Feature use of Web 2.0

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PLN update

This year’s Personal Learning Network (PLN) course is underway, and we’ll bring you updates to refresh the memories of alumni and perhaps update your own web toolbox and PLN community.
The 2012 intake began simply, with discussions and reading about the idea of PLNs, creating a Google account and Reader subscriptions, and a couple of tasks to introduce some bright ideas early on.
Participants posted a message on Wallwisher about what they hoped to achieve in the course, and placed themselves on a Google map: both tools that can be used to collaborate with colleagues and in libraries or classrooms. It also gave participants a means of sharing information and reading about other people’s hopes and fears.

The next task was to set up a PLN blog, a huge task for people who’ve never done such a thing before. The blogs are coming in thick and fast, with some great posts and designs already. Take a little look here.
A web conference including a discussion with Miffy Farquharson (Mentone Grammar) and Celia Coffa (St Luke’s, Blackburn) introduced people to the Elluminate/Collaborate software and allowed us to connect and talk.
This week, people are launching themselves into social media, signing up for Twitter, facebook and testing out Skype.
The VicPLN facebook group is part of the course but also an ongoing PLN community to which you are all welcome.

A number of PLN participants have asked whether there are any classes or schools out there who’d like to connect through Skype or blogs.
Any takers?

Poetry mash up: Leanne Hampson

Leanne Hampson (aka The Resourcehound) from Brauer Secondary College recently completed the PLN program and is experimenting with web tools in her library and classroom. Her guest post today talks about how to create poetry mash ups with students.

Recently I was studying poetry with my year 9 English class, mainly focussing on analysing particular poems. Most students seem to find it difficult to create their own poetry and I certainly find it very difficult to assess (poetry is such a personal thing, don’t you think?). Then I happened across a Bright Ideas post about the Phat Poetry site and although I couldn’t seem to get the mash up function to work (more investigation required!), it was the spark I needed.

One thing I have discovered is that while students can use some computer programs well, they needed a lot of guidance and suggestions on how they might present their mash ups. Whenever I promote a particular web tool or program I like to demonstrate it to the students as well (the old, ‘and I expect yours to be much better than mine…’). This meant creating some mash ups of my own. This was quite addictive and I spent far too long on my ‘demos’ when I should have been writing reports…oh well.

Students used two texts with a similar theme but they could choose these themselves. I recommended they select song lyrics they felt strongly about and then we went to the library and searched the poetry collection for something that matched. Then students had to take lines from each text, find images and music to match the feel and atmosphere and then decide on a program to create their mash up. I recommended to students that they use either Photostory, Animoto, Movie Maker or Glogster. All of these have the capacity to combine text, images and sound together. I made examples in Photostory, Animoto and Glogster to show them.

Some issues we had were that Animoto tended to ‘eat’ their internet quota pretty quickly and its ability to add text is limited. But it does come out looking absolutely smashing! Glogster is also simple to create but I did struggle with how to let students share their work. I think this was because I was unfamiliar with the new Edu Glogster though, rather than a limitation of the site. Photostory was very straightforward and was probably the most successful of the three. We worked together to solve issues and had a great time in class looking at everyone’s work.

Overall the students were very engaged. They loved using their computers and the final products were impressive. It is amazing how effective the new texts were. One student used poetry written by her grandmother and even the ‘I hate poetry’ boys got enthused. I also used Rubistar to create an assessment rubric for the task (if you’d like a copy, contact me via my blog, The Resourcehound, or Twitter, @LHampso).

Here is an example I made using Animoto. It features ‘Been Caught Stealing’ by Jane’s Addiction and the poem ‘Stealing’ by Carol Ann Duffy.

Act Wild

Act Wild is a website, m-site and mobile app providing opportunities for students to take simple real world actions that benefit wildlife.

It offers information in a range of formats such as videos, fact sheets, images, and habitation mapping, and offers online actions that students can take if they want to get involved in saving the Sumatran Tiger or the Growing Grass Frog.

It also includes feeds on recent web or mobile initiatives by the Zoo and other wildlife organisations (for example, the use of iPads in Zoo learning activities, or new apps launched recently).

Act Wild is a partnership between Zoos Victoria and Greening Australia and is funded as part of the digital education content initiatives and strategies of the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) through the Find Use Share Education (FUSE) project.

Phat poetry

Here’s a great FUSE project, not just promoting poetry to students, but also highlighting the ways in which web tools can add creativity and fun to learning.

Phat Poetry is an interactive poetry website targeted at middle years students (VELS Level 5). The site allows students to research a range of poetic styles and techniques and explore poems in the Poetry Vault, chosen from a selection of classic and contemporary poets. Students are then encouraged to use original or published works from the site and combine it with photos, animation, video, sound effects and music to create a digital mashup.

Teen book videos

St. Patrick’s College of Ballarat hosted its annual Immersion Week for the students in year 9. This included students participating in two and three day elective units. One of those units, ‘Teen Book Video Awards’, was created by the dynamic teaching team of Michael Goss and Julia Petrov.

The unit involved students using online tools to create book trailers and publishing them to the Library webpage. The students used Windows Movie Maker to construct the trailer, Jam Studio to create the music and Flickr images as well as their own photography. The end result was impressive and the students are now keen to vote for their favourite trailer.

Here are two examples of student work:

Shutter Island by Lachy L and Joey S

Cirque du Freak by Lachlan K and Ash D

And here is the unit outline.

TEEN BOOK VIDEO AWARDS!

Digital Trailers

Description

Everyone loves a good story, so why not share some of the stories you have loved with others? In this unit you will create a 90 second book trailer that will be entered into a competition. You will:

Choose a book from a set list and/or bring along two of your favourite books;
Become familiar with the film platform for recording your trailer;
Learn about how to persuade an audience; and,
Enter your trailer into a competition.

Digital storytelling requires a different way of thinking about how you might develop and present the information about your book/s. You can choose from a variety of digital platforms to develop and present your trailer.

Rationale

At the conclusion of this unit you will be able to:

Create an engaging representation of a book in a well-structured multimodal text.
Participate in discussions and conversations about various strategies you will use to connect, organise and structure you text.
Use a digital platform to publish your trailer
Develop your skills as a writer.

Assessment

The trailer will be assessed using a rubric including the following elements:

audience;
text structure;
ideas;
character/s and setting;
vocabulary;
cohesion;
conventions (spelling, sentences, paragraphs)

Timeframe

Teen Book Video Awards is a two-day unit.

Thanks to Ria Coffey for this guest post and to the students for sharing their work.

Great new vodcasts for VCE students

Merspi is a free online social networked learning hub for VCE students, where they can ask questions and have them answered by members of the merspi community. All information is self-organised through Web 2.0 tagging and user votes.

Now merspi, in partnership with SLAV, presents The VCE Advantage vodcast series.

This project leveraged on this learning community by establishing a bank of videos that share strategies for the development of transferable skills that instill independent learning behaviours and deeper web-based research understandings.

The vodcasts provide tips, research strategies, guidance and pointers to useful resources to support VCE studies. Topics range from study and survival skills through to essay writing, power searching, online tools for organising and presenting, as well as tips for VCE English.

Find a way to alert your students and VCE teachers to these vodcasts: highlight them on your library website; screen them in your library; suggest them as resources for VCE orientation and information sessions ; email VCE students and teachers!

The vodcast are available via the VCE Advantage link on the merspi front page, directly from the merspi YouTube channel and through FUSE for all schools – search for merspi.

Guest Post: BialikTV by David Feighan

David Feighan, director of Libraries and Learning Resources at Bialik College, Hawthorn, Victoria, has been kind enough to do a guest post about BialikTV. BialikTV is a place where the college celebrates learning, reading, and literature.

BialikTV was created in response to the fact that content is becoming more varied, more immediate, and more multimedia. Students are still working with text, but increasingly they are also working with images, sound recordings and audio-visual content. As a result there is a change in how people find information, with YouTube now recognised as the second largest search engine after Google. As a library that thinks about how information creation, distribution and use is changing; we need to understand and be on top of these major trends. What is the role of the library in a post text multimedia world? How do we collect and integrate text and multimedia? What metadata do we use to facilitate access to multimedia content? How do we include the growing amount of multimedia citizen journalist content into our collections? How do we ensure we are using authoritative content? What will a school library collection look like in 5 or 10 years’ time?

BialikTV is also where we celebrate learning, reading and literature at Bialik College. As such it is a platform where we can host and celebrate the student’s work, for example the book trailers students create. To protect the children’s identity, and to prevent inappropriate comments, no children’s faces are shown, and the ability to comment has been removed from BialikTV.

Further reading:

· http://www.reelseo.com/youtube-search-engine-domination

· http://www.smartinsights.com/search-marketing-alerts/youtube-as-search-engine

· http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2078931/YouTube-Updates-Logoless-Player-HD-Previews-As-Seen-On-Pages

· http://socialtimes.com/youtube-and-the-future-of-citizen-journalism_b15810

Well done to David and the Library staff at Bialik College for creating BialikTV and for using it in such a wonderful way.

Miffy Farquharson and Bev Novak’s Prezi

Prezi is a zooming presentation application that allows you to show the connection between concepts as you zoom around the canvas. You are able to zoom in to focus on a piece of information, then zoom out to see the bigger picture. The prezi website provides a number of short videos that explain how to use the application.

Teacher librarians Miffy Farquharson and Bev Novak from Mentone Grammer (Mentone, Victoria) presented at the May SLAV conference Creative communication: A conference for library technicians and assistants on the topic ‘Social networking to publicise books’. To illustrate this talk, Miffy and Bev made a prezi. They have kindly allowed Bright Ideas viewers to see their prezi, and it is clear how effective a good prezi can be in conveying information and in capturing an audiences’ attention:

Thankyou Miffy and Bev, your prezi is fantastic. For those of us just starting to play with this application, your prezi shows us what is possible.

Guest post: Barkly College Libraries: Connecting, encouraging, blogging

The staff of Barkly College Libraries have created a wonderful blog, Barkly College Libraries, to connect the Barkly District, the College, and the Libraries, and to foster a love of reading and learning. Shelagh Walsh, Library Technician at Barkly College Secondary, has been kind enough to write a guest post about the creation of the blog, and how it is being used to encourage learning in the community.

Barkly College Libraries have been asked to write a guest article for this amazing blog and we feel very privileged to do so.

To put us into perspective – we are situated in the middle of the Northern Territory – about 500kms north of Alice Springs and 1000kms south of Darwin. We are classed as a remote location, and because of this, we have many challenges that other suburban schools may not have. Our student base is majority indigenous with over half of these students being ESL (English as a Second Language) students. As you could appreciate, libraries and reading are not high on their agendas.

We wanted something that, we hoped, would catch their attention – and, it should be said, that of the staff as well. Something to make it easy to keep people updated with anything that was happening in the library – an easier way to promote books and to bring new books to everyone’s attention – something we could use to promote our college and the Libraries. Another aspect of the creation of our blog was the fact that we, ourselves, were interested in learning and using the Web 2.0 tools. This seemed a way of combining both wants or needs into one – so to speak. Having tossed the idea around for a while, we sought approval from the Director of the College to go ahead.

After that, came the fun part. We started by researching a number of Library Blogs to get an idea of what others had done and what hosting site they were using. It appeared that Blogspot seemed to be the most commonly used, and was an attractive layout as well.

To give you an idea of the ease of setting up the blog – we did it in an afternoon at home with a laptop – while bathing my dogs. It was a snap. The hardest part was the first post – blank looks at each other – now we are here what do we want to say?

Our aims are simple – we want our students and staff to know what is happening in the Library world – and importantly, to feel a part of it. We are campaigning for book reviews by students – whether by themselves or as part of a class. Our kids love trivia and all that sort of thing, and so the Worthless Wisdom post was conceived. We have asked them for suggestions as well – if they feel an ownership, then hopefully they will use it. Currently there is an article posted from one of the year 7 classes after we spent a lesson showing them how a library works and how to find things. More lessons will involve research skills and evaluating websites. We have developed various ‘games’ and activities to get the message across without lots of talking and writing as we are an Indigenous ESL school and this seems to work well.

