SLAV Web Elements Engaged Project

For Victorian Schools only.

Are any of your students and teachers involved in using interesting and innovative online tools?

Have you been working with students and teachers on copyright, creative commons and Intellectual property?

Are you interested in helping your students to build online resources to share their discoveries with others? If you answer YES to any or all of the questions above then the SLAV Web Elements Engaged project might be for you. We need a number of schools to be involved in the development of online video/audio resources to help share knowledge, skills and links that make use of online technologies and help educate others about copyright and IP.

Being part of the project will provide schools with:

  • on-site professional development activities for teachers,
  • some additional equipment and software, and
  • the opportunity for your students to create online resources for other students.

Those involved in the project will also become part of an online community where project resources, ideas and learnings will be shared, discussed and reviewed.

The following are some of the areas we would like to cover as part of the project:

  • Basic Searching Skills
  • Searching skills explored
  • Creative Commons basics
  • Creative Commons – classroom application
  • IP for schools
  • Online Safety
  • Digital Publishing Tools
  • Digital Publishing Responsibilities
  • Google Tools
  • Google Forms
  • Google Docs and Collaboration
  • Google Sites
  • Animoto
  • Wall Wisher
  • Glogster
  • Copyright Free Images
  • Copyright Free Audio/Video
  • Mind Maps
  • ccMixter
  • Evernote
  • Edmodo
  • Prezi
  • Social Bookmarking
  • VoiceThread
  • Avatars
  • Please Note this is not a definitive list and if your school has been working on other areas we would love to hear and see what you have done. If you are interested in being involved please fill out the following online form.

If you are interested in being involved please fill out the following online Expression of Interest Form.

Expressions of Interest close: Monday 13th September 2010
To send any additional information including audio or video clips to show us what you have done, please contact the SLAV office on phone: 9349 5822 or email: slav@netspace.net.au for uploading instructions.

Timeline: Project will run from September 2010 until May 2011.

Sweet search

This is an incredibly useful search engines for teachers to use with students at every level. In fact it is more than once search engine, as you can see in this screenshot:

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Sweet search has been developed carefully:  “It searches only the 35,000 Web sites that our staff of research experts and librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved when creating the content on findingDulcinea. We constantly evaluate our search results and “fine-tune” them”.

Their blog post explains even more:

SweetSearch is the product of 100,000+ hours of research that went into creating findingDulcinea’s 700+ Web Guides and thousands of articles. This content links to tens of thousands of Web sites that have been evaluated and deemed reliable by our research experts and librarian and teacher consultants (for a bevy of reviews of findingDulcinea and SweetSearch from top educators, see our media kit; or get a widget for SweetSearch, so you can embed it on your school Web site.).

For younger learners, we’ve recently introduced a beta version of SweetSearch4Me, which is the only search engine that prominently ranks high quality Websites created for elementary (primary) school students, and mixes them with accessible primary source sites. Please send feedback on SweetSearch4Me to sweetsearch@dulcineamedia.com so we can fully launch it with your input in September.

Sweet search also has a terrific page for school librarians.

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This page has information on:

  • research guides
  • tips for better research
  • news of the day
  • improving research habits and more.

This site comes highly recommended from educators globally. However, as always, check it out first to see if it suits your needs.

Ping

Kent Walsdorf, Program Coordinator at The Song Room has kindly shared the following information about an innovative music program:
Ping is a social networking site that makes learning music fun, simple and accessible, and provides creative musical opportunities for middle year school students in Australia. Using Web 2.0 technologies, the emphasis is on student centred, self-directed learning, exploring a range of musical styles. Ping incorporates video resources with online classrooms, master classes and real-time concert streaming. Perhaps the most attractive aspect of Ping is that it is completely free!
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At the start of Term 3 2010, Ping went live to 15 schools across rural Victoria . Each school started by working through the ‘Ping Do’ tutorials where students learn the sign up process, how to create their own profile and how to make their personal blog. Once students where comfortable in using the site, they are then able to access 3 different streams of learning through the comfort of their classroom computer. These are singing, junk percussion and composition/notation.
Ping has been able to offer schools the opportunity to attend Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concerts in their rural areas, to have professional musicians attend their Ping workshops, as well as the opportunity to engage with other members of the site. At the end of Term 4 schools Ping will bring schools together in their clusters to perform what they have learnt throughout their Ping workshops.
In 2011, Ping will begin the next phase of tutorials in guitar and drum lessons while continuing to develop the composition elements. We are now seeking schools who would like to participate for 2011. If you are interested in becoming a Ping school, please register your interest to kent@songroom.org.au and check out the site at http://www.pingmusic.com.au   Remember, you don’t need to be a musical genius or tech savvy to be involved.
The Ping project is a collaboration between The Song Room, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Victoria, Victorian Opera, Country Education Project, 3MBS FM and is funded by the Victorian Government.
What a fabulous initiative.

