Feature blog – Whitefriars College – Fiction is like a box of chocolates

Posted on November 2, 2009 by slav

Web 2.0 dynamo Tania Sheko has developed a fiction blog for the students at Whitefriars College. Tania explains the reasoning behind the blog’s development:

Why I started to write ‘Fiction is like a box of chocolates’ – I wanted to do more than just talk about books. My aim was to present information about fiction in an informal way, providing hyperlinks to further information, but without cramming it into a half-hour talk. Blogging allows me to include images of books covers or authors, videos of interviews, book and movie trailers, or videos produced by the authors themselves. My idea was that people would browse what they wanted and when they wanted to. Students will always go to the videos; they’re raised on multimedia.

The blog is deliberately informal in tone, and invites comments and discussion. Initially I started a webpage which was too static, then an internal school blog, which I couldn’t share outside the school, and finally moved to a WordPress blog which has an unlimited audience. Sharing in this way has resulted in wonderful connections with people from all over the world, and a chance to exchange ideas and information. I think that blog commenting is still foreign to our students, and needs to be learned. If English teachers integrated fiction blogs into their classes, it would be just like reading the newspaper for news, only it would be browsing the blog for information about books and authors. In the same way that we teach students to find facts in newspapers and other traditional media, we should teach them to engage with opinions and ideas in newer media such as blogs.

Where the Wild Things Are

I don’t apologize for including as much audiovisual content as I can, as well as featuring books which have been made into films. I think the ubiquitous crossover between books and films should not necessarily be seen as a bad thing, as young people who don’t read voluntarily may come back to the book after enjoying the film. The media isn’t the most important thing, it’s the engagement with ideas and stories.

Thanks and well done again Tania. It’s great for students to be able to revisit what you have discussed at school or read about books you don’t have time to fit into your book talks. The incorporation of multimedia is a great idea and will lead more and more students back to books. Which is what we all want!

Feature blog – Round Reading @ Lowther Hall

Posted on October 26, 2009 by slav

Glenys Lowden, Head of Lowther Hall AGS’s LRC has developed a well-used blog for her students. A previous post explained how Glenys used a wiki for this topic, but on reflection of practicalities, she decided to change over to a blog. Glenys explains:

The program is called Round Reading. It was originally on a wiki, however I found I actually preferred the discussion aspect of the blog and I had successfully used this method in a Year 7 blog. Students are divided into groups depending on the novel they chose. They had a couple of weeks to read the novel and then are to post responses to questions which are outlined on each page.

As you can see by the number and extent of student responses, this is a widely used blog which gives students a forum to discuss their thoughts on books studied. Well done Glenys!

Feature blog – Whitefriars College – Tania Sheko’s year 7 English blog

Posted on October 12, 2009 by slav

Thanks to Whitefriars College teacher librarian Tania Sheko for sharing another of her virtual creations. This time, Tania has developed a blog to support her year 7 English class. Tania explains:

http://englishwfc.wordpress.com/ is basically something I started to support the year 7 English class I teach collaboratively with an English teacher at my school. I decided to document the progress of our journey through this class because I’d read other teachers’ blogs and found them to be helpful and inspiring. I wanted to include what worked and what didn’t work and why. I think it’s important to be honest so that readers can benefit from your experience. I include resources and links, student work, videos used and created, in the hope that a teacher may find something they could use – an idea, a word of caution, recommendations or advice. I also include a short list of my favourite English teachers’ blogs. These have been a wonderful, rich resource for me.

I also find that making myself record what we do in class is a worthwhile discipline. Nothing is forgotten or wasted, and I can look back to review what we’ve done, as well as clearly see the path we’ve taken and how far the students have come.

Thanks again Tania for your contribution to the world of Web 2.0 and for sharing your efforts with the readers of Bright Ideas.

