Test drive: MyHistro

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Catherine Hainstock

There is a new timeline tool in town! Actually MyHistro is more than just a timeline – it has a built-in mapping tool too.

MyHistro allows users to build timelines around a theme or story with options for including text, video and photos. Every ‘event’ the user adds to their story can be geo-located on a Google Map. Stories can be developed by individuals or as a collaborative effort; the owner simply invites others to co-author a timeline. Comments are limited to registered users only. Registration is free with unlimited space and number of timelines you can create.

And if that isn’t wonderful enough, MyHistro has the added bonus of allowing your audience to view your ‘stories’ three different ways. Present them in a slideshow format, as a chronological stack or as ebooks with turn-able pages. Stories can also be embedded into blogs and websites or exported for uploading onto Google Earth.

Have a look at what others have been doing with the tool. The site offers three search options as well as a tag cloud for browsing the gallery. The gallery of stories is growing daily. There is a free app available for iPhone/iPads that allows you to edit your own stories and search others’.

MyHistro was initially blocked by our school’s filtering system because it was classified a social networking site. I asked and had no problem getting it unblocked.

I found it very easy to use once I understood the difference between events and stories. The Help section covered most of the questions I had and there is a new MyHistro blog with useful articles. I found the Terms of Use were a little confusing; when joining I had to tick a box confirming that I was old enough to use social networking in my country but on reading the Terms of Use it is very clearly written (in all caps!) that users must be 13 years old to register.

I can really see our History and Integrated Studies students using this to map migration stories, global events and issues, the spread of ideas from one culture to the next. English students could map out story-lines and hero’s journeys (or author’s journeys). I can also envisage uses in health studies such as tracking epidemics.

With so many possibilities you’ll want to pass this one on to colleagues in all subject areas.

eSmart Libraries

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Yen Wong

On Monday 27 August, 2012 The Hon Julia Gillard MP officially announced eSmart Libraries – a 8 million dollar partnership between The Allannah & Madeline Foundation and the Telstra Foundation to address cybersafety through public libraries.

Given that over 54% of Australians are members of libraries, this could be a valuable piece of work – providing a roadmap to the tools and resources that will equip the library community with the skills and knowledge for smart, safe, and responsible use of technology.

A pilot will commence in early 2013 , and the initiative will eventually be rolled out to all public libraries nationally.

eSmart Libraries is an extension to eSmart Schools.

Twitter announces updated widget features

Posted on September 9, 2012 by Cam Hocking

If you have a blog or website it can be a good idea to include a panel displaying your recent tweets. The process of adding a stream of tweets to your blog is now much easier with the addition of a widget maker in Twitter.

This new feature lets you choose between displaying all of your tweets, your favourites or even a search of a particular hashtag. We’ve included a sample widget below which displays tweets with the #vicpln hashtag. The widget also lets visitors to your site send you a tweet if they are logged into Twitter.

Tweets about “#vicpln”

To access the new widget option, login to Twitter and go to the Settings menu. Once you’ve set up the widget you’ll get a code to embed the stream in your blog. To help you with the process we’ve put together a guide to adding a Twitter stream to your blog.

TEDx Melbourne talks now available

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Cam Hocking

On the 19th of July the State Library of Victoria played host to the TEDx Melbourne event on Educational Leadership. The event explored the importance of collaboration in education and the way communication technology is changing the way we teach and learn. You can now watch the talks delivered on the night by Will Richardson and Toorak College’s Jenny Luca.

The event was documented in a drawing by Lynne Cazaly

In his talk Will Richardson explores the definition of learning and advocates for the importance of educators being involved in the conversation about assessment. Will also explains the changing role of the educator as a learner and a facilitator of learning, rather than the traditional pattern of teachers as content experts. You can read more of Will’s thought on his blog.

Many of you may be familiar with Jenny’s work through the Lucacept blog. In her talk Jenny touches on the value of the networked teacher and the opportunities afforded by new technologies in creating meaningful learning.

Congratulations to the organisers of the evening and to the presenters involved. You can find out more about this and other events at the TEDx Melbourne site.

The three literacies of comics

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Heath Graham

Updated: Here’s the recording of the webinar on comics and literacy held on 10 September. This post introduces some of the ideas and resources discussed.

Comics are often misunderstood. Many people, when they think of them at all, think of them as being the preserve of superheroes and three panel gag strips in the newspaper. Comics embrace works of all genres and they are increasingly finding a place in classrooms around the world.

A commonly used definition of comics is “sequential art.” Images, when viewed in order, give a sense of the passage of time.

Image source: http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/carl/3a/02.html

This simple two-panel comic from Scott McCloud, the author of Understanding Comics, demonstrates this point. By “reading” the placement of these images as a time sequence, we build a narrative.

The art form of comics imposes no boundaries on genre, content, or indeed artistic merit. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, telling the story of his Holocaust survivor father, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Reading comics is an engaging experience that embraces traditional literacy skills, but also brings other skills into play as well.

Literacy skills

Most comics have words, in the form of speech, captions, or both. These written elements become uniquely engaging through their embedding in the comics medium. Many of the core concepts of literacy learning can be explicitly addressed. Sequencing and ordering of ideas is at the very heart of comics, and inference and deduction from context are also well supported by the inclusion of visual imagery. This additional visual support provides another way in to a story, and can provide an often much-needed boost to visual learners.

The use of comics in literacy teaching is finding increasing support in academic circles, as these studies show:
Comics Are Key to Promoting Literacy in Boys, Study Says
For Improving Early Literacy, Reading Comics Is No Child’s Play

Visual Literacy

Comics not only have to be read as literary texts, they also have to be read as visual texts. The artistic choices made in producing a comic shape the experience of the comic. To appreciate a comic fully requires an understanding of the elements and principles of visual design. These elements provide a common vocabulary to talk about images that can be used across the curriculum. This allows students to think about the composition of an image in the same way they consider the composition of a written text. This idea can be expanded by considering individual panels of a comic like shots in a movie. What is visible in the shot? How is it framed? Why were these choices made?

Comics literacy

Comics are constructed in a particular way, and they use their own grammar and syntax. Each image in a comic is called a “panel”, and the space separating them is known as the “gutter”. Speech is enclosed in “balloons” and internal dialogue is often placed in “thought bubbles”. Panels are read in the same direction as usual reading order, which can often come as a surprise to first-time readers of Japanese comics!

Most of us are so familiar with reading comics that these procedures become transparent, but they are learned skills, and a vital part of reading comics.

Tools and resources

Given the place comics can have in class, here are some online tools and resources to help you and your students make their own:

Comic Life – one of the most popular comics makers, which is now bundled with EduStar for use in public schools. A simple drag and drop interface allows you to create comics with your own images.

ToonDoo – free online comic creator. Use images from the site, share your creations, and view comics made by others

A great site for news and reviews about comics is No Flying, No Tights, which as the name suggests, looks well beyond the usual superhero fare.

Howard Rheingold talks about being Net Smart

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Cam Hocking

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

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Cam Hocking

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

Posted on August 26, 2012 by Cam Hocking

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

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Cam Hocking

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.

School Library Association of Victoria

Yearly Archives: 2012