SLAV Conference: Be the expert

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Cam Hocking

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

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Cam Hocking

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

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

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

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

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Cam Hocking

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

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Catherine Hainstock

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.

Texts in the City from the Wheeler Centre

Posted on August 8, 2012 by Cam Hocking

The Wheeler Centre is an institution that is dedicated to the discussion of reading and writing. Based in Melbourne, the centre hosts a number of excellent events and panels related to reading. A regular event at the Wheeler Centre is the Texts in the City series which explores texts from the Victorian upper secondary (VCE) English reading lists. Many of the novels or plays discussed, such as The Quiet American or The Crucible, are being studied in other states as well. You can view or download all of the Texts in the City talks here.

One excellent aspect of these discussions is that they provide students with original and varied perspectives about a text. In senior levels when detailed text studies are being completed there can often be a level of fatigue that sets in amongst the students. Hearing the text discussed by fresh voices with new views helps to avoid this common problem. The talks would be perfect for a revision or homework task.

The Texts in the City recordings also provide a great example of how teachers might record their own video discussions or podcasts about texts. With relatively easy to use video and audio recording devices now available (even a mobile phone will do) there is an opportunity for teachers to record their own discussions about a text, which could then be shared across a whole year level and many classes. Check out free tools like Audacity or the YouTube Video Editor for some simple tools that can be used to edit together audio or video.

To keep up to date with the Texts in the City series and any other events you can follow The Wheeler Centre on Twitter, or subscibe to the video and audio podcasts using the links below.

Subscribe to the Wheeler Centre Video Podcast

Subscribe to the Wheeler Centre Audio Podcast

YouTube video editor

Posted on August 6, 2012 by Cam Hocking

Recently a new Video Editor function was added to YouTube. It is available to any user with a YouTube account and allows for simple timeline based video editing from within your web browser. The editor has a similar feel to Windows Movie Maker and lets users create movies from existing clips uploaded to a YouTube account.

If you want to create a new project from multiple video files it is best to upload each file and set each to private so only you can view them. Then you can edit your project together and publish the final results for all to see.

The editor enables you to search for Creative Commons videos which can also be included in your project. Music tracks can also be inserted. Any edited video projects which are then published to YouTube also include an attribution of any music or videos used.

We had a look at the editor and recorded a short guide to getting started with this very useful new feature. The Youtube Video Editor is easy to use, has all of the basic features you’d expect and may be the perfect option for putting together your video projects.

Watch below for our Guide to getting started with the Youtube Video Editor. Please note- the video below shows us accessing the video editor through the Video Manager page. The button appears to have moved, but you can still access the editor by visiting http://www.youtube.com/editor and then logging in to YouTube.

Film and video resources: Making History & 15 Second Place

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Heath Graham

Today’s guest post comes from Heath Graham, Education Officer at the State Library of Victoria. Heath explores two sites designed to help students create special kinds of online videos.

In 2010 – 2011, Innovation and Next Practice at the Department of Education funded the development of a range of highly engaging and interactive online educational resources from cultural institutions around Victoria. The focus for these projects was on content production by students, for sharing with their peers and the wider community. Two of these projects allow for online video creation. They are Making History and 15 Second Place.

Making History

Museum Victoria’s Making History is a resource for producing and sharing digital histories. Digital histories are short digital stories based around an historical inquiry. Students choose a topic, conduct their research, then produce and upload their story to the site, where it can be viewed and commented on by members of the community.

The site offers four broad themes for students to follow:

Living with Natural Disasters,
World Events; Local Impacts,
Cultural Identity; Migration Stories
Family and Community Life

These topics are broad enough to find a home in many parts of the history curriculum and allow great opportunities for students to conduct some original research.

Student research is well supported by Making History. Videos and tutorials from professional historians and museum curators cover each of the themes suggested by the site, as well as more general videos on oral history, conducting an historical interview, storyboarding, filming tips, and guides on how to upload your finished story.

Making History also has a space for students to upload and share their work with the community. Users can comment and give feedback on the videos. Digital histories uploaded to the site range form grade three to VCE, and the focus is from myths and legends to the story of a German immigrant coming to Australia after World War II.

15 Second Place

ACMI’s 15 Second Place allows students to create and share very short films that capture the mood or theme of a location. The films are geotagged, so they can be linked directly to the place they were made. The recommended length for these films is only fifteen seconds, which might seem impossible, but it’s well worth checking the site out and seeing how much you can capture in that time.

Fifteen seconds is not enough time to develop a narrative, but it is long enough to give a sense of place, capture a particular mood or tone, or address a theme. The site has several suggested themes that you can use.

Films can either be shot onsite with a mobile device and directly uploaded from the free iOS app, or they can be uploaded via the website. Once they have been shared, they can be viewed through a map interface on the site. The videos are geotagged (this happens automatically if uploaded from the app), and other tags can be added as well. Other users can comment on videos they have viewed. They can also follow other creators, mark favourites, and share to other networks.

The 15 Second Place site contains teacher’s notes and support material for using the site effectively with students. Also included are curriculum links, activity suggestions and a link to the ACMI Educator’s Lounge.

These projects are all accessible through the FUSE educational portal. All FUSE content can also be found through the Ultranet under the Resources tab.

Forecasting the Future of Education Technology

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Catherine Hainstock

Today’s post comes from regular contributor Catherine Hainstock (M.Ed TL) of Vermont Secondary College.

Many Bright Ideas readers will be aware of the Horizon Report released by the New Media Consortium. These reports are invaluable to educators and schools planning for change.

Now there is another excellent forward planning resource, a visualisation created by Envisioning Technology. They describe Envisioning the Future of Education Technology as:

… a concise overview of technologies that have the potential to disrupt and improve teaching on all levels.

This visualisation comprehensively maps out 6 key trends, puts the emerging technologies into educational context and projects it forward on a 30 year timeline. It can be downloaded as a pdf or high resolution png image.

It is also well worth exploring this trend-forecasting firm’s website if you have students looking at themes such as future careers or envisioning the future. There is an amazing visualisation on Emerging Technologies highlighting areas of STEM with some truly extraordinary predictions. Envisioning Tech’s blog is currently featuring “Sci-fi Scaffolds”, scenarios situated in the near future and based on emerging technologies. Spend a bit of time on this site and I guarantee you will be thinking about the future in a whole new way.

Leading the reinvention of learning

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Cam Hocking

The SLAV Global eLiteracy conference was held last Friday, 27th of July. The conference explored the changing face of learning in a digital age.

The event was significant as it saw the announcement by Judy O’Connell of oztlnet.com, a new site for the Australian Teacher Librarian Network. You can become involved with OZTL through Facebook, Twitter or the Diigo group.

The day involved a number of interesting presentations, but the highlight was the round table session. Delegates spent time in small groups learning from peer leaders about a range of technologies. There was a wonderful atmosphere of collegial support, exploration and sharing.

You can find notes from the event as they are added here and also see a summary, including highlights from a very active Twitter stream, at this Storify of the day.

Congratulations to all of the organisers for a very successful day of professional learning.

School Library Association of Victoria

Yearly Archives: 2012