Feature blog – Ballarat Grammar School

Posted on September 14, 2009 by slav

Marcia Phillips, Head of Library and Learning Resources at Ballarat Grammar School (and former Victorian CBC judge) has developed an interesting book blog for students and staff. Marcia explains the inception of the blog:

As a result of undertaking the SLAV Web 2.0 course and enjoying it enormously as well as learning an incredible amount, I decided to start a blog for the Ballarat Grammar Resource Centre. I first started blogging using our School’s Management system, Scholaris, but found this too restrictive, so I turned to Edublogs back in November, 2008 and started a new blog. I find Edublogs relatively easy to use and suitable for our needs. Not everything has worked and some days I cannot fathom why I can’t embed a video or load an image. I walk away and come back to it at a later date and often, although not always, experience a better result. However, due to the time that some postings take, I have found it quicker and easier to work from home on the blog. The speed of my computer at work compared to my home computer means I can accomplish so much more in a shorter space of time. I blog about what is happening in the Resource Centre, what is new, or a feature an author and their work. I try to keep my focus on what the students and staff want to know or read about. As a result it is not a personal account of what I am doing, with the exception of my reading. I often report on what I have recently read.

CodeX - The Ballarat Grammar Resource Centre blog

I have signed up students who can write posts although only a few have been active to this point, but I am hopeful more students will agree to contribute to the blog. The Year 10 English teachers are enthusiastic about show casing their students’ work via this medium and are working on different forms of reviews at present.

I am excited about CodeX and look forward to many more happy years blogging.

Congratulations to Marcia on a fabulous blog that looks appealing and is evolving quickly.

Feature blog – Eltham College Junior Library

Posted on September 7, 2009 by slav

Raeanne McLean, teacher librarian at Eltham College of Education Junior School has shared her experience of developing Web 2.0 resources for her students. She explains:

I finished my T/L course at CSU at the end of 2007 and then was excited to implement the things I had learnt. The course had given me the confidence and tools to try out new things on the web (but precious little time to do it!).

In 2008 I saw the promotion for The Victorian School Libraries Learning with Web 2.0 Program through SLAV. I am a hands on person and jumped at the chance and bought 8 other teachers onboard from our school. We set up a time each week in the library to work through each activity. We all found that we ‘played’ with the features during the week. I learnt so much by completing this program as I hit inevitable problems along the way that I had to solve.

The idea of setting up a blog was always on my ‘to do’ list but I didn’t feel confident enough. After the program I had a greater understanding of how to do it and the various applications that could be utilised. I have set the blog up specifically for years 3 and 4. There is so much out there but it is certainly a start for them and me. The students have really enjoyed it and have visited it from home and made comments. I have a link from our intranet under the library page so they can access it anywhere.

Homepage

An unexpected bonus is from the teachers and parents as a few have come and asked me about it. It has given the library yet another profile and avenue to be promoted. As I try different applications my confidence grows. I have dipped my toes into the blogging world and I am enjoying the experience.

It’s great to see that teachers, students and parents are benefitting from Raeanne’s blogging endeavours. Well done.

Hey! Teenager of the year

Posted on September 2, 2009 by slav

When attending the virtual release of the Inkys longlist, Bright Ideas met an excpetional teenager with a brillant blog. Focussing on books for teenagers, Steph Bowe’s blog Hey! Teenager of the Year is both informative and inspiring. Steph has agreed to let the readers of Bright Ideas know a little bit more about her blog.

About me: I’m a fifteen-year-old aspiring author who lives in Victoria, Australia. At the moment I’m finishing high school by correspondence, because it allows for a lot more freedom with my education and I have more time for reading and writing.

Earlier this year, I interviewed YA author and the manager of insideadog Lili Wilkinson on my blog. She invited me to be an Inkys judge, along with blogger Adele Walsh, three other teenage judges and last year’s golden Inky winning author James Roy. It’s been a lot of fun to be a part of.

About my blog: I started Hey, Teenager of the Year in April as a way to talk about books for teenagers. My aims for the blog were mainly to talk about the books I love and get to know other YA readers and writers. I emailed authors whose books I love and asked if they’d be interested in being interviewed, read and commented on the blogs of other teen bloggers and gradually I got more and more readers – something that when I had started, I didn’t expect at all. Now, I regularly receive books for review, and through commenting on blogs and writing guest posts more and more people discover my blog. Because of my blog, I was asked to be an Inkys 2009 judge and I was invited by author Susanne Gervay to the NSW Writer’s Centre Kids & YA Festival.

Hey! Teenager of the year is a fabulous resource as well as an exceptional model for other inspiring bloggers and writers, both young and not so young alike. Thanks to Steph for taking the time to speak to Bright Ideas. You can find out more information and contact Steph here.

Feature blog – Emmanuel College

Posted on August 24, 2009 by slav

Joyce Sendeckyj from Emmanuel College has kindly sent in the following information about the development of a library blog.