We are fairly passionate about reading and books and, I believe, have been reasonably successful in getting kids and books together, especially the senior students. So somewhere to review books, to be able to comment and discuss the books they had read seemed to be worth a try. Get them reading, we are halfway to getting them into learning as well was our thought – and if they don’t realise it is a sneaky attack on the flank, so much the better!

It is early days yet and we know that it is going to take a lot of effort and promotion to get this running the way we envisage. Setting up the blog is the easy part – it is getting everyone on board and using it, along with keeping it continually up to date with interesting posts that will keep us on our toes. But we are optimistic that it will become an important part of our schools – and meanwhile we, ourselves are learning lots and having fun. Who could ask for more than that?

I really didn’t realize that librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group … They are subversive. You think they’re just sitting at the desk, all quiet and everything. They’re like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn’t mess with them.”

Michael Moore.

Thankyou, Shelagh, for this wonderful look at how you are using a web 2.0 tool to foster learning, and well done to you and the Barkly College Libraries team on your great blog.

Guest post: An international 3-way webchat for Gippsland youth

On 21st May 2011, an innovative group took part in an international 3-way co-author webchat via Skype. The chat was set up by Phong Truong, Branch Support Librarian of the Civic Centre, Port of Sale, Wellington Shire. The webchat allowed rural youth to connect with authors. Particpant and author Hazel Edwards explains the process, the strengths of the webchat, and the challenges:

This morning we had a chat about writing which overcame geographical and a few other barriers.

This webinar was an innovation set up by Branch Support Librarian Phong Truong after attending a talk I’d given at the SLV on our YA novel ‘f2m:the boy within’. She wanted to use technology to attract youth & provide access to counselling resources on issues such as gender.

Across the Tasman and across Skype, it was a 3 way Webinar between Wellington Shire Gippsland Youth Council members, co-author Ryan Kennedy in Wellington New Zealand and myself in Melbourne.

Ironically, at first, we didn’t realise both places were both called Wellington.

Did it work? Yes. But we had a few technical hitches. Despite the trial on Thursday afternoon, where audio problems were solved with a closer microphone relaying questions, getting the visuals working three ways on the Saturday ‘real’ event was a challenge.

Was it worthwhile? YES!

Strengths of Webinar:

Role modelling by Ryan as young novelist, writing first book from own gender experience.

Demonstration of how ‘outside’ authors could be accessed, where-ever they or potential readers live.

Practical sharing of how co-authors had utilised electronic ways of collaborating (and how to cope when things go wrong).

Good questions and candid answers.

Encourageded rural youth to utilise Internet resources when seeking answers to problems: relationships, gender or literary.

This area has a Youth Council with a Youth Mayor, and Pauline the Deputy Youth Mayor participated.

Audio was clear.

What have we learnt from the experience:

Network connection recommended over Wifi.

Need to have a test session, especially for sound. Re-position seating.

Prepared questions

Suggest audience identify themselves when asking questions.

Wear a bright coloured jacket to stand out from dark chairs.

Intimate group enabled questions to be answered fully. ‘Casual feel’ atmosphere conducive to a real exchange.

Since our YA novel subject matter of gender was controversial, helpful to have co-authors viewpoints from varied backgrounds & generations & access to their website resources such as YA guests blogs.

Needs a co-ordinator to arrange books available for reading beforehand & this is where e-books are more easily accessible.

Challenges:

Several youth who were expected didn’t make it, but there were eight in the room, including the deputy Youth Mayor.

Technical issues with getting the visuals to work three ways on Skype. After a 10 minute delay, we decided to go with visuals between the Wellington Youth and Ryan in NZ, and utilise Hazel’s audio although they could ‘see’ Hazel. At the end, we had a concentrated visual session between Hazel and the group in Gippsland.

Co-ordinating: Phong prepared books, handouts etc and invited reps from youth groupings, but 10 am Saturday a bad time for techie support and those who play football.

Questions covered writing issues such as how to co-write on Skype and e-mail, how did the book get published and benefits in e-book format. Gender questions included issues such as how do you get support in a rural area, Ryan’s personal experiences transitioning and media and librarian reactions to ‘f2m:the boy within’.

PS Only afterwards, I realised the room in which participants chatted was called the Wellington Room! I was still in my Melbourne study, but my husband had cleared up his desk, visible behind my head on the web cam. That’s another plus for participating in web chats! Desks get tidied or are caught forever on web cam.

Phong outlines the Wellington Shire Gippsland Youth Council and lists those involved in the Skype chat:

The Wellington Shire Youth Council is made up of 18 youth between the ages of 12-25, who eagerly represent young people within Wellington Shire. It provides an avenue for youth issues, feedback and communications to liaise with Wellington Shire Council, forming a bridge between youth and local government. Youth Councillors are instigators of positive change and act as role models and leaders with the community.

Youth Councillors who were in attendance:

Krystal Davison, Youth Mayor, 19 yro, Sale

Pauline Rathnow, Deputy Youth Mayor, 23 yro, Wurruk

Mallory Ginkel, Youth Councillor, 15 yro, Sale

Dean Hardisty, Youth Councilllor, 19 yro, Paradise Beach

Mel Giles, Youth Councillor, 22 yro, Sale

Staff:

Phong Truong, Branch Support Librarian

Katy Cummins, Communications Officer – Media publicity and photo

Damian Norkus, Information Technology Support Officer – Set up of Skype link

Before participating in the webchat, the youth were expected to read f2m. The trailer for the novel is below:

Thankyou to Hazel and Phong for sharing their webchat experience. What I love about this webchat is that regional youth were provided with role-modeling from the authors, experienced amazing technology, and discovered how there are really no barriers anymore to what can be achieved (co-authors Hazel and Ryan explained how they co-wrote on Skype). If you are thinking of organising your own author/youth chat via Skype and would like to contact Hazel, Ryan, or Phong, please leave a comment or contact them via their websites (linked to above). To see reviews of the fabulous book f2m, visit Google Reads.

Wiki Walk-Through by Teachers First

Teachers First have put together Wiki Walk-Through to help teachers who are wanting to know about wikis and how to use them in their classrooms. The ‘Wiki ideas appropriate for most subjects and grade levels’ is great for people who know the basics and want to know how to integrate wikis into their classroom teaching and student learning. The site gives some fantastic classroom ideas for maths, science, social studies, language arts, and other subjects. Even if you are an advanced wiki user, this site can give you some new ideas for using the tool in the classroom. I really like the travel brochure idea in the language arts where the wiki is used to ‘advertise’ different literary, historical, and/or cultural locations and time periods, such as ‘Dickens’ London, fourteenth century in Italy in Verona and Mantua ( Romeo and Juliet), The Oklahoma Territory, The Yukon during the Gold Rush, Ex-patriot Paris in the Twenties, etc.’ .

Maths Maps

Tom Barrett has created Maths Maps using Google Maps. The maps show the location, and the placemarks explain the math activities (placemarks are colour-coded according to year level, from year 1 to year 6). Each location deals with one topic. For example, there are ‘Measures in Madrid’, ‘Shapes in Paris’, ‘Data handling in Nottingham’, and ‘Addition in Adelaide’. What a fantastic way to interest students in math topics.

Maths Maps is a collaborative project that relies on teachers adding to the maps. So, if you let Barrett know the map you are interested in exploring with your class, he will make you an editor of that map. Have a look at the blog page for detailed information:

Worth watching – Mike Matas: A next-generation digital book

Thankyou to Lindy Hathaway for suggesting this Ted Talk video to subscribers of OZTL_NET (volume 87 issue 7). The video is of Mike Matas, a software developer and co-founder of Push Pop Press, showing the first full-length interactive book for i-Pad (Our Choice by Al Gore) (filmed in March 2011). Have a look and see what you think. The comments below the video on the Ted Talk site are interesting to read. To view a trailer of the digital book Our Choice , click here.

Guest post: Junior M’s blogging and global collaboration, by Michelle Scott

Michelle Scott is a teacher at St. Luke the Evangelist School, Blackburn South, Victoria. Michelle has developed a bright, engaging blog with her junior class called Junior M’s Learning Journey that showcases their learning using web 2.0 technology. The class is also involved in a wonderful exchange activity that is connecting them globally. Michelle explains below:

In 2010 I completed the SLAV Web 2.0 course along with several other teachers at St Luke’s. At this time a blog was started for our two grade 1/2 classes – Junior’s Jig. My level partner Verona maintained the blog with my class chipping in posts every now and then. This year my class Junior M have the very own blog (we signed with blogger after much unsuccessful wrangling with wordpress), Junior M’s Learning Journey. My aim for the blog is to provide the St Luke’s community (parents, families and friends) and a gradually developing group of global friends (through twitter), an insight into the learning Junior M is engaged with most weeks.

Recently, my students made a significant connection with a school in Ontario, Canada with whom we are twitter-friends. After we posted questions on twitter to the Gill_Villeans they asked us if we’d like to host their class mascot, Gill the goldfish, and to add photos etc., of his adventures at St Lukes on their wiki. Their teacher is using this as a platform to further engage her students in writing.

Over the term holidays we will send our class mascot, Ella the echidna, to Canada. Students in Junior are fascinated with the process of receiving a package from overseas and have many ideas for how to host our visitor, which they actively implement.

I feel this process of blogging and commenting on blog posts extends the children, from enriching their thinking both laterally and critically, to exposing them to a world beyond their classroom. This in turn shows them how much in common we have with people around the world.

The understanding of differences and similarities that comes from global collaboration is priceless. Thankyou, Michelle, for sharing your teaching and learning with us. All the best to Ella on her big trip.

’55 interesting ways to support writing in the classroom’

55 interesting ways to support writing in the classroom (and counting) is a compilation created by Tom Barrett, that can be contributed to by whomever. It is a ‘this is brilliant’ Google Doc resource that is flying around Twitter and is being contributed to through crowdsourcing. It is part of Barrett’s ‘Interesting Ways’ series and is definately worth a long look. Literacy is cross-curricular, so remember to share this resource with all.

Guest post: Class blog ‘Learning Together’ by Marie Kennedy

Marie Kennedy is a prep teacher at St. Luke the Evangelist School, Blackburn South, Victoria. Marie and her prep students’s class blog, Learning Together, is a wonderful example of how web 2.0 tools can be used to support and extend teaching and learning, and as a way to make connections:

I started my class blog following the SLAV Personal Learning Network PD I was a part of early in 2010, where I had learnt so much about Web 2.0 tools and the many benefits of blogging for Learning and Teaching. I was excited about the potential for local and global collaboration and creating strong links between home and school. I had always used ‘myclasses’ as a way to communicate with parents about what was happening in the classroom however I could see the enormous potential of creating a class blog.

As a Prep teacher I spend a lot of time modelling how to use a blog. Through this modelling the students are learning important protocols and safe behaviours when navigating the online world. I am responsible for posting photos, writing most of the posts and moderating comments. My students take part by sharing reflections on their learning using tools such as voicethread, wallwisher and videos. I share their writing, reading, maths and art through slideshows. My students also become involved in commenting. I model the process and at this early stage of the year I type their thoughts and ideas. My students are articulating to a global community what they have discovered helping them to consolidate and deepen their understandings. Many visitors to our blog ask interesting questions that extends the students thinking and challenges them to consider new perspectives. These are some of the powerful advantages of blogging.

While we have had success reaching out to the global community one of the challenges of blogging is involving our parent community. My major aim for developing a class blog was to connect with parents and families. To provide a springboard for conversation at home about what is happening at school and how the students are thinking and learning. While some parents do visit and comment I have had limited success with this. As a school we are hoping to provide a parent night on blogging to address this issue.

Blogging allows for authentic and rich conversation both within and beyond our school community.

Thankyou, Marie, for sharing your fantastic work, and the work of your students. I particularly like how visually appealing Learning Together is, with the images of your students and their work. Your adopted pet Freddie, the spider, is a cute extra on the blog and a good way to create interest in any blog (e.g. name the virtual pet or avatar). Learning Together provides uses of web 2.0 tools that will offer inspiration to many.

Guest post: Inside a Dog with Heath Graham

The Centre for Youth Literature’s (CYL) Inside a Dog website was launched last night at the Docklands. Heath Graham, the Learning Programs Officer for Online Education at State Library of Victoria, has kindly outlined what students and educators will be getting from the new Inside a Dog. In Heath’s words, “The old dog has learnt a whole bunch of new tricks”.

The new version of Inside a Dog maintains all of the features of the old site, adding new functionality to help readers to share what they love and discover new books.

The biggest new feature on the site is the addition of member-run book clubs. If you are a fan of a particular author, genre, or series, you can now start your own Inside a Dog book club and find other like-minded readers to share ideas, post reviews, or show off your fan art. Book clubs can be either open membership, allowing any of the site’s users from around the world to join and contribute, or closed, requiring permission from the clubs’ creator to join.

Each site member will have their own page, listing reviews they have written, their favourite and recommended books, and the book clubs they are members of. “Star reviewers” will earn privileges, ranging from recognition on the site itself to copies of books to review.

In addition to individual pages for members, each book reviewed on the site will have its own page. Book pages will list all reviews of the book, along with any additional content supplied by publishers, including first chapters, book trailers, and audiobook snippets, and a list of recommendations and related titles.

Recognising the popularity of the site with teachers and librarians, the revamped site has curriculum-linked resources supporting the use of book clubs in the classroom, writing book reviews, and exploring the use of new media in creative responses to literature, as well as information for teachers on copyright and using online resources in the classroom.

Inside a Dog will continue to run a news blog, and the popular Writer in Residence feature, allowing readers to interact and join in a discussion with a new YA author every month. The Inky Awards, yearly reader-voted awards for favourite local and overseas book, and the Inkys Creative Reading Prize will also continue.

In addition to this new version of a favourite website, there have been other changes behind the scenes at the Centre for Youth Literature. Adele Walsh (aka blogger Persnickety Snark), has begun as the new CYL Program Coordinator, following Mike Shuttleworth’s resignation for personal reasons. Lili Wilkinson, herself an award-winning YA author, will also be leaving CYL to commence a creative writing PhD at the University of Melbourne. Both Lili and Mike have made enormous contributions to the Centre’s work, and they are wished the very best for their future endeavours. The Centre’s new status as a Key Organisation for the Australia Council for the Arts kicks off a new era for CYL in 2011. For more information please contact the Centre for Youth Literature on 03-86647262, or youthlit@slv.vic.gov.au

Thankyou to Heath and the CYL team for providing such a fantastic website for readers to use, enjoy, and contribute to.

Animoto: A favourite of 2010

Animoto changed the way we did things in the library at Mooroopna Secondary College in 2010. We used Animoto to create book trailers from photos, video clips, and music. Using the videos that animoto collated for us, we had a new way to connect to the students, one that far surpassed trying to talk to reluctant readers about a book that we thought they would like. Showing them a book trailer talks to them in ways we never could. Below is an example of a book trailer created by library staff in June 2010, for The Book of Lies by James Maloney:

We have found that many students connect with the book trailer format, as it is in the same vein as a movie trailer. Since using Animoto the library staff have presented book trailers to english literature circle classes to showcase novels (using the IWB). We have connected with authors, some of whom have kindly given us images to use in the book trailers of their books. Furthermore, we have been invited to go into the classrooms to show staff and students how to use this tool. The students, especially, like seeing each others completed Animotos. Currently, a media class is using Animoto to create cybersafety videos.

A question that is often asked is “how do we get our class signed up?”. One option I use is below:

* First sign up in Animoto for Education. This provides you with an education code to get Animoto Plus.

* Create a ‘fake’ account in gmail for your class, e.g. litcirclesyear7@gmail.com.

* Sign yourself up to Animoto using this email address and the education code Animoto would have sent you via email.

* Now, sign-up each of your students using your fake gmail account. To do this, you need to add a ‘+1′, ‘+2′, ‘+3′ etc. to the email address for each student. E.g. student 1′s email address would be: litcirclesyear7+1@gmail.com; student 2′s email address would be: litcirclesyear7+2@gmail.com; student 3′s email address would be litcirclesyear7+3@gmail.com, etc.. Don’t forget to include the education code when signing up.

* Don’t forget to write down the email address and password for each of your students.

* The benefit of having them all signed up like this is that each student’s Animoto video will go to the fake gmail account that you control. Therefore, you can monitor their use and assessing their work is made simpler.

I must admit, for large classes this is quite laborious, and if you could it would be easier to have each student sign themselves up using the email address (as above) that you assign them.

Animoto is enjoyable to use, and at Mooroopna Secondary College we are now seeing students submit reviews for our review blog MSC’s licorice allsorts using this applicaiton (things were quite dry on that front!).

If you have a particularly favourite tool of 2010, please leave a comment and let us know.

Out of this world – a Prezi

Heather Stapleton, the Library Technician at St Joseph’s College Geelong has created an excellent Prezi. She explains why she developed the Prezi:

The following Prezi has been created to support the Year 9 English unit on Science Fiction. The boys study The giver in this unit and are also required to read a sci-fi novel of their choice. The latter can be difficult for some of our reluctant readers so I thought I would do a trial run with a Prezi presentation. The boys are familiar with PowerPoint and use it regularly so I wanted to present the book suggestions in a different way and not risk ‘death by PowerPoint’. The book selection caters for a wide range of reading abilities and interests.
Science Fiction is a genre that is very rich and varied. I have loosely grouped the selections in sub-genres but many of the titles crossover. The presentation was done this way to assist the boys and act as a guide for them to find a book of their own choosing.

Out of this World on Prezi

Best viewing of this Prezi is Fullscreen in manual mode. To achieve this press the play button and once it loads move your cursor over More and click onFullscreen that appears above. Press the arrow keys to move through the presentation at your own pace. To improve the quality of the YouTube book trailers reduce their size by using the scroll button on your mouse. You can also use your mouse to pan and zoom freely within the presentation.

The Maze runner book trailer featured in this presentation is an Animoto creation by Sarah Ehlers. This could be an excellent activity for students.

Thanks Heather for showing readers your excellent Prezi and the motivation behind its development.

Update and final thoughts on Tania Sheko’s Flickr project

You may remember reading about Whitefriars College teacher librarian Tania Sheko‘s collaborative learning project using Flickr. The project has now concluded and a few of the students have shared their thoughts, reflections and ideas about what they loved most about the project.

Tania explains:

As part of the evaluation of this project, I interviewed a few students to get their feedback. You have no idea how long it took me to convert the interviews to film and embed them in this blog. Sorry about background noise!

Thanks to Tania and her students for a number of posts about the project from the beginning right through to the end. Sounds like it was a great success and thanks for sharing.

animoto for geography

Penleigh and Essendon Grammar teacher librarian Joanna Durst has created a terrific animoto as a guide for her year 7 geography students.

Joanna explains:

I prepared this one to demonstrate how the Year 7 students might make one for their “My favourite destination” unit in Geography. It was lots of fun.

Creating your own digital story or presentation is an excellent way to show students what can be achieved. Nice work Joanna and thanks for sharing.

Book Week 2010 @ Whitefriars College

Thanks to Rhondda Powling, Head of Library at Whitefriars College and School Library Association of Victoria President for allowing a parallel post from her blog about the success of their Book Week activities this year.

We tried to do things differently this year. We finally have a large screen for showing digital images, videos, etc. and we bought some digital photo frames. This allowed us to change the emphasis to digital formats.

Book Trailer Competition: Our library technician Dawn created a great competition by gathering together 21 book/film trailers and putting them into a single film using Corel Video Studio. She spent a good deal of time putting in text (and editing the trailers slightly when the titles were a bit too prominent). Our students had to fill out the title of the film, the title of the booked linked to it the author of the book and in what section of the library you would find it (fiction, Non Fiction, picture book, graphic novel. The video file was playing everyday before school and at recess with sound and with the mute button on during class times. Some of the seniors were very taken with the idea and worked on the clips in one of their private study sessions.

Library Treasure Hunt: Another of our staff, Karen Kearney, created a quiz that had the students using their research skills as well as their observation skills. This was a great way for all the year seven students to put into practice the different searching. As part of the personal development classes they were given the chance to take part. They could answer many questions with the appropriate use of the catalogue and information pages linked to the library website. We also had them come up to the library to answer the rest of the questions. The quiz could be done at any time during the week and some of the older boys were very confident they would do well.

Picture puzzles: We created more picture puzzles using the Mosaic maker from Big Huge Labs. Each of the 7 mosaics referred to books at WFC with “bridge”in the title. There was some fun when finding pictures that gave clues to the books. All the clues were designed to link to keywords the notes and/or subjects linked to the books when you looked up the catalogue. The images were saved onto memory sticks (each with a mosaic number image before it) and then shown using the digital photo frames.

Make your own animation

Building a bridge: This activity was held over Wednesday lunchtime. A small but dedicated group of boys undertook to build a bridge using paper, rubber bands, paper clips, straws and string. The bridges had to span 20cms and we tested how much weight they could hold by putting books on them. We had some very interesting attempts at bridges. Some were remarkably strong and held a lot of weight and others just looked interesting.

The Literary Heads competition:

On Friday some of the teaching staff helped us out by being the guinea pigs and wearing the names of various literary characters. They took it all in good spirit and the students loved the incongruity between the staff members and their character label.

The Literary Heads competition: On Friday some of the teaching staff helped us out by being the guinea pigs and wearing the names of various literary characters. They took it all in good spirit and the students loved the incongruity between the staff members and their character label.

Make your own animation

Our students really got into the spirit and a few had favourites, who they tried to help out . It was a lot of fun and the laughs were great to hear. All the students were sorry when the bell rang for period 4.

During lunch times we showed some short television programs. Loosely based around the idea of using media to bridge the gap between our students and literature the viewings included some of the 1960′s Batman episodes (we have quite a few Batman graphic novels and books of the later Batman films). We also had the first episode of Black Books, the dictionary burning episode of Black Adder, and future screenings will include the original as well as more current Dr Who episodes, some other cartoons and some adaptations of children’s books. Requests have included Round the Twist and Lockie Leonard. Of curse the seniors have asked to see more of Black Adder and the Batman series. We plan to show more book trailers, author sites, and slides of new book covers as well as student work.

As always the boys will have an afternoon tea and be presented with certificates, by the principal, for doing well. They all will be able to choose books as prizes and we will make up book plates to celebrate their achievement. Many more than just the “winners” (those who joined in) will also attend and all will be able to ask their parents to come as well as it is held after school.

What a fabulous week for the students. Well done to all of the staff who worked so hard to make it the success it obviously was.

OLMC on Twitter

Our Lady of Mercy College Heidelberg has a library Twitter account.

We also set up a twitter account which was linked to the facebook page. This was an attempt to tackle the facebook conundrum directly and to see if, as educators we can communicate through our students’ choice of social media. After a year of working to inform teachers of the potential of Web 2.0 in learning and assessment, I also wanted to look at my own area and how we could utilise these tools.

Teacher librarian Michael Jongen explains how the need to tweet came about.

At OLMC Library we have been using Twitter to try to engage and communicate with students. We use it to promote events like Book Week, Readers Cup and new books as well as good web links. Previously it was linked to the OLMC Library Facebook page which meant that I could place links, news etc onto Face Book and it would also be uploaded to Twitter. Now that we have a closed group Facebook page this can no longer be done and I have to post separately to Twitter.

I feel that the initial enthusiasm shown by students to Twitter has evaporated and that they are back to Facebook which seems to meet their needs. While I feel it is a great tool for educators I feel it is not so important with the young who seem to be enamoured with Facebook. I will still use

Twitter to promote but will focus on Facebook.

Interestingly Head of Library Tricia Sweeney and I are using the school’s intranet portal to promote much more. Filters enable us to target Year levels so we can target our message much more effectively.

It is really worthwhile to give some new communication methods a trial, so well done to the OLMC library team!

Google Lit Trips @ Mooroopna SC

Teacher librarian Rachel Fidock has kindly shared information on how she has been developing Google Lit Trips with her colleagues and students at Mooroopna Secondary College.

Google Earth and Google Lit Trips:

Google Earth provides a tool for students to present oral presentations on their novels (where appropriate (i.e. aspects of the book can be highlighted by Google Earth)). We have low VELS levels in Speaking and Listening, possibly because students are not at ease giving oral presentations (often the way they are assessed for Speaking and Listening). Google Earth helps students to divert the attention from themselves. For example, they can show the class a trip they create that follows the journey taken by the main character in the novel (e.g. Swerve Google Lit Trip Presentation).

