Yearly Archives: 2013

A groundswell of playfulness

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Hamish Curry, Education Manager at the State Library of Victoria reflects on gaming and playfulness after recently taking part in conferences in Auckland and Melbourne.

Games and playful thinking have been popping up a lot for me recently, more so than usual.

There seems to be a shift in the discussion from the games people play to how games both reflect and add to the culture of our workplaces and public spaces. School libraries can potentially be a hub for this kind of discussion enabling the exploration of games and apps that contribute to our understanding of digital literacy, deep reading and game elements.

In digging deeper I headed along to the inaugural Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) from July 19-21. Here more than 40,000 gamers descended on the Melbourne Show grounds to indulge in games from all kinds of mediums: card games, board games, video games, and talks about games. The scale was overwhelming. It was a powerful physical reminder of just how ubiquitous and diverse games are, as well as how rich the networks and local game development scene are too. I spoke on a panel about The Playful Library exploring the ways in which library spaces can be designed and co-programmed to support games culture. If libraries are keen to engage with the community, then games become a powerful way to bring playfulness and partnerships into their spaces.

Speaking of spaces, I was New Zealand bound the following day to participate in the Auckland City Council’s Hui ‘New Rules of Engagement: Future Directions for Children’s and Youth Services at Auckland Libraries’. This two-day event explored the ‘serious business of being playful’ and brought about 180 staff together to discuss how library spaces can be revitalised, redesigned and reprogrammed to better support families and youth services. There was a strong sense of community driven perspectives coming through the sessions, which also included a workshop on building bridges with newspaper whilst being shot at with Nerf guns! Clearly the play potential of libraries was a key focus, and the energy of the room suggested that the tenacity and eagerness of staff was certainly there.

The themes of risk, innovation, and opportunity kept surfacing. Something that also surfaced during this Hui was an article I’d written for the Schools Catalogue Information Service on Games and learning. In it I explore the ways in which games complement and contrast with education, and how control is always shifting.

Being playful reminds us all that control is at once a state of mind and an opportunity to do things differently.

Image credit: Steam punk nerf guns at Auckland Libraries Hui – librarians vs children!

What’s Technology For, Anyway?

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In this guest post, Kristin Fontichiaro, Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, School of Information highlights key ideas from her upcoming presentation at SLAV’s, Transliteracy, multiliteracy, makerspaces: how can I participate? on Friday, 16th August.

The other day, I heard a story. A parent of young children heard that the oldest children in the school – ages 9 and 10 – were going to be having an end-of-year technology celebration to which everyone in the building was invited.  Eager to hear what her kids would be experiencing in a few years, she dropped by. The students filed in front of the assembly and, without a word, held up an A4  printout of a presentation slide.

That was it.

The whole school had been pulled out of class to gaze at small pieces of paper dozens of feet away.

Ahem.

Now, I have no doubt that the educators behind that project had great intentions and worked hard. (Anyone who has ever tried to get an entire primary school class to print out a project without mixing up whose is whose knows what a feat it is that each kid actually ended up with anything.)

But how did a tool meant to serve as an illuminated backdrop for public speaking end up as a small paper rectangle held up by a silent child? How did a faculty make a decision that seeing these faraway papers merited pulling every other child out of class? What was this project supposed to accomplish?

It’s hard to know. Maybe the technology curriculum focuses on the acquisition of specific skills and behaviours (“the learner will print from software,” “the learner will format a presentation slide”). Maybe the educators were pressed for time. Maybe something else.

I would argue that the crux of the issue is this: there were not clear, aspirational expectations for how technology could transform, extend, and deepen student learning. I would bet that this faculty did not have a clear understanding of what it meant to teach and learn with technology and how to use technology as a game-changer. I have a hunch that the administration pushed for its staff to use technology without talking about how and why to use it.

I quote an extreme example, but (I fear) it probably resonated within the realm of possibility for you. In this madcap Web 2.0 world, where there are endless “creative” tools, just waiting for you to type in a few words and pick a template, how do we move the conversation from “teachers need to use technology, period,” to, “technology needs to transform the teaching and learning and take students further than they could go without technology.”

Next Friday, we’ll gather to talk about this phenomenon. We’ll look at a possible vocabulary and framework for planning and discussing student work, and we’ll draw inspiration from Alan Liu’s Transliteracies Project as we collaborate to articulate what it means to do robust “reading” and “writing” in multimedia. At the end of the day, we’ll dip quickly into two alternative ways to use technology with kids: digital badging to track learning in formal and informal spaces and the makerspace movement. Come roll up your sleeves and dig in with us!