Feature blog – Glenys Lowden’s year 7 History blog

Lowther Hall AGS’s Head of Library Glenys Lowden has kindly agreed to share information on the development of her year 7 History blog.

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Glenys explains why there was a need for such a resource:

I have set up a Year 7 History blog for my class this year.  The main aim is to disseminate information to them through this source, have discussion when appropriate for tasks and include media content.

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It is great to see that Glenys is reinforcing students set tasks through the blog along with a range of resources. Looking at the number of comments from students, using the blog seems to be a popular way to learn. Another excellent resource from Glenys.

Historical Facebook

Recently edtech guru Richard Byrne wrote about a way to encourage students to research using the concept of Facebook. By creating a faux Facebook account for a person of interest, students need to research that person and try to bring their personality to life. Derrick Waddell has developed a template that any teacher can freely use.

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To read the entire post, click here.

Note: Students will NOT set up a Facebook account, this is merely a template based on the Facebook concept and layout.

The State Library of Victoria Education Services have also alerted me to an interactive way for teachers to bring Shakespeare to life for their students. Sarah Schmelling created this Facebook page for Hamlet:

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Again, Facebook does not have to be used for this unit, but using the template above, students could create new Shakespearean scenes, scenarios, characters or plays, update the play they are studying or develop conversations between characters.

A great way to bring history to life for our students using a format they are familiar with.

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!

Mashpedia

Looking for an online, multimedia, real time encyclopedia? Mashpedia is just that and is worth using with students.

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The website explains more:

Mashpedia is a web encyclopedia enhanced with cutting-edge functionalities and sophisticated features such as multimedia content, social media tools and real-time information, accessible to people all over the world. It’s free to use and open for public participation, allowing users to discuss specific topics, post and answer questions, share relevant links or contribute in new creative ways. Mashpedia integrates a variety of online services and applications like Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Google News, Books, Blog Posts, and further contextual information into a single slick interface, presenting an organized outlook of live content feeds for every topic, thus providing a broad spectrum of services and features that eliminate the user’s need to visit each service separately.

The FAQ page explains more:

Mashpedia aggregates multiple web feeds (streams of content from different sources) into structured articles about specific, encyclopedic terms, historic events and popular individuals, groups, organizations, companies, etc.
Every article provides a basic definition of the term, along with the most relevant videos about it, a stream of current Twitter messages, latest news, images, blog posts and links. Mashpedia also offers semantic connections between the articles, in form of links.
Even though there are advertisements on Mashpedia, it is a worthy search tool for (at least) older students as it gives a real overview of a topic from many different points of view and many different types of media.

A Book and a Hug

A Book and a Hug was created by US Children’s Services Librarian Barb Langridge.

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Barb explains why she developed the book recommendation site:

I created abookandahug.com to help you find a book for your child. It’s important to match children up with books they want to read. It can make all the difference in the world if you can figure out his or her “reading personality.” So, just who is your child and what does your child look for in a book? A Books For Boys page is coming soon to help you define your boy in book terms. A Books For Girls page will follow on its heels.

A new section for books set in or from Asia/Australia/Oceania has just been added to the site. Barb explains:

Welcome to the wonders of Australia, Asia and the islands of Micronesia. Everyone of us is a citizen of the entire planet so we are actually looking at the countries of our Earth neighbors when we spin the globe. This section of abookandahug.com has been designed to make it easy for young readers to explore this neck of the woods through books whether picture book or young adult titles. Our hope is that by reading stories from these countries, all children will see the connections between us and the many similarities between us. Through this knowledge hopefully will come acceptance and friendship.

Click on a the map to find the books from a country. We wish you wonderful journeys!

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Reading literature from specific locations is a great way for students around the globe to learn more about those countries and Barb would love to add recommendations from people in Australia, so please feel free to contact her to help develop this wonderful site.

Thanks to Barbara Braxton for passing on the  link to A Book and a Hug.

Reading rewards

A frequent flyer scheme for young readers, Reading Rewards is a site where students, teachers and parents can keep track of books read and offer incentives for reading and reviewing books.

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The site explains more:

How does it work? It’s simple. Kids accumulate ‘RR’ Miles on the site, which they can exchange for fun and sometimes silly things on the site: joke of the day, video of the day (always safe, kid-friendly videos our editors find), mini-games, and more. We even have an RR Store where kids can spend their miles and buy real stuