you’ve made use of Pinterest in your work.

Automate your Dropbox with Wappwolf

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Cam Hocking

Wappwolf is a free service which connects with your Dropbox or Google Drive account and lets you set automated tasks. It has a number of useful features and is a handy way to automate many time consuming tasks such as file conversions or basic image editing. In particular it works very well when it comes to converting audio, e-book or picture files, which can then be saved back into your Dropbox folder, uploaded to Google Drive and Evernote or emailed automatically to an address you define. Because of the excellent integration with Dropbox these automations could be particularly useful for getting student work off an iPad or other mobile device.

Wappwolf works in similar fashion to If This Then That which we featured earlier this year. You can select a folder in your Dropbox that Wappwolf will watch. As soon as a new file is added to that folder the task you have defined will begin. There are a wide range of tasks that Wappwolf can complete. You can convert files, edit an image, turn a text file into a PDF or upload a picture to your Twitter or Facebook account. You don’t even need to have a computer running as all of the automation is done in the cloud.

As an example, you could set Wappwolf to watch a folder in your Dropbox and as soon as you add a picture to that folder it could be converted to black and white and then sent to Evernote. Or you could create an automation that automatically sends any picture you save in a folder to your Grandmother! A free Wappwolf account lets you define up to 10 different automations.

Here are some of the automation options available:

For audio files: Convert to MP3, WAV or MP4

For picture files: Stamp a logo on an image, Convert to black and white, Upload to Flickr

For documents: Convert to PDF, Convert ebook, Send to Kindle, Upload to Google Drive

An example action from Wappwolf. This action stamps a logo on to an image and saves it back to Dropbox.

There are many other options available for Dropbox and also options for Facebook, Google Drive or Box. The best way to understand the range of options is to explore Wappwolf’s features, so have a look at our guide to getting started and see how you can use Wappwolf to make you life easier.

School Library Association of Victoria

Yearly Archives: 2012