Image credit : cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Brad Flickinger

eBooks and Online Content Trade Expo

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Access and management of digital resources became a good deal clearer for the large group of school library professionals attending the School Library Association of Victoria eBooks and Online Content Trade Expo at Melbourne Girls Grammar on Saturday 27 July.

The aim of the Expo was to demystify the concept of ebooks and online digital content.  It was a fast moving day of presentations from providers of free and subscription-based content for schools through digital content management systems, some of which we already subscribe to but could use more fully, others that opened up ideas for future development.  Presenters included:

  • Soltlink – Overdrive
  • Oxford University Press
  • Read Plus/Links Plus
  • Access-It Software
  • Follett eBooks
  • Jacaranda
  • OCLC Worldshare
  • Wheelers Books
  • EBSCO
  • Bolinda Digital

Links to resources from the Expo are available at SLAVConnects.  Exploring the options available in this rapidly developing field can be bewildering, however, this list provides a starting place for exploring online services even if you were not able to attend on the day.

Mining the treasures of Trove

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It’s sometimes easy to forget how lucky we are to have so many digitised items freely available online. Institutions from around the world are making their collections open to people who could never have previously accessed these items. When this is combined with user uploaded content that is being added to sites like Flickr, the amount of digital content can almost become overwhelming.

Given this, it’s no surprise that educators see the importance of developing strong search skills in students. We’ve often written about choosing the right search term, filtering results and honing in on what we want. That’s great, but there are also some interesting ways to discover new items, or even items that we didn’t know existed. Here we’re going to take a quick look at three tools that tap into the incredible range of collections in the National Library of Australia’s Trove site. If you’re not familiar with Trove, prepare to spend the rest of your day there! It’s a unified search of items from many libraries across Australia, including books, newspapers, manuscripts, pictures and more.

Trove has a pretty familiar (yet very powerful) search feature. Make sure you go there and have a play. But for now, let’s look at three other tools that harness the amazingly open nature of the site. All of these tools are still quite experimental, so you may see some bugs or glitches, but they are well worth an explore.

The first of these is Trove Mosaic, built by Mitchell Whitelaw. This site lets you enter a search term and then displays a mosaic of images, which can be sorted by collections, titles or decade. Clicking on an item will take you to the record on the respective library’s website. It’s a brilliant way to explore the amazing digitised pictures available from across Australia.

Trove Mosaic displays images in a lovely sortable mosaic. Here we’ve sorted our search for ‘rabbits’ by decade.

The second tool for exploration of Trove is QueryPic  This tool  searches for terms within Trove’s digitised historical newspapers collection, and displays a graph showing the number of results for that term per year. You can add multiple terms and searches to a graph. In this way you can see the patterns of usage of a particular term over time. Clicking on a particular year in the graph will show you the related articles, and this then leads you directly to each digitised article.

QueryPic works on a similar principle to Google’s Ngram viewer, which searches and displays the usage of phrases in digitised books over time. Of course, it is important to remember that not every newspaper from the time has been digitised, but it’s definitely an interesting tool for analysing the frequency of phrases, like in our example below where use of the term ‘bushrangers’ peaks in the mid 19th century,  whilst use of the term ‘theft’ steadily rises.

Our search for theft (in red) and bushrangers (in blue) shows some interesting trends

The final site is a brand new tool built by the One Week, One Tool team. This team of coders are aiming to build a new tool each week, and one of their first projects is a seredipity site called Serenidip-o-matic. Paste in some text (such as a bibliography, essay, blurb) and then see what is returned based on keywords from your passage. The site searches sources like Flickr, Europeana & the Digital Public Library of America. It now also includes Trove (thanks to the work of Tim Sherratt at NLA). As you’d expect from a serendipity machine, results aren’t always completely relevant, but they are certainly interesting.

All of these sites show the possibilities presented by digital collections when they are built with open architecture. Trove’s open API means that tools can harvest the collection and present items in very different ways. We’re lucky to not only have such amazing collections, but also people who want to work with them to build these wonderful tools.

Influence and Enchantment

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As part of a new series on advocacy in school libraries, regular Bright Ideas contributor Catherine Hainstock shares her reflections on how school librarians can assert their place at the heart of the school.

The School Library Association of Queensland in partnership with the Queensland University of Technology has recently published research on the important contribution that school libraries and teacher librarians make to literacy development. This excellent report reinforces the findings of decades of research on the positive influence a well-resourced library with a qualified teacher librarian has on student achievement.

I read this report in tandem with Guy Kawasaki’s book, “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions”. His book is about promotion and customer service and even though a school library is not a business, I believe it’s a useful model to explore. At the end of the day, as a teacher librarian I feel I am here to help others. The better our service, the better the result. I am also interested in how we promote what we do because no matter how much research is released, how well supported a school library is, how well it is resourced, or how qualified the teacher librarians are, there is no immunity from decisions to down-size or side-line a library service.

We must make our contribution to school life and student outcomes evident and our influence felt by everyone who comes into the library. Kawasaki’s book helped me understand that my ultimate goal is not about improving customer service, it’s about enchanting people with our service.

[Enchantment] is more than manipulating people to help you get your way. Enchantment transforms situations and relationships. It converts hostility into civility. It reshapes civility into affinity. It changes skeptics and cynics into believers.

— Guy Kawasaki

Kawasaki’s book goes right back to basics (and that’s not a bad thing). He reveals the foundation of enchantment as ‘Likeability’. You can’t enchant people if they don’t like you or your service. (I still haven’t forgot the tyrannical librarian in the public library when I was a child!) Those lady-dragons in pearls may be extinct now, but we want students and teachers not just using our services, but raving about them. Here’s a short list of points from the book that I found relevant to school Library/Information Services (and check out this infographic for more):

  • smile (and be polite)
  • accept others (and sometimes give them a break)
  • get close (get out of the library and make contact)
  • project your passions/find shared passions
  • create win-win situations
  • adopt a Yes attitude

Kawasaki also points out that likeability only goes so far – people need to be able to trust you and your service. In a chapter on the importance of trustworthiness there’s some excellent food for thought about:

  • focussing on  goodwill
  • living up to and fulfilling promises
  • giving people the benefit of the doubt
  • the importance of expertise and competence  (like keeping abreast of basic ICT skills for us)
  • showing up (physically and virtually interacting with our clientele)

Reading these two publications at the same time brought into focus the influence we have (or can have) as teacher librarians and how important it is that we recognise and actively cultivate opportunities no matter how big or small.

We used to say the library was the heart of the school; a place for students to learn, inquire, read and enjoy. But with all the technological changes occurring in education, school libraries are no longer contained within four walls. Perhaps the focus can finally shift from the physical space to the real heart of the library – teacher librarians and the services they provide. Over the next few posts, I hope to explore the idea of teacher librarians at the heart of the school. I’d like to reflect on what that can mean for us and how we can continue to grow our influence.

Other posts in this series:

Image Credit: (ca. 1910),  Interior of The Queen’s Hall, showing a member of staff sitting at the Enquiries window, State Library of Victoria Pictures Collection.

Global Education Project

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In this guest post Heath Graham (Project Officer for the Geography Teachers’ Association of Victoria) introduces resources and webinars for the Global Education project. 

The Global Education Project is an AusAid-funded initiative, designed to encourage teachers to take a global perspective in the classroom across all learning areas. The Global Education website features teaching activities, videos, image galleries and other resources. Resources cover a range of Global issues including Water & Sanitation.

The Victorian branch of the Global Education Project is hosting a series of webinars on range of global education topics. The first session covers Primary level resources on the topic of water, to coincide with the International Year of Water Cooperation. The second session gives a general introduction and overview of the global learning emphases and their application in the Primary classroom.

Webinar details:

Global Education And The International Year Of Water Cooperation

August 6, 2013 from 3:45pm to 5:15pm Session details

Global Perspectives in the primary classroom: building global citizens

August 7, 2013 from 3:45pm to 5:15pm Session details

These sessions are hosted in Blackboard Collaborate. If you have not used Blackboard before, DEECD have set up a Virtual Conference Centre to help you get started:

http://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/support/Pages/vcc.aspx

Using Postach.io to blog with Evernote

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Whilst Evernote is an incredibly powerful organisational tool on its own, one of the most exciting aspects of the service is the way it connects with other tools. One such service is Postach.io, a new platform that lets you blog from your Evernote account. 

Use the ‘published’ tag in Evernote to publish your work

Postach.io works by connecting with your Evernote and creating a blog from your notes. You define which Evernote notebook it can access and notes will only be published on your blog once you tagged them ‘published’. You can also set notes to appear as pages rather than posts by tagging them with the tag ‘page’. If you want to unpublish you can just remove the tag or drag it out of your notebook.

Postach.io blogs come with a number of different themes and there are also options to modify a theme if you know how to code. The theme editor options aren’t as easy to use as the visual theme editors in Global2, Edublogs or WordPress, so if you can’t code you only have the option of prebuilt themes at this stage. I’d expect that as the Postach.io user base grows (the service is still in Beta at the moment) that more themes will be shared by users. 

Postach.io comes with a few built in themes and the source code can be edited to create your own theme

One of the advantages of Postach.io is that all of your blog content is stored in your Evernote account. We’ve seen the angst caused in recent times with the closure of online services like Posterous, so storing your data in a service like Evernote, which syncs back to your computer, reduces the risk of data loss. It also means you are investing less time and effort in a single platform- if Postach.io doesn’t suit your needs you just close down your account and take your data with you. Hopefully this signals a move towards more data portability between online tools.

One other advantage of Postach.io is the wide range of apps produced by Evernote. Evernote works well on almost any device, either through desktop software, web browser versions or mobile apps. All of the Evernote apps are free, so you don’t need to buy a specific app to get blogging on your mobile device. You could even use the Evernote email feature to create blog posts via email (which coincidentally was a much loved feature of Posterous).

The Postach.io developers recommend you create your blog entries in the web browser version of Evernote, as many of the formatting options are the same as traditional blogging software. We built a sample Postach.io blog and decided to test out some of the standard blogging tasks like formatting text, adding images and embedding media. This included trying to recreate some recent posts from Bright Ideas. Creating simple notes with bullet points, text formatting and images was all as easy as creating a new note in Evernote. Postach.io also coped quite well with embedding media from popular sites like YouTube, Flickr and Twitter (see our test post here). There seemed to be very little lag time between a note being updated in Evernote and the changes being reflected on the Postach.io site which is very promising. Comments can be enabled using the Disqus service and your blog avatar can be updated using Gravatar. Postach.io blogs also include RSS feeds and tagged posts.

Postach.io lets you embed media from popular sites like YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. Click on the picture to see our sample post.

Nevertheless, we did find some elements of Postach.io lacking in comparison to standard blogging platforms. There is less control over items like captions and alt text, and it obviously lacks some of the fabulous features of Edublogs and Global2 like student blog management. Postach.io also ran into problems when we tried to attach files to a note; the text of the note appeared as a post but the attachments were not added. I also found that not being able to see a preview of my post until it was published was quite limiting, so if you are someone who likes to triple check your posts before they are published then this might be a difficult adjustment to make.

But what Postach.io does represent is  an easy way to create simple blog posts very quickly. Postach.io harnesses the power of Evernote to simplify the blogging process and also shows the value of developers building services that work well with other apps.

It’s not a replacement for a fully featured blogging platform like Edublogs (particularly if using it in the classroom) and the service is still in beta so you can expect bugs and downtime. Despite some limitations, Postach.io could end up being a great way to introduce beginners to the concept of blogging or to create simple blogs with very little effort, particularly if you are already using Evernote.

Check out our Sample Postach.io blog and see how the notes originally appeared in Evernote.

New to Evernote? Have a look at our guide to organising yourself

 

All About Change: Raising Modern Learners

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Raising Modern Learners (RML) News is a new go-to place if you believe in real educational change and want to stay informed, be part of the conversation and help educate your school community about issues in contemporary education. Raising Modern Learners was created early this year by two giants in the field of educational technology, Will Richardson (US) and Bruce Dixon (Australia). They were concerned that current school reforms largely missed the point when it comes to the changes necessary to meet students’ needs for success in modern society. They wanted to find a way to inform and shift conversations away from how to tweak traditional curriculum and get people talking about new literacies, skills, and dispositions.

We’re dedicated to helping parents (and educators) stay abreast of these changes in timely, thought-provoking, concise, and interactive ways, and to help them find ways to advocate for more modern, student-centred change in their schools that reflects the needs of [our]time.

The latest article entitled If High School Wasn’t Compulsory, Who Would Go? examines disengagement issues in school and has some intelligent conversation already clocked up in the comments. News articles come out fortnightly and can be accessed via the website or you can download the free iTunes app for either iPhone or iPad.

Image Credit: (c. 1935), Elton Fox instructing a student at the Fox-Morgan School of Commercial and Fine Art [photograph], State Library of Victoria Pictures Collection.

Create word clouds and analyse text with Textal

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Word clouds are a good way to visually represent the frequency of words in a piece of writing. While there are plenty of apps available that will automatically generate word clouds, a new app for IOS devices aims to make word clouds even more useful. Textal turns a text passage into a word cloud and also includes some interesting tools for analysing word usage.