There are options to add images (creative commons-licensed images from Flickr), or show pictures that are already on Google Earth. There are so many options in Google Earth that students can make it as in-depth as they wish. The best part is they can record their voice over their journey so they have another option of meeting the requirements of Speaking and Listening. I have put together a guide to using Google Earth for the English staff that highlights how a Google Lit Trip can be used as an alternate assessment item for students to meet the requirements of VELS levels in Speaking and Listening, and created a Google Lit Trip on the novel Swerve as an example of its use.

We are now in the Ultranet training stage and are looking for ways the Library services, particularly our website, can become part of the student’s virtual space.

Rachel has taken the hard work out of learning how to introduce Google Lit Trips to students by providing readers of Bright Ideas with a Guide to Google Earth and Google Lit Trips which includes step by step instructions (including screenshots) for teachers and even assessment rubrics. A brilliant resource for teachers.

The Lit Trip that Rachel has created for Phillip Gwynne’s Swerve is an excellent example of what can be created. Please note that you will need to have Google Earth installed to view Rachel’s fantastic presentation.

OLMC Facebook Fan page update

Bright Ideas featured Our Lady of Mercy College Heidelberg Library’s Facebook Fan page three weeks ago. As most readers would know, Facebook has had some serious fallout due to privacy changes (or more to the point, lack of privacy) and OLMC have changed their approach to Facebook. Teacher librarian Michael Jongen says:

This week following the lead of the Media Teacher I pulled down olmclibrary Facebook page as he had pulled down his media page.

This was because of safety concerns. A speaker on cyber-safety had spoken at the school and demonstrated that identifying a school is a danger to students who ‘fan’ the site.

Both of us have re-established our pages as a group which is invite only and private. The groups name is anonymous in terms of identifying the school. Both of us will need to build up the audience base we had to promote our services and useful links and information. We have used the same branding as the media department.

As a school we have looked at using Facebook for assessment and concluded that wikis and blogs and googlesites were better Web 2.0 tools for providing collaborative and private assessment within and educational context.

It seems clear that with recent Facebook controversies about safety and privacy that if as educators we wish use Face-book to communicate with our students it should only be done as a closed group with strict membership control.

This is a parallel post reproduced with permission from Michael’s blog web 2.0 and other library stuff. Thanks to Michael for taking the time to inform readers of Bright Ideas of the changes and why they were necessary.

Little Big Planet @ McGuire College

Award winning teacher Adrian Camm has been using the Playstation 3 video game Little Big Planet with his classes at McGuire College as a learning tool. Adrian explains:

The aim of this particular project is to engage year 7 and 9 students in game-based learning using the Playstation 3’s multiplayer functionality and the game Little Big Planet. Not only to students have to communicate and collaborate to solve problems within the game, but it then allows for students to be level designers and developers. The game includes an accurate physics engine that allows for exploration of a host of physical and mathematical concepts such as force, momentum, gravity, drift, scale and radius, to name a few. This initiative covers many other VELS domains and includes scope for cross-curricular opportunities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The project is only really just starting but we envision that students will initially participate in multiplayer game play and then will develop game levels that reinforce or perhaps even expose them to science, technology, engineering and mathematics concepts. Students will learn about scientific concepts by exploration, will be engaged in self-directed, non-linear learning and contribute to a vibrant community of Little Big Planet developers and enthusiasts. Other classroom content would encompass game design principles, game play, debriefing to talk about application of game design principles to current levels etc.

It is proposed that this method of teaching science concepts (having the student at the centre) will lead to improved learning outcomes as opposed to the traditional textbook approach. In addition to measuring changes in skill at level design and changes in knowledge of scientific concepts, the evaluation of the project will investigate attitudes and perceptions of using game-based learning in the classroom from a student, parent and teacher perspective.

Adrian is a true innovator and is passionate about using technology to help students attain their very best. Thanks Adrian for sharing this amazing project.

OLMC Facebook Fan Page

Our Lady of Mercy College, Heidelberg teacher librarian Michael Jongen has recently developed a Facebook Fan page for the students. Michael explains:

After a meeting of CLANS (Catholic Network) librarians where we had discussed social networking, I decided to create a facebook fan page for the library. This is an attempt to engage with the students but we will maintain the page so that is current, informative and fun. Several of the creative faculties already use facebook fan pages to communicate with students. We also set up a twitter account which was linked to the facebook page. This was an attempt to tackle the facebook conundrum directly and to see if, as educators we can communicate through our students’ choice of social media. After a year of working to inform teachers of the potential of Web 2.0 in learning and assessment, I also wanted to look at my own area and how we could utilise these tools.

Head of Library Tricia Sweeney and I feel that we will use this as our main medium of communication with the girls and as a tool to showcase our web 2.0 projects such as book trailers and book blogs.

Some newspaper reports in April 2010 suggested that teachers should not ‘friend’ students on Facebook. OLMC has addressed these issues in the following way:

Our Facebook page was devised as a fan page. Several other subject areas use the same approach, this enables students to fan the page rather than have to become a friend of the teacher. olmclibrary facebook page has three administrators, including Tricia Sweeney as Head of Library.

We have an eSmart committee at the School which Tricia and I both sit on alongside the IT manager and the Vice Principal. We have draft protocols.

Facebook is a good way to engage and communicate with students. Fan pages can be created in Subject areas and domains e.g. olmclibrary, media, drama and dance pages. It is not recommended that Facebook be used for assessment or assignments. It is recommended that teachers do not ‘friend’ with students.

At OLMC the message is very strong that teachers should think very wisely about ‘friending’ current students. Any current Facebook controversy or issue is raised at the weekly staff briefing by the Principal.

An excellent idea by Michael and Tricia to meet the students’ interests by joining Facebook, but also by setting up a number of procedures that ensure that students stay safe online.

Virtual Tour of the Sistine Chapel

How about a virtual excursion (field trip) to the Sistine Chapel? With 360 degree views of the Chapel that includes ceilings and floors, this is a tremendous site for art, history or religious instruction.

The Vatican hosts the site and lets the magnificence of the Chapel speak for itself. There are no words or links on the site, only the ability to rotate the view of the Chapel via your mouse.

Thanks to the very excellent Richard Byrne from Free Technology for Teachers for passing on this link.

A Backyard Beginning – Hawkesdale P-12

By Tadfish

The absolutely amazing and multi award winning teacher Anne Mirtschin from Hawkesdale P-12 College has kindly shared information about how her blogging journey with her students began:

Three years ago, a rich picture studies case grant from DEECD required us to use web2.0 tools. A quick request to my computer technician found some information on web2.0 tools including blogging. The article was produced by Heather Blakey of Soul Food Cafe blogging fame. By a strange coincidence, I also received an email to say that a globalteacher and global student campus was being set up, so I immediately enrolled. As I had no idea what to do with these blogs, I, in usual form procrastinated.

As luck would have it, our librarian Faye Matters had attended a SLAV PD in Melbourne, heard a lady called Heather Blakey speak and immediately booked her up for a cluster PD session and art workshop at our school, Hawkesdale P12 College.

Heather squeezed in some time to come to my IT class and discuss the possibility of a backyard blog. We were researching volcanic evidence in our area, and backyards seemed a logical beginning as students had lots of interesting things to talk about – and they all love their backyard. The backyard blog began as a class blog. Students wrote about their backyards. I would grab their file out of their folders and post it onto the blog. Imagine our amazement and delight, when after one of the first posts we received several comments!

Your “backyard” is beautiful! Thank you for sharing it with the world.

Lori, California

Thank you so much for sharing your backyard. When we all share like this, it makes our world just a little smaller and better.

She Wolf

These comments acted like magic to my class and me. Somebody was reading our work, we seemed to have a global voice. Later we found out, it was Heather’s wonderful blogisphere who were reading and commenting. However, we were up and blogging. Soon students from years 5 to 10 had individual student blogs. It was hard work, as there was so much to learn and much of our work was by trial and error– posts, dashboards, tags, categories, widgets, pages etc all had to be learnt. However, Heather created the wonderful “25 steps to web2.0”. Each day for the 25 days to Christmas, Heather and her blogging friends would add a post each day, illustrating some aspect of blogging.

From humble and unknown beginnings, my globalteacher blog became my class blog, and now features the following:-

Posts

Posts with tutorials

Posts with class instructions

reflections

Active web2.0 tools for interactive global project use eg wallwisher with Malaysia and voicethread with Boston

Instructions when I am absent including a link to a backchannel, when it is possible for me to connect with them virtually eg chatzy etc

Pages include the following

About Me – a vital and important page where most visitors will go to seek out validity and nature of the blogger.

Current timetable and list of current classes

Code of conduct

E-safety

Past students

Resources

Global projects

Widgets and sidebar features include the following:-

A flikr widget that shows photos added to my online photo album.

Time clock

Categories etc

Various world maps to visualize where virtual visitors are from eg clustrmaps

Flagcounter

My slideshows (ppt presentations) uploaded to slideshare

List of classes taught with student blog links

Student blog of the week in 2009 as the school received a box of usb drives as part of a campaign. The usb drives were the weekly prize.

Links to resources and global projects

Posts contain hyperlinks where possible. This is an efficient means of directing students to further online pages and adjusts them to appropriate 21^st century literacy.

Postscript: Unfortunately, busy time commitments have prevented me from working on the backyard blog so it rests peacefully at the moment, knowing that it has taken us to the globe!

Thanks Anne. What a brilliant start to what has become an amazing Web 2.0 presence at Hawkesdale P-12 College.

Using Ning in the Year 12 classroom

Whitefriars College teacher librarian Tania Sheko has agreed to share the success story of using a ning at her school.

Alan November in “Curriculum21″ by Heidi Hayes Jacobs (found on Flickr in Great quotes about learning and change)

Alan November in Curriculum21 by Heidi Hayes Jacobs (found on Flickr in Great quotes about learning and change).

I want to share with you a teacher’s evaluation of a ning as learning and teaching platform for a Year 12 English class. Although teacher Catherine has only been using the ning for a couple of weeks, she has used the features of ning to their full capacity, enhanced student learning, and created a real learning community. It’s a shame that the ning is private – otherwise I’d show you what it looks like and how it’s working. Instead, read Catherine’s excellent summary and description:

“A couple of weeks ago I began a ning with my Year 12 English class. After their initial disappointment that this ‘wasn’t Facebook’ and once they worked out how to post a blog and reply to discussions, the class began to embrace their ning, and I have been thrilled with the results!

Our ning contains the following:
1. Photos of our class. Once a week, I bring a camera into the class and the boys take turns with being the ‘class photographer’. They capture moments from the class and ensure that everyone in the class has a photo. We have also added photos from college activities such as the Athletics Carnival where all the boys dressed up. These photos have been placed in albums in the ning and have been great in inspiring a sense of class spirit and unity.

2. Videos related to the text: I have been able to upload a number of videos related to the text we are currently studying – Maestro – at the moment there are videos of related topics such as Cyclone Tracy, Wagner, Peter and the Wolf, and Vienna.

3. Notes: I am able to write notes that highlight upcoming events / work that is due etc. I have arranged the format so that this is the first thing the boys see when they log on.

4. Groups: I have made groups for each of the texts we are studying, so all of our comments, quotes and resources can be located in easy to find areas.

5. Discussion Forums: Each group has discussion forums. At the moment our discussions are taking place in the Maestro group. As a class we have decided to pool all the quotes we find into these areas so that when writing a text response, everyone knows where to find the resources.

6. Chat facility: this enables everyone in the class to be online at the same time in the evenings and ask questions that everyone can contribute to, if they wish.

At the moment my class is preparing for their first text response, and I have found the chat facility to be extremely useful. A number of boys over the long weekend asked for help with their introductions and were able to place their work on chat and receive feedback from other students as well as myself. It was wonderful to see students help each other, as well as to see the particular student edit and re-edit their work. We have missed a number of classes in the past week due to public holidays and college activities, so it was wonderful to be able to assist students in this way in the lead-up to their assessment. It has also been good to see students ask each other for help with specific quotes and to see other students provide answers.