Just to share the Emmanuel College W.I.R.E.D. Blog that we are launching for our students to coincide with Book Week and the introduction of our inaugural Book Club.

Blog homepage

The idea for a Book Club and a blog combined nicely the aims of the promotion and enjoyment of reading and literature, the featuring of book awards and the integration of web interaction and publishing (ie Web 2.0 tools).

Emmanuel College has two secondary campuses, and our goals also include the communication and connection between students and interested staff of both campuses.

The marketing of Book Club and the blog has included, regular articles in the newsletter, links on the school intranet, flyers, promotion and viewing of the blog on Open Day and reminders at meetings and briefings. Book Club is every Tuesday (our first day was 11th of August) and our next step is to assist the students to ‘register’ to the blog.

I have not completed the SLAV 2.0 course (which I hear good things about) , however I did major in information technology and web publishing at CSU as part of my librarianship degree. A great deal of my major included Computer Supported Communication and Collaborative Group studies which incorporated Web interactive technologies. I have come to realise how benficial this study was and am loving the ongoing professional development by SLAV and ‘Bright Ideas’.

Happy Book Week.

Thanks to Joyce and her staff for alerting Bright Ideas to the new blog.

Feature blog – Monivae College

Posted on August 16, 2009 by slav

Nicola Crawford and Maree Bell from Monivae College Library & Information Centre have developed a strong Web 2.0 presence in their school. Nicola explains how this came about.

The WILD Library

Since completing the SLAV Web 2.0 course last year, we became inspired by all the terrific resources out on the World Wide Web. We wanted to share some of these with the rest of our school community, so we created ‘The WILD Library’ which is the blog of the Monivae College Library and Information Centre. The WILD Library contains lots of Web 2.0 Resources, plus “Good Library Stuff” such as authors, reviews, book requests, competitions and links to other useful information and resources. Students have begun to make contributions to the blog, but as yet it is early days.

'The Wild Library'

From little acorns…big trees certainly grow!! From a single Library oriented blog, we now have a nest of blogs to disseminate information to the different areas of the school community. The WILD Library acts as the primary blog, and from this there are links to all the other Monivae blogs. Some of these are more advanced than others, but all are a work in progress.

Exciting English

If you have a wander around the various blogs, you will see that the different Domains utilize them in different ways. Some use them as “go to” points when they begin a new topic. For example, “Super SOSE”, “Sensational Science” and “Fortes in Fide” (the Religion @ Monivae Blog) carry web lists for particular projects. These are used as starting points, or depending upon the scope of the topic can act to limit students to a particular selection of sites.

Sensational Science

The “Exciting English” blog has evolved differently. It has pages containing information and resources for teachers. This site is only in its infancy, eventually the aim is to provide resources for all the literature studied at the different year levels in the College.

Bathurst Island blog

“The Bathurst Island Blog” is run by my colleague Maree Bell. The aim of this blog is to provide information to students and parents about the 2009 Mission Experience to Bathurst Island. During the trip later in the year, it will be used as a travelogue of their adventures.

Ultimately, our aim is that the Monivae Blogs be the first port of call for staff and students when they are looking for resources or information from the World Wide Web. To date, this is probably quite optimistic, but we continue to encourage people to use and contribute to the blogs.

When we first dipped our toe into blogging, we never expected that it would blossom into such a wide ranging affair. We now have ten blogs at various stages of development, and we still have plans for others. We have just created an ICT Committee Wiki and our next project is a class blog in collaboration with one of our LOTE teachers.

Ten blogs ranging across a wide range of curriculum areas is certainly a major achievement. Well done to Nicola, Maree and all the staff involved!

Feature blog – Karen Kearney

Posted on August 10, 2009 by slav

Whitefriars College teacher librarian Karen Kearney has kindly agreed to share the development of her blog – Childhood Memories. Karen explains:

The SLAV “23 Things” course during 2008 saw the creation of my Childhood Memories blog. Our very first “thing” to do was to set up a blog, where reflections on each week’s tasks could be recorded.

Homepage

It was very difficult to decide just what the main focus of my blog should be. There were so many possibilities! I wanted something that was going to be of continued interest for me to write about, and that was interesting for anyone who wished to drop by and read it. After chatting away about some favourite childhood books in the first post, I decided to incorporate all of my interests into the blog, and write down some memories of my childhood.