A Textal cloud can be created using the text from a web page, a Twitter feed or one of the sample books provided. There’s also an option to simply cut some text from another app and paste it into Textal. Like most word cloud apps you can choose different fonts and themes (though there are no fancy shapes like Tagxedo). You can also choose to set the number of words displayed in your cloud. Once you create the cloud you’ll be presented with a pretty standard word cloud, with the most frequent words displayed in the largest text. Check out our sample Textal word cloud of #vicpln tweets here.

Textal lets you choose basic font and theme options, and clouds can be created from text, a web page or Twitter. In this case we’re creating a cloud of VicPLN tweets.

It’s when you tap on a a particular word that Textal begins to get really useful. This will display statistics about the frequency of word usage, the relationship of this word to other words, the overall word count and the number of unique words used in the document. The word cloud is also created online (though statistics aren’t available unless you open the cloud in the Textal app). Each Textal word cloud also has a unique QR code to make sharing easier.

Textal provides a breakdown of the number of unique words used, the popularity of your chosen word and the relationship to other words.

Textal is a relatively new release and is currently only available on Apple devices. At this stage it looks like it also requires access to a Twitter account (though it doesn’t auto post without your permission). This may make it difficult for students to use unless you have a shared class Twitter account.  Despite these possible drawbacks, Textal is definitely a useful tool for helping students analyse word usage in their writing and visualising the frequency of words they have used.

Download Textal from the Itunes store

Clip go the shares with eduClipper

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The web is awash with curation and bookmarking tools that promise to help organise resources and links. Given the vast range of educational and teaching resources available, it’s not surprising that educators have embraced many of these tools, using them to organise personal libraries and share with colleagues and students. In recent times we’ve seen curation tools like Learnist and Edcanvas aimed specifically at education, and the recently launched eduClipper is another interesting entry into the educational collation field.

eduClipper helps users bring together their own uploaded resources and material from the web  into subject boards. These boards can be collaborative, making it useful for teachers who want to share planning or collate resources with a class (student accounts are available) . Popular file types (such as JPG & PNG images, PDF or Word files) can be uploaded manually, and web pages can be added as a bookmark or as a clip of specific text using the eduClipper bookmarklet. Google Drive files can also be added. Each eduClipper account includes 1 gigabyte of storage.

Clips can be taken added from Google Drive or a URL. Popular file types can also be uploaded. Details and tags can be added to a clip, and clips can be organised into subject boards.

eduClipper is designed for and limited specifically to primary and secondary educators and students. Several features demonstrate the level of thought that has gone into the design, such as the flag feature that can be used to identify inappropriate content. The eduClipper help page outlines the flagging process;

When you flag a piece of content, the following will happen.  It will be frozen from the site meaning that it is no longer able to be seen.  The user will get an Email notification that their content has been flagged and why.  Their teacher (if associated with an educator) will also receive an Email letting them know that the student’s content has been reported.

The student may enter an appeal for the content which will be sent to their teacher and eduClipper employees.

One exciting aspect of eduClipper is the citation feature, which uses the EasyBib service to provide a citation for each clipped resource. In our tests it worked very well when clipping links from the web. It would also be great to have an option to manually enter citation information for items that aren’t recognised automatically by EasyBib, so hopefully that comes in future updates. The citation feature was brought to my attention by Celia Coffa, who has also written a great post about how she plans to use eduClipper with her class. I look forward to reading more posts about how it goes.

eduClipper’s citation tool sets it apart from many other organisational sites

In my initial testing of eduClipper I did find some slight bugs when clipping items, particularly when using the eduClipper bookmarklet in Google Chrome. (Update: The bookmarklet has now been updated and seems more reliable. Here is Adam Bellow’s video demonstration of the bookmarklet). Some pages and boards also took a bit of time to load. This is probably to be expected with a relatively new web app  and we’d expect any bugs to be ironed out soon, but at this stage I wouldn’t recommend using it as your primary way of storing resources. We’re also yet to see how eduClipper will cover costs in the future, and the Terms of Service do list the service as ‘currently free’. As always, we’d encourage you to read these terms and consider the issues in using any free tool. eduClipper does include an option to export data out of your account, so that can give you some peace of mind.

My initial impression of eduClipper is that it is definitely worth testing out, although I do have some minor reservations related to a few bugs that should hopefully be ironed out soon. Already the growing community of users are sharing some great resources, and limiting the site to K-12 levels makes these resources much more relevant than what you’ll find on a site like Learnist. At this early stage eduClipper looks to be a valuable and promising addition to a growing field.