The ning has given students a central place to go to, when finding their resources for English, and has also allowed questions to be asked and answered very quickly. One of the boys told me this afternoon how much he loves being able to use the ning and how helpful it has been for him. I have also enjoyed seeing boys who never contribute in class, feel confident using this technology to voice their opinions. One boy in particular has become a ‘guru’ when it comes to knowing specific quotes in the novel, which has been wonderful for his self-esteem. However, without a doubt, the best part of the ning is the fact that students are discussing and analysing the text outside of school hours – of their own volition! What more can an English teacher ask for?!

This is an excellent tribute to the power of a ning, used as a learning and teaching tool. Isn’t it amazing how the students have formed their own network to help and guide each other? What a wonderful way to use technology in the classroom.

This is an edited version of a post from Tania Sheko‘s excellent blog, Brave New World.

Tania Sheko’s Flickr project

Extremely creative Whitefriars College teacher librarian Tania Sheko has developed another engaging and interactive piece of work for her students. Using Flickr as its basis, Tania explains how the project went from idea to reality:

In his book, The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman says that there are certain ‘flatteners’ that promote and allow for connection, collaboration and creation via distance. He was referring to technological applications which shrink geographical barriers and make global connections possible. This is my aim for a special project at my own school – a project which would enhance teaching and learning through ‘connection, collaboration and creation’, taking the students out of the classroom and into the world.

In 2009 I decided to take up a Flickr challenge to upload a photo every day for a year and post it to appropriate flickr groups. As a result I connected with others through interest and dialogue, and three of us – Marie Coleman, Sinikka Laakio-Whybrow and I – agreed that a similar project would be an enriching experience for students. I was lucky to find a teacher who was interested in the project and who has supported it wholeheartedly.

In the planning stages, we collaborated in a Google document, using Google spreadsheets and slideshow (thanks Marie!) to brainstorm and formulate our project. The geographical time differences weren’t a problem at all, and occasionally Sinikka would catch me in Google chat before going to bed if I was online early enough in the morning.

The final product is an 8 week project with a weekly assignment based on a photo and written description following a theme. The first assignment is to take a photo which ‘is not you, but represents you as a person’ – so, an introduction to initiate the sharing of personal information and interests. Although almost every student included sport and music in their introduction, there were diverse details which created interest in the group. The cultural differences were obvious conversation starters, and the similarities brought the students together through shared interests. I know that our boys, being in a single sex school, were interested in the opportunity to connect with the girls!

The project is quite simple but with very rich results. The weekly themes set diverse tasks. Some themes ask for the sharing of personal, cultural or geographic information, some encourage photographic creativity (‘Take a photo: of something you go past every day and take it from an interesting new perspective”), while others require deeper thinking and creative solutions (‘Take a photo that goes with the title or lyrics of a song’ or ‘Take a photo that somehow represents learning to you’).

We have used Flickr as a platform for this project. Flickr provides an easy way to upload photos, an automatic photostream for each student, and a profile for identification. Our group, Through global lenses, is a one-stop shop for the whole operation. It holds all the members from the three schools, allows for instructions and program, as well as storing all essential information such as netiquette, creative commons, commenting guidelines, etc. It even has email.

Challenges

Following a weekly theme and guiding questions, students’ task is twofold. Firstly, to take their own photo – this requires thinking and reflection, creativity, individuality, and it is hoped that, as students become accustomed to the challenge, they will become more creative and try different things. Secondly, to write something which responds to the theme, answers prompt questions, and informs and entices readers.

When students view each other’s contributions, this sparks curiosity, natural questioning, and ensuing dialogue. It also brings out a desire to do as well or to do something different. Students are not writing for the teacher, but for a peer audience, sharing generational views and tastes, and learning about cultural differences.

It really is one big conversation, with everyone getting a go, and nobody feeling they can’t get a word in. Several people can engage in dialogue under the same photo. Conversation arises from shared interests and curiosity about cultural differences. Students encourage each other and develop trust and respect for each other. The result is writing from desire instead of duty.

Differences in language are often the subject of conversation. Students ask and explain linguistic and semantic differences, for example, the first week’s photo has resulted in a discussion of the differences between American and Australian football.

Challenges for us include encouraging students to move away from ‘chat language’ and to write correctly and fluently. Despite our instructions, I’ve noticed in the early stages students reverting to their preferred chat in the comments.

Practicalities

It’s easy to keep up with who is commenting on your photo, or further conversation in photos you’ve commented on, when you visit the homepage for the group. Another useful feature is the availability of editing comments or writing. Teachers can ask students to improve or correct their writing at any time.

Reading through comments in the early stages, I can already see the conversations developing as more people enter the conversation, as questions are answered and elaborated on, and the desire to develop the dialogue becomes self motivating. This is very different to writing for your teacher which is a static exercise. Here the writing is interactive and can continue at any time. The Flickr Group Pool can be viewed here.

I’ve noticed that our boys seem different in their writing and comments to the way they present themselves at school. In the comments they seem unafraid to say that something is beautiful, comment on cute dogs, and be generally more open. I guess that’s what comes with writing to a peer audience. That and writing to connect with kids like them from distant places. For these reasons I’m excited about this project which, even in its initial stages, has sparked authentic and engaged conversation, and which will no doubt develop for each student his/her voice through images and words.

Isn’t it interesting that the students are more open to authentic and honest commenting via Flickr than they were previously in face to face situations? It seems that the ways the boys communicate will be a lasting effect from this project, which is absolutely fantastic. It is also another excellent way of students committing to writing and enjoying what they write; being aware of a (possible) international audience means that they really think, write and polish. The project is also a lovely way to engage in dialogue about cultural differences and similarities.

This is an edited version of a post that first appeared on Tania’s excellent blog. Posted here with Tania’s permission.

Book trailers with Chrissie Michaels

ustice and SurvivalChrissie Michaels* is a teacher of English, Drama and Humanities at a Gippsland school. She is also an author of YA fiction. She has been using book trailers in class to enhance teaching and learning. She explains more:

Why did you begin using book trailers as part of your teaching?

I’m always on the lookout for new ways to make tasks interesting and engaging for my students. This seemed a new and novel way to have them respond to a wide-reading activity; a change from the basic written review or oral presentation. A book trailer requires a different approach: working out how to portray the selected book in such a way that someone else is persuaded to read it. The task sets a multilayered challenge―to create visuals, audio and text.

Recently I was involved in the production of a book trailer for my YA novel In Lonnie’s Shadow. After doing a bit of my own You Tube and publishing-house research, and enlisting some willing helpers, I discovered it wasn’t that hard to put together a short film. A great big cheer for Windows MovieMaker which is the program we used. It’s readily accessible on most PCs. At home we had already been using MovieMaker to put together family DVDs. Making the book trailer was just the next step.

Which trailers did you use?

In the classroom I used the trailer for In Lonnie’s Shadow as a starting point. Being an author/teacher has its pluses! I also showed a simple student trailer from TeacherTube which used the basic MovieMaker elements. This provided enough background for the students to work on their task, which was to create a book trailer to market their chosen wide-reading novel to a new audience of readers (i.e. without giving too much of the plot away). First, students spent a period creating their own ‘test’ sample, using a set of photographs on a range of general interest topics (surfing etc.) and adding some audio/music clips. Teachers do have to remain aware of copyright issues of course. Students inserted text onto these pictures or made separate text frames and played around with transitions and effects.

How did students respond to them?

Since we started they have been really engaged. It’s still early days, but I’ve been delighted with their interest! Of course they picked up on how to use the program within about five minutes flat. Two students already knew how to use MovieMaker. Some could use Vegas (another movie-making program) which is a more complex program (at least for me). I gave those students the option to use it if they wished. Teachers may prefer to use Photo Story 3 as another simple option.

Have they made their own trailers?

Many are well on the way but they are still a work in progress. All have picked a key line of narrative or brief interpretive piece of dialogue from their chosen novel to work with in a new way. I dutifully bring in a video camera and the digital camera for this section of the task. Many still haven’t got their own pictures ready (part of their homework) so I am going back a step for some students where they have to map out a short storyboard. A website with some starting pointers can be found at: http://www.squidoo.com/booktrailers.

We are planning to show the finished clips (1-2mins duration) in a class presentation probably in a fortnight’s time.

If so, what skills did they learn?

I think that being able to weave together a multilayered storyline using the visual, auditory and textual has been a great creative exercise. Of course, students start by reading. They pre-write: plan their response and storyboard those visual images to create a narrative line. The task makes it so important for the students to understand the key imagery and themes for each story they have read and then they have to work out how best to convey these in an original way. They decide on transitions and effects. They seek peer review. They revise and refine.

We are all looking forward to the presentation. Students have been discussing with each other how to best represent imagery, themes and characters. They have teamed up with others to film snippets of dialogue. Hooded students have been chasing each other down corridors (for the sake of the film clip of course!).

Can readers see what the students have developed?

At this stage the students have elected for a once-off viewing of their book trailers for the class only. I guess the next time we may be more adventurous and do something for a wider audience.

Since you mentioned a book trailer for your novel, tell us a little about it…

My new YA novel is called In Lonnie’s Shadow, and is out in May 2010. It is published by Ford Street Publishing.

The novel is about a group of teenagers living in Little Lon, Melbourne in 1891. Lonnie, Pearl, Daisy and Carlo are trying to make a fair go of life, although many things are conspiring to make their life difficult. Sometime it’s hard to know who they can rely on. Secrets are kept and promises made. There’s plenty of action and the characters find themselves facing many hot spots – theft and kidnap, gang warfare and murder – and they have to make some pretty serious choices. The narrative structure draws upon artefacts (some real and some imagined) found in the contemporary archaeological digs of Little Lon. There’s a wonderful collection at Museum Victoria. In fact this is what first inspired me to write the story. So I hope you will read the novel and most of all, enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Check out In Lonnie’s Shadow trailer here or through Vimeo, Blazing Trailers, or go straight to Chrissie’s author website or Ford Street Publishing which has a number of other book trailers readers might like to use in their schools.

There are new essay questions for In Lonnie’s Shadow on Chrissie’s author website: http://sites.google.com/site/chrissiemichaelsorg Themes covered:

Justice and survival
Identity and belonging
Imaginative landscape

Thanks Chrissie. We would love to be able to show the students’ book trailers on Bright Ideas if at all possible.

*Chrissie Michaels is an author pen name.

Lowther Hall’s book ning

Thanks once again to the Head of the LRC at Lowther Hall AGS, Glenys Lowden (@glenyslowden) for sharing her forays into the Web 2.0 world. Glenys’s Ning has been developed for year 8s:

The Ning ‘Bookish at Lowther’ aims to provide a place where we can upload information and have discussions about books. The focus is on Year 8 students who will request permission to join the Ning and once given will have their own page. They can change the presentation of their page and all pages are accessible to members of the Ning. As this involves a social network it seemed like a good opportunity to give a presentation to Year 8 on Social Networking. I used prezi.com to make the presentation. You will find it by searching prezi.com for ‘Year 8 Social Networking’. Once the Year 8 students have signed up we are going to be using the space to upload Book Trailers. This is an assessment task for each Year 8 class. They have been given a list of criteria etc and process to undertake. This is all a trial this term and I will use this experience to further develop the Ning next year.

You will note that Glenys has embedded other Web 2.0 tools such as Shelfari, YouTube and animoto into the Ning’s homepage.

The Year 8 students are sure to love such a vibrant way of presenting and discussing books. Thanks again Glenys for sharing another job well done!

Driving Information Literacy – a Prezi

Head of Lowther Hall Anglican Grammar School LRC Glenys Lowden has agreed to share a Prezi that she presented recently to staff. The Driving Information Literacy Prezi shows the ‘journey’ that Lowther Hall are on; how much they’ve addressed so far and what’s yet to come.

Glenys explains more about the Prezi:

The prezi I did http://prezi.com/vanla3godjfi/ was undertaken as an alternate to preparing a PowerPoint. It was part of a group presentation at school and I was focusing on the information literacy aspect. I actually did the presentation as a PowerPoint then noticed Dianne McKenzie in Hong Kong mentioned a Prezi she had done. This inspired me to revisit this tool (which I had thought was too hard) and actually have a go (thanks Dianne). It was tricky in parts and is a tool you need to keep practising. The PLUSS model that I mention in the Prezi was developed by James Herring. A number of staff came up after asking about the tool and how to use it–they really enjoyed seeing an alternative to PowerPoint.