As I explored each of the subsequent tasks, many times I was able to tie in the task with something from my childhood. Theatres have always been a large part of my life and the image generation tasks allowed me to explore some of the different ways I could present photos of our Melbourne theatres. The week we explored YouTube.I looked at different book trailers. Later I had fun exploring some old doll television commercials and some clips from classic television shows I watched as a child. These commercials are absolute gems if your classroom is comparing values important for girls growing up, as I did, in the 1960s, with that of today’s young girls. Exploring podcasts led me to many different podcasts related to both my professional and personal interests, so much so that I am now a devotee of podcasts as a source of information!

The blog has also been a place for me to record different ideas which have been useful both in classes and the school library, and as a reminder of useful sites and applications. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the black and white videos at Connect Safely for example, yet would probably have forgotten all about them unless I had recorded the site in a blog post.

Book Week ideas also made it into the blog. Last year our school library created lots of posters, using Glogster to advertise our book week activities. Some examples of ones I made can be seen on my blog. We also designed some Book Week activities using Web 2.0 technology, and again, posts were made on my blog to remind me of these ideas.

Karen's glogs

Wordlewas used to create word clouds. Examples of Wordles have been made, and can be seen on my blog. Short, written reviews of both Kill the Possum (James Moloney) and Miss McAllisters Ghost (Elizabeth Fensham) were found and then copied and pasted into the Wordle box. A click of the mouse then randomly arranged the words and created a word cloud, where words appearing more frequently were larger, and less frequent words were smaller. This was explained to the students and it was their mission to then work out which Wordle went with which book. Very popular books were chosen and students had to analyse each Wordle carefully and gather clues to help them correctly identify each book. Blurbs could also be used for this activity, or students could create their own Wordle by writing their own book reviews.

Miss McAllister's Ghost

Kill the Possum

Mosaic Maker, part of Flickr’s Big Huge Labs was used to create another competition. Around 10 well-known books were chosen and a mosaic was made for each. Using scans from the front and back cover, as well as finding other pictures which identified objects found within the book, twelve pictures in all, were used to create each mosaic. Examples can be seen on the blog. Students were able to try to guess which book each mosaic represented. If they found any too hard they were able to collect a sheet which had all of the titles listed, but each title was jumbled. Titles needed to be unjumbled before the mosaics could be matched to the books.

Black Dog Gang

Both of these activities were very successful. They were easy to prepare, and create, and were enjoyed by many of our students. They could easily be incorporated into Library classes at both primary and secondary levels, as either activities or displays. Better yet, have students create them.

I enjoy sharing my thoughts through writing my blog, and reflecting on the different Web 2.0 tools I have explored. Writing and commenting on blogs are a wonderful way to get to know people from all over the world. Whilst there may be few people in your circle of friends who share some of your interests, there will be many worldwide who do, and connecting with them is extremely satisfying.

Well done Karen and thank you for sharing your blogging journey with us.

Feature blog – Girton Grammar School

Posted on August 2, 2009 by slav

Girton Grammar School Head of Library (and immediate past Children’s Book Council Victorian Judge) Miffy Farquharson has developed two book blogs for her school. Miffy explains how they came about:

The student blog has been in place for about a term now. It is supposed to be by and for secondary students, but I am having trouble getting students to contribute. I think that this is because the students don’t actually do much blogging themselves. So you will see that most of the entries are by me.

Student book blog

I have set in place some protocols to keep the identity of our students anonymous, which includes only using their initials, and I edit out any mention of their age. I have tried to create enough categories to that when the blog starts getting really long readers will be able to sort through the entries to find age appropriate books easily.

I have also learned how to add tags, and create a cluster map. I have an accompanying Blog roll for my favourite bookish websites, which is slowly being added to. Crash Solo is one of my favourites.

This blog has been a huge learning curve for me, as I had only used a blog to record Hockey news and results in the past, and hadn’t got into any of the fun stuff like feeds and blogrolls in the Hockey blog.

I have also started a ‘grown-up’ book review blog which was prompted by the submission of a review of Tim Winton’s ‘Breath’ by a colleague. The review was very obviously for an ‘adult’ book, which was not appropriate for the student blog, so a new site was created.

Teacher book blog

Thanks to Miffy for sharing her efforts in getting students and teachers to read and blog. Well done.

School Library Association of Victoria

Category Archives: Feature blog