Well done to Glenys and staff for the Prezi as well as driving information literacy in your school. Thanks also to Dianne McKenzie for inspiring Glenys (and myself) to tryPrezi.

Who am I? Rowville SC is a SLAV/Connect Web 2.0 winner!

Michele Berner, English teacher and e-learning coach and Katherin Grelis, Teacher Librarian at Rowville Secondary College have developed a winning way with Web 2.0.

As joint winners of this year’s SLAV/Connect Web 2.0 competition, Michele and Katherin have devised an exciting and engaging unit of work using a number of Web 2.0 tools. Michele explains:

I teach a Year 7 class for English and Information Technology. I wanted a project that would incorporate both English language skills and competencies and would integrate ICT. With the help of Katherin Grelis, a teacher-librarian, we developed a unit that would answer the following questions:

Who am I?

Class blog: http://7eenglish.globalstudent.org.au Student blogs are linked from here.

What is the essence of me? Where did I come from? What makes me who I am? Where will I be in the future?

What happened in history?

What significant events occurred on the day and year I was born?

Class wiki: http://starringme.wikispaces.com/

During the year, 7E English was introduced to blogs and wikis as an integral part of their coursework. There is a class blog: http://7eenglish.globalstudent.org.au and each student has their own blog linked to the class blog. Students spent some time at the beginning of the year setting up their blogs and learning to post, tag, comment etc. Students have completed a number of writing tasks on their blogs. I found this to be an effective way of developing student prewriting, drafting, writing, editing and evaluation throughout the year.

The Web 2.0 competition was a good opportunity to develop student skills in a variety of Web 2.0 tools, to gather photographs and other evidence and produce information that linked to their study of the autobiography genre. This would therefore make the online history a more complete representation of the student. The class blog has a number of tasks designed to build up a personal picture of the student: in effect, to answer the question of who am I?   Students set up pages on their blog and all their writing was posted there. The table below outlines the tasks students completed. Each task also used ICT by requiring students to take images, edit them, use a web 2.0 tool, upload and embed, and demonstrate appropriate file management.

An instruction booklet was provided to students which outlined all the tasks and the websites they were required to access. A copy of this booklet, the unit planner and other relevant files can be downloaded from the class blog.

These are the tasks the students completed for the project. They created pages on their blogs where each task was posted.

Who am I?

3 poems: About me, I am….. My bedroom Billboard. Bring in a headshot photo of you and create a billboard using http://bighugelabs.com/billboard.php. Wordle - Describe your personality – one word for each letter of the alphabet. Make it into a wordle.

My Interests

Explain in detail your favourite things in life and why you consider them to be your favourite. Photos of interests Collage – bring 10-15 personal items (eg photos, medals, trophies and scan them on the photocopier to create a collage of you. Save it as .jpeg image and post on the page

This is me

Open ended sentences. Using the site, Glogster, create a glog – multimedia poster which incorporates different elements of your personality and character. It can include music, photos, text, video. When you look at the finished Glog, what should emerge is “You”.

My Memories

Provide three memories for each of the following sections. Memories of long ago. Memories that make you laugh. Memories that make you cry. Memories that are warm. Memories that are precious.
After filling in the blanks for Task 1, pick one from each category and write a 4-5 sentences describing each one.
Create a Memory wall using the program Wallwisher: http://www.wallwisher.com/

My Family

6 photographs – family /pets. For each photograph, write 5-10 lines explaining the importance of your family member or pet to you. Photocube 3d: http://www.photocube3d.com/

My Future

Letter to YOURSELF and tell yourself things that will happen in the future to yourself. Here are the topics you are to write about…:• Something to look forward to…• Something to watch out about…• Something/someone to avoid…• Something to work hard at…• Someone to be especially nice to…• Someone to really listen to…• Somewhere to be sure not to go…

What happened on the day I was born

What happened on the day I was born? What events occurred in the year of my birth? What happened on the day I was born? On the wiki site: http://starringme.wikispaces.com/, each of you have a page where you will type your findings. Your page is: the date of your birthday (No two students have the same birthday in the class so you will be responsible for locating the appropriate information for this date in history).

Join the wiki using the username and password provided.
Using any of the sites below, find 5 things that happened on the day you were born. It might be something in history, in music, in film, in sport.
When you find something interesting, follow the link and read the information.
Edit your page.
Write a brief summary (5 -8 lines) on the event that happened and save your page

Task: QuizUsing any of the events from the wiki, you are going to generate a quiz which includes 10 questions based on the information collected in the Wiki. Look at each of the dates on the Wiki, find something that interests you and create a question from the information. Also provide the answer to your question.

Step 1: Planning: Create a three column table in WORD.

Question

Answer

Wiki page information comes from

Step 2: Create the quiz. See class blog for further instructions

Step 3: Put your name as the author of the quiz

Step 4: Obtain the embed code for your quiz.

Step 5: Embed the quiz on your WIKI page

Link to the quiz generator

http://classtools.net/main_area/template_loader.php/?quiz

Instructions on how to use the Quiz generator

Skills Developed

Students should develop skills in the following:

Interpret, analyse and evaluate information on a student’s life (past, present and future) with the assistance of technology

Read and follow multistep directions to complete a complex task

improve technical skills by using web 2.0 tools to publish elements of their life

evaluate their own work.

create appropriate graphic organizers to provide a structure for information

apply the writing process to write effectively in various forms and types of writing

Locate and use multiple resources to acquire relevant information

evaluate reliability of information

record relevant information using a variety of note-taking and organizational strategies

Implementing the project

The project was completed in English and IT classes for a period of 4 weeks. Year 7 students are not the best at following instructions on handouts so it was often hectic and students were completing different activities in the booklet as they worked at their own pace. As students completed some of the ICT tasks, they assisted other students which worked well.

Continuing use of the unit

During Semester 1, Yr 7 English study Autobiography. In 2010, English teachers will be able to use the Who am I / Starring Me unit to study this genre whilst the ICT and Web 2.0 skills that accompany each task can be taught during the class’ Information Technology classes.

The project will also form part of our ICT showcase; demonstrating to teachers how to integrate ICT into a unit of work and how to use blogs as a daily part of the class activities.

What a fabulous unit of work Michele and Katherin have developed. There is plenty for all of us to take from the tools they have incorporated and the way in which ICT has been embedded into the unit of work. The beauty of blogs and wikis is that they can be tweaked and updated year to year without having to reinvent the wheel entirely. As new tools become available, they too can be incorporated into the unit.

Congratulations to Michele and Katherin for their SLAV/Connect Web 2.0 competition success. It is obvious that it is well deserved.

Mount Waverley Primary School Film Festival

Lee King, Mount Waverley Primary School’s ICT Coordinator/Specialist has developed an innovative and exciting approach to ICT in her school. Lee writes:

Mt Waverley Primary Film Festival a.k.a. ‘The Moscars’

The journey ……

New School Buildings

It is well recognized that school design has a powerful impact on both student outcomes and innovative teaching. Throughout 2008 and 2009, Mt Waverley Primary School has been going through an extensive rebuilding and renovation project as part of the Victorian Government’s 10-year plan to transform Victorian schools.

Our new buildings have been designed with the aim of giving students a contemporary education so they are equipped with the skills they will need to be successful and productive members of a 21^st Century workforce and society. The design of the learning areas was influenced by the need to be flexible and supportive of different learning styles. For example, the ‘great spaces’ outside the learning areas support collaborative approaches to teaching and learning as well as providing physical space for an interdisciplinary curriculum and self-directed learning. The students are able to ‘spill out’ into areas that allow for a greater degree of independence, individual learning and reflection.

Year 6 Production – The Trees and The Stars

With the new learning areas came the recognition that our traditional Year 6 Production was no longer ‘cutting the mustard’.

Rehearsals took place in core learning time

Only a small group of students were truly engaged in the activities

Bored students were a behavioural issue

Large chunks of time were taken up with a narrow band of discipline-based domains

As educators, we were not adequately preparing our students for a 21^st Century world.

As the ICT Specialist/Coordinator, I had been keen to introduce the Year 6 students to ‘Claymation Animation’ and after various discussions with the Year 6 teachers and the Leadership team, the idea of a ‘Film Festival Night’ was born. This would replace ‘The Production’.

Convincing the teachers was relatively easy. Convincing the students was an entirely different matter.

These students had yet to experience the trials and tribulations of The Production. They had been part of the audiences since Prep and were looking forward to being the ‘Stars’. They didn’t realize that most of them would end up being ‘Trees’. And, that they would spend many hours rehearsing to be trees!

There were tears and the school was on the receiving end of a petition and letters and phone calls of complaints from some of the parents.

Outcomes:

These were the changes we were teaching towards. They included attitudinal as well as academic outcomes:

draw on students’ multiple intelligences

provide opportunities for students who are not typically good at school with a chance to see themselves as capable members of the class

build on their story telling skills

be involved in cooperative and collaborative learning

be engaged in problem solving, higher order thinking, critical and creative thinking

plan and reflect 

provide opportunities for personalized learning that supported different learning styles and levels

Increase students’ control of their own learning

be involved in a multi-disciplinary project where ICT is interwoven with other VELS Domains.

Creating an animation involves music, visual arts, script writing, story development, physics, spatial awareness, ICT, problem solving, personal and interpersonal development – all key skills necessary for the 21st century.

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image

The staff decided to take on a team teaching approach. This would include our Art and Music Specialists, our two Assistant Principals, Year 6 class teachers and myself (ICT). As none of the staff had had experience with stop motion animation, we all attended a professional development day at ACMI to assist us to support the students in producing their own stop-motion animations. We believed we needed to experience what we were asking our students to do.

We worked as cooperative learning groups (much as the students were going to do) to explore basic stop-motion animation, production processes and skills completing a short stop-motion animation.

Areas covered in the training included:

   storyboarding

   scripting

   character

   set design and construction

   camera

   editing

   music

We thoroughly enjoyed the day, however, we were made aware of what a steep learning curve we were facing.

Community Partnerships

First and foremost – going over to the ‘white side’……

It was clear that Mac computers offer the Applications needed to create and edit the animations. Garageband would also enable the students to compose their own music, add voiceovers and layer these to make a cohesive and fluent sound track.

We were primarily a ‘PC’ school and few of the teachers and students had experience with Mac computers. We leased 15 Macbooks and Gary Bass from Connecting Point, together with Glenda Schubert, our Assistant Principal, ran familiarization workshops with the students. They particularly enjoyed Photo Booth and much laughter could be heard when they viewed some of the grotesque images produced.

……… The Apple Store Chadstone

As part of the Year 6 Film Festival Project, we organised a series of excursions to the Apple Store at Chadstone Shopping Centre.

The purpose of the excursions was to provide the students with hands-on access to the Mac computers and the expertise of select Mac trainers and Specialists. They had opportunities to create new projects and showcase some of their existing work. The emphasis was on using software to create animations and movies.

Needless to say, they were highly engaged and loved the experience.

Glenda and I took advantage of the One-to-One training offered by Apple and completed extensive training in the editing and production stages of movie making.

…….. Parents and Friends

It was soon obvious that we didn’t have enough funds the cost of the equipment needed.

Parents and Friends to the rescue! They gave us enough to supply:

Digital microscope cameras

USB back-up devices

Lights

Additional software

A visit by Adam Elliot

We were extremely lucky that they valued the vision and philosophy behind the project.

Adam Elliot

Yes …. THE Adam Elliot!

We wanted to launch our Film Festival with a ‘big bang’ and decided to approach Adam to speak to our students. Who better to inspire and motivate them?

From the beginning, he was keen to be involved. He is passionate about his craft and I believe that his interest in our project arises from his belief that schools should provide for more diverse forms of self-expression.

The Academy Award winning Animation Writer and Director grew up in Mt Waverley and his 2009 feature film “Mary and Max” is set in Mt Waverley Town. It incorporates many scenes and objects remembered from his childhood.

He spoke to the students and spent time with each of the animation teams, offering advice and tips and tricks. Many of the students incorporated these into their own animations.



One aspect that Adam emphasized was the importance of the story line.

‘At first I was embarrassed [on winning the Oscar for Harvie Krumpet in 2004], and then realised that we won because our story was stronger. I truly believe it has nothing to do with budgets or what studio the film came out of. At the end of the day it all comes down to a good story well told’.

He is a wonderful man – an engaging and inspiring speaker, unassuming and generous with his time and very patient with the endless questions that came his way.

Adam must have enjoyed his visit to Mt Waverley Primary as he offered to come to our Film Festival night and be a guest speaker! We were delighted as this would add weight and credence to our project.

Meanwhile …… At The Coalface

The story was the beginning.

The teachers used an inquiry approach and immersed the students in examples of claymation animations. Pingu was a favourite!

Genre workshops followed. These included:

Comedy(slapstick, parody/satire, sitcom, mockumentary)

Drama & Reality TV

Documentary/Current Affairs/News

Mystery/Thriller/Suspense

The students organised their own co-operative learning groups. They identified the genre they would like to use and decided upon a Production Company name. Students designed a company logo and this was attached to a specially designed Mt Waverley Film Festival lanyard.

Many sessions of script writing, editing and storyboarding followed.

Specialist classes in Art involved the making of the clay figures, sets and backdrops.

Music focussed on the use of Garageband for composing the appropriate music for the sound tracks.

My own role, as the ICT Specialist, involved training the students in the use of the various software programs such as ‘I Can Animate’, iMovie and Garageband (for voice recording and sound effects) and the final editing process.

Once the animations were complete, the students designed their own movie posters to advertise our film night.

The Night

It was highly successful and the culmination of a great deal of creative collaboration, skill development and enthusiasm. The students thoroughly enjoyed showcasing their achievements for their friends, family and Adam Elliot. Their interest and enjoyment in the ‘Claymation’ project has indicated overwhelming satisfaction and engagement in the process.

The staff involved will soon be participating in a debriefing to discuss the positives and negatives. There are many aspects that we, as teachers will need to refine for 2010. This has given us a focus for our teaching. E5 here we come!

Adam Elliot speaking to the audience

Winners of the inaugural Adam Elliot Award

Congratulations to Lee and all of the teaching staff, students, parents, friends and Adam Elliot on an innovative and engaging project that will no doubt stay in the minds of those involved for a very long time. An amazing project!

Information Literacy @ Preston Girls’ Secondary College

Recently, Preston Girls’ Secondary College teacher librarians Judith Way and Reina Phung developed an information literacy wiki.

Information skills wiki front page

For a while they had been thinking about developing a place where all search strategies, information on how to compile a bibliography and other research resources could be placed. They came up with the idea of using a wiki. Judith says, ‘The advantage with a wiki is that it is easy to both provide links to outside websites as well as upload documents onto the wiki. So materials that we had previously developed or modified for research, such as data charts and internet search strategies could be accessed as immediately as links to URLs.’

They also created a page of links to books and reading.

Judith and Reina say that they are pleased with the results so far and intend to use the wiki as part of year 7 orientation sessions and VCE research skills lessons.

Some of the resources on the wiki are for finding information and others are for students to consider using when producing school work. Judith and Reina explain that the wiki is a work in progress and will be added to when they discover or develop new resources.

SuperClubsPLUS @ Mount Waverley PS

2007 SLAV Research Fellowship recipient (along with colleague Jacqueline Griffeth) Lee King has created some outstanding ICT opportunities for her students at Mount Waverley Primary School.

Lee recently introduced the students to SuperClubsPLUS.

SuperClubsPLUS is currently being trialled by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development’s Knowledge Bank: Next Generation. The trial provides free accessto SuperClubsPLUS for 100,000 year 3 and 4 students and will conclude in December 2010.

Lee explains how she came to be involved in the project. ’Increasingly, students, parents, teachers and the wider community have become aware of the issues surrounding Cyberbullying and Cybersafety. As a parent and a teacher, I have been active in protecting the children I have contact with from the dangers in an online world. How did I do this? By worrying endlessly and restricting access.

’What a ‘head in the sand’ attitude! After a quick ‘hands up’ survey, I established that in each of the Year 3 and 4 classes, an average of three students had mobile phones. Again, in each of those classes, around half used MSN Messenger and 3 to 4 students used Skype regularly. What was I protecting them from? They were already engaged in online activities!’

Lee wondered, ‘Were they safe? Did they know that not everyone online is who they say they are? Did they know not to give out personal information? Were they treating others kindly and speaking appropriately? I had read a little about SuperClubsPLUS and liked the sound of it, so I registered our Year 3 and 4 students with the intention that it would be the ICT focus for Term 1, 2009.

‘SuperClubsPLUS (Australia) is a social network, similar to Facebook and MySpace, however it is for primary school age children and it is extremely safe. It is a ground breaking initiative, providing engaging and stimulating learning experiences centred on ICT, literacy and citizenship.

’Students are kept safe whilst on the site as only those who have been registered by their school and have written permission from their parents will have access. This ensures that the community is only made up of the children it was designed for. Fully trained mediators, all of whom are teachers or Principals with current Police checks and VIT registration, actively mediate all children’s activities. At least one mediator is on duty from 8am to 8pm, monitoring all interaction and protecting the students in real time. Students may access the site out of these hours but will be unable to communicate with others.

Lee continues, ’Once registered, students receive a user name and password which is uniquely theirs. They have their own personal online space where they can complete activities to earn their Cybersafety badge, design and build their own home pages, participate in clubs, join discussion forums and achieve their ICT ‘Star Awards’. They are expected to reach a certain degree of awareness of cybersafety issues before they can participate in other parts of the site.’

Cybersafety page (no link as you must be a member to access this.)

As Lee explains, the students just loved SuperClubsPLUS. ‘A wonderful thing happened on the way ……. An hour is never long enough in the lab! Only a day after introducing the students to SuperClubs, I found I was receiving many emails from the students. They would begin with ‘How do you …… ?’. Other emails would arrive shortly after, from the same students saying, ‘Don’t worry, I worked it out’.’

’They couldn’t wait for the next lab session so they used their initiative and actually read the instructions! By clicking on the ‘HOW TO’ link, the students are able to learn everything they need to know about building their home pages, inserting widgets, how to send emails and more. They discovered this before I did.

’The students learn by ‘hands-on’ experience. If they forget about the Cybersafety and Cyberbullying issues, they quickly find themselves on the receiving end of an email from the Mediator. Any inappropriate email (no girlfriend/boyfriend stuff either!) is immediately blocked. Serious misdemeanors are dealt with by deregistering the student and cancelling their user name and password. Teachers are always notified via Department email if students have acted inappropriately.’

Lee explains how SuperClubsPLUS fits in with VELS:

VELS and SuperClubsPlus Australia

’Many aspects of VELS are covered. Students’ achievements and progress are monitored and rewarded with the STAR Awards challenges. They learn a huge range of ICT skills, Literacy, Cybersafety, social skills and global citizenship – ticks many of the Progression Points boxes!!

’The Domains in italics are dependent on the focus of the content:

Interdisciplinary Learning

Thinking Processes
Communication
Information and Communication Technology (ICT)

Discipline-based Learning Domains

English
The Arts
Humanities
LOTE
Science

Physical, Personal and Social Learning Domains

Personal Learning
Interpersonal Development
Health and Physical Education
Civics and Citizenship

Personal and Social Learning

‘The students have the opportunity to join learning projects and events such as: discussions on global issues; a writing club with a popular author; a Hot Seat with an Olympic hopeful athlete, an artist or an astronomer; an interview with Anne Frank or Tutankhamen or a Maths fun day. There’s something for every child as they follow their own interests and work at their own pace and level.

‘Out of the mouths of babes ……

“Thank you for getting us on to Super Clubs, it is so cool so thank you I love it.
Thank you.” TG, Year 3

“Superclubs is awesome.” LM, Year 4

“I LOVE Superclubs. Mum and dad want to have a go.” GK, Year 5.

‘It is not just the kids who love SuperClubs!!!! Here are some comments from teachers involved:

”It is so easy – this week for my computer literacy group – they have to send me an email to tell me three things they have loved doing so far this year in class. Took me about 5 seconds to think of the activity, takes no time for me to show them anything because they all know what they are doing, and is so easy for me to assess!!!!!!”

“I love it as much as they do!!!”

“Thanks for hooking us up with it!!! I was trying to stay a step ahead of the kids – not possible – some of them are so far ahead of me I will never catch them!!!! Which is a good thing as they are obviously so happy with what they are doing and being asked to do.”

Congratulations to Lee and the staff at Mount Waverley Primary School for being an enthusiastic part of the SuperClubsPLUS trial that will benefit all Victorian primary educators. SuperClubsPLUS is supported by the Telstra Foundation.

Lyndhurst Secondary College – a Webquest winner!

Africa’s Child is an award winning Webquest that was created by the two Teacher Librarians at Lyndhurst Secondary College.

Africa's child homepage

Pam Macdonald and Melinda FitzGerald explain how their Webquest came about. ‘We had a desire to learn more about Webquests, Web design, and making the Year 8 text, The Heaven Shopby Deborah Ellis, more relevant to an Australian teenager. (We also wanted to win a Smartboard!)’

Pam had been involved in developing a science Webquest previous to this endeavour. Melinda says, ‘The earlier Webquest had been designed using Microsoft FrontPage so a teacher gave us a quick introduction on using FrontPage, the rest was trial and error. Many hours were spent researching African sites, NGO sites, design sites, clip art sites, AIDS sites and the many wonderful sites that explain the theory and design of Webquests.’

Introduction

Melinda says, ‘We chose the template from the Webquest.org page. A couple of nights were spent selecting a basic FrontPage design and loading it with the wonderful African wallpapers and designs we had found. Unfortunately some of these designs have disappeared from the web pages, people seem at a loss as to how we can fix this.’

Task

Melinda continues, ‘Nicola Park, a Middle Years Teaching Co-ordinator, had been instrumental in the design and implementation of the Year 9 Inquiry Centre and for promoting Inquiry learning across the College. With Nicola’s help we streamlined our rich questions and Teachers pages.’

Teacher page

Some things didn’t go to plan though as Melinda explains, ‘The thing we found most frustrating, was waiting for people to reply to email requests to include sites. Some things we had to drop because we could not get permission to include photos, an author’s link, etc. This actually saw us redesigning some aspects of our quest. Pam did the final touches and got Africa’s Child on the web then entered it in the competition whilst I jetted off to Europe for six weeks. Winning was very exciting and rewarding. Of course the Interactive Whiteboard lives in the library where we both have now developed an interest in building lessons around it.’

Melinda continues, ‘Many Year 8 teachers use Africa’s Childwith varying degrees of success. We have gone over the design to simplify it but we believe it is as simple as it could be without taking away the team aspect of the quest. Students and teachers will over time become more familiar with Webquest formats. Many students may get confused with the many levels of pages but if the teacher familiarises themselves first they can then guide their students through.’

’One of our aims was for Africa’s Child to become a catalyst for raising global awareness incorporating a major fundraiser for the year – this has not yet happened. The problem, we feel, is timing, The Heaven Shop is not read until fourth term which does not allow for a sustained and ongoing interest to develop.’

Evaluation

Both Melinda and Pam completed the SLAV Web 2.0 course last year. They said that they found it an extremely beneficial PD that allowed them to understand the new designs for Webquests, ones that incorporate Wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies. They say, ‘We will incorporate these into our next Webquest, although we would be cautious about making the quests too complicated!

Congratulations Melinda and Pam and thanks for your honest assessment of how the Webquest worked with students. Hopefully this wonderful Webquest might inspire Victorian educators to enter the Connect/SLAV Web 2.0 competition.

Pageflakes @ Casey Grammar School – a winning combination!

At the end of 2008, Julie Squires and Mark Phillips from Casey Grammar School were awarded the then Education Channel’s (now Connect) ‘Webquest of the Year Award’ for their Webquest ”Earth 2.0 Headquarters – Is it possible to create a completely sustainable planet?”

Earth 2.0: is it possible to create a completely sustainable planet?

Julie, then teacher librarian and Mark, then Head of Humanities decided to collaborate on a project that the year 10s could undertake. Julie explains, ‘I was really motivated to have a go at entering the then Education Channel/SLAV Webquest of the Year Competition (now Connect/SLAV). Although time was short, we got our page together and had a number of students ‘test drive’ and critique the site.’ The students suggested that Julie and Mark add more games and make it ‘more fun’.’

The Webquest has a lot of links, mostly devised by Julie and Mark. These include a wiki, several vokis, trading cards and a blog.

Earth 2.0 wiki

After taking the students ideas into consideration, Julie and Mark completed the site and entered it into the competition. The rest is history! Julie and Mark created their Webquest using the Pageflakes Web 2.0 resource. Congratulations to Julie and Mark for creating a vibrant and engaging piece of work for their students. Their recognition by winning the 2008 Webquest and Beyond! Competition was richly deserved.

Schoolyard Blitz @ Mooroolbark College

Last year Mooroolbark College teachers Jodie Tilley and Pennie White developed a wonderful WebQuest. This WebQuest was an award winner in the Education Channel (now Connect) and SLAV WebQuests and Beyond 2008 competition.

: Schoolyard Blitz! home

Jodie explains how the WebQuest came about. ‘The Yarra Valley eLearning Community implemented a 1:2 laptop program for year 7 and 8 in seven schools including Mooroolbark College and was running PD to support the curriculum development needed. I am a maths teacher at Mooroolbark College. I attended a professional development session run by Pennie White on Student Collaborative Projects with an emphasis on WebQuests. Pennie White was a Development Manager for the Yarra Valley eLearning Community and was based at Mooroolbark College at the time. During this session, I became interested in using WebQuests with my class but was pretty disappointed at the lack of Maths WebQuests available. Pennie and I decided to work together to make a Maths WebQuest and this is how ‘Schoolyard Blitz’ was created. Having Pennie as an eLearning Coach in my school enabled this great project to get off the ground. Without the joint expertise and time invested this innovative curriculum would not have come about.’

Jodie says, ‘I was interested in finding a creative way to teach measurement to my Year 7 students. After brainstorming together we decided that students could design an outdoor area of the school. Pennie thought that Google Sketch-up would be the ideal 3D modelling program that students could use to do this. The best thing about this quality program is that it’s free and comes with video tutorials. This meant that we as teachers did not have to fully know how to use the program ourselves!’

Process page

Jodie continues, ‘The WebQuest itself presents a scenario to students where they work in teams of three or four to design an outdoor space of the school with a budget of 100,000. Students worked as architects, accountants, designers and computer model creators on this four-week assignment. Students had to measure the dimensions of the physical space. They had to create a scaled drawing on graph paper and develop their design for the space. They had to use the Internet (with a hotlist provided by the WebQuest) to cost the equipment, furniture and materials needed.’

Evaluation page

Jodie explains, ‘They then used Google Sketch-up to create a virtual 3D model of their design. They had to present their submission using PowerPoint to the rest of the class. I ran this WebQuest with my year seven class with great success. The students were highly motivated and were even seen working on this in their lunchtimes.’

Jodie has also provided a list of VELS Standards addressed in the WebQuest:

Strand: Discipline Based – Domain: Mathematics – Dimensions: Number, Measurement, Space and Working Mathematically
Strand: Interdisciplinary Learning – Domain: Information and Communication Technology – Dimension: ICT for Creating
Strand: Physical, Personal and Social Learning – Domain: Interpersonal Development – Dimension: working and learning in teams

Well done to Jodie and Pennie for creating such an interesting and engaging WebQuest and for winning a Smartboard in the Education Channel (now Connect) and SLAV WebQuests and Beyond 2008 competition. Hopefully this will inspire Victorian educators to submit their Web 2.0 projects to the Connect and SLAV Web 2.0 2009 competition.

Reading Cafe @ Mill Park Secondary College

Mill Park Secondary College teacher librarian and ICT Coach Heather Bailie has developed an interesting book blog.

Heather says, ‘The Reading Café is a site that has been set up directly as a result of the library staff at MPSC completing the SLAV Web 2.0 course. The Reading Cafe is a place for staff to discuss books and reading. I set this up with a dual purpose:

1. ‘As a place to consolidate reviews and recommendations for reading by and for staff. We have many avid readers on staff and we try to cater for their reading, almost as much as the students, particularly through the senior campus fiction collection. In our busy lives it is not always possible to share our good reading experiences in person- this site aims to provide that experience asynchronously (now there’s a word I’ve only dared use since blogging!)

2. ‘As a gentle means to encourage other staff to delve into the world of blogs, and, for some, to introduce the concept to them. For many teachers the idea of writing for a blog is totally foreign; they fear the unknown and don’t believe (wrongly) they have the necessary skills.

‘At first there wasn’t a competitive element to this but speaking to an old friend (Melbourne State College 1982!) at a SLAV conference I decided to adopt her idea of a teacher’s reading challenge modelled on the Premier’s Reading Challenge. I challenged staff to read 6 books by the end of the year, 2 of which must be designated “young adult”. To record books read they must post a review on the blog or, if that book has been previously reviewed, make a comment on the original post.’

She continues, ‘Initially, to get some content on the site, I encouraged everyone at school who was doing the SLAV Web 2.0 course to post some reviews. I also selectively invited some other people who I knew would be interested (either from the blogging perspective or as readers) to visit and contribute. Once we had a body of reviews, about 15, I launched the site at each campus at morning teas hosted by the two campus libraries. It has certainly generated a lot of interest although perhaps not as much activity as I would like. I’m starting to hand out some random prizes so there may be more activity soon. I think that goal 2 has been at least partly achieved – plenty of people look. I’m very grateful to my wonderful library staff who have enthusiastically posted reviews to the site. To record people’s progress on the challenge I adopted the SLAV Web 2.0 course idea of using a google spreadsheet - it is linked from the site.’

Heather says that she will be doing a new year re-launch of the blog shortly. Well done Heather and Mill Park Secondary College staff that have contributed to the blog.

PLP @ Mooroopna Secondary College

Mooroopna Secondary College teacher librarian, Leading Teacher and eLearning Coordinator Leonie Dyason is part of Will Richardson’s PLP project. PLP is Powerful Learning Practice, an international program developed by Will Richardson and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach in the US. Mooroopna Secondary College was fortunate to be nominated to receive sponsorship from the State Library of Victoria and the School Library Association of Victoria (following the Victorian School Libraries Learning with Web 2.0 program) to have a team involved in the PLP program.

Leonie explains how she organised her team once Mooroopna had been accepted into the project. ‘Our Assistant Principals were both very supportive. I then selected my team of 5. I wanted some young teachers with me, some risk takers, and not necessarily all Web 2.0 savvy.’

Leonie says, ‘Our team members consisted of Adrian who is a Physics & Maths Teacher (he did the SLAV Web 2.0 program last year with our library team), Deanne, who is an Indonesian and English Teacher and who is Daily Organiser this year. Kirsten is a Science & Maths Teacher as well as being the Maths/Science Leading Teacher. She is also an INTEL master trainer. Katie is a SOSE & English teacher and me, a teacher librarian.’

Leonie explains, ‘All four regularly attend my eLearning Cafe where I have been teaching Web 2.0 and Internet skills for 3 years now as part of my Leading Teacher role of eLearning Coordinator. Adrian often presents here too – he started with podcasting.’

Leonie's eLearning Cafe

She continues, ‘We have all achieved different things so far, but mostly it is great teacher training – a good boost knowing you are on the right track, and good to be alerted to new stuff via the PLP before it becomes mainstream. We have learnt lots of skills, looked at the new digital blooms, better ways to connect students not only to the school, but also to the world. We have learnt lots and lots. Some of the examples of what we have achieved are:

I have set up the PD blog that can be anywhere anytime learning for teachers – to keep them ahead hopefully, but at least abreast of what their students are doing out of school hours. It will alert them to the eCafe topics, and have other incidental learning on the sidebars. I have also set up the usual literature blog with the English staff, however I intend to grow that to be reviews on everything – a writing I have done spasmodically or verbally all my career, but now it is there with others adding their reviews and everything tagged for the staff and students to use as sorting for genre, etc. I have a link on the Library Website on our intranet to both these blogs.
Adrian has set up his wiki/NING for the Year 12 Physics students in the state – much more ambitious than me – and has on board textbook writers and professors from all over.
Deanne has set up the skeleton for a cultural assignment in a wiki. She has set it up to be a collaborative piece. Her demo to the staff started at least 3 wikis that night.
Katie and Kirsten are still experimenting with what they will use as their platform, however Katie is going to do the VCE novels and have RSS on the site to alert students to, and Kirsten is going to do something with podcasts and biology.’

Physics teacher Adrian Camm explains about his Web 2.0 developments. ‘I have created a virtual learning community (VLC) for Unit 3 & 4 Physics that will link all students across Victoria to experienced educators, members of the Australian Institute of Physics and textbook authors from both Nelson and Heinemann publishers. It will provide students with tremendous learning opportunities anytime, anywhere. Students (and educators if they wish to be a part) will have access to a password-protected learning environment, where they can ask for help with questions, chat about careers in physics and have concepts explained to them in great detail. The best part is it’s free!’

Adrian's Virtual Learning Community

Adrian continues, ‘If you and your students are interested in joining, click this link and fill out the invitation located on the left-hand side of the page. Follow all of the instructions and within 24 hours, you will have access to the Physics Ning.’

Adrian continues, ‘Why should you and your students be a part of the VLC?

By using a 21st century context students will see relevance
By removing geographic boundaries. Brings the world into the classroom
Takes students out into the world
Creates opportunities for students to interact with each other, with teachers and with knowledgeable adults in an authentic learning environment with authentic learning experiences.

Leonie Dyason says, ‘At the start of this school year we had three professional learning days, and our PLP had a 1.5 hour slot to talk about PLP. Adrian, Deanne and myself presented our projects to the staff as outlined above. We also presented on a blog of Web 2.0 skills for MSC staff’s professional learning which we will probably all contribute to directly or indirectly. We launched this to the staff on the second day and asked them to go off and use the blog and go to one of the links there “CogDogRoo” from Alan Levine and learn 2 things. We have 17 Australian hits so far, so someone besides me is visiting it!’

Congratulations to Leonie, Adrian, Deanne, Katie and Kirsten on an absolutely brilliant job; you are an inspiration! Thanks also for taking the time to share your knowledge.

Netvibes @ Preston Girls’ Secondary College

On discovering Netvibes as a result of a previous Bright Ideas post, Preston Girls’ Secondary College teacher librarians Judith Way and Reina Phung couldn’t wait to use it as a resource for students and staff.

Judith says, ‘We had been looking for a Web 2.0 tool where I could incorporate all of the other things we had developed. We needed a central location for all of our blogs, wikis and our Flickr and Delicious accounts. Although Delicious allows us to link sites and describe them, Netvibes gives us the option to incorporate each blog, wiki and other site into our Netvibes homepage. (We also had a problem with our ISP blocking Delicious. This has been an ongoing problem for some months and our IT technician has been liaising with our ISP, but at this moment, to no avail.)’

She explains, ‘Once the blogs, wikis, etc. have been linked to the Netvibes page, the actual sites appear within the page. You can set the size of each “mini page”. Students and staff can then enter their chosen site directly, without a need to click a link or open a new page.’

Judith continues, ‘Netvibes also enables us to dedicate pages for staff and pages for students. We intend to use the widget function to add a calendar so students can see when the Readers Cup is scheduled, when Book Club is due in and when Book Week occurs. Our Netvibes page is linked from our intranet and we plan to promote it by encouraging students to explore it during library orienation sessions, by making and distributing bookmarks with the URL and by introducing Netvibes at a staff meeting.’

Judith also says she found Netvibes relatively quick and easy to use and has even been complemented by the school’s IT technician on her work!

Netvibes can also be used as an RSS reader, so those people using Bloglines, Google Reader or other RSS services may decide to use Netvibes instead. Your RSS feeds can be set as ‘private’ allowing only you to access them.

We look forward to hearing how the staff and students at Preston Girls’ use the site and their thoughts on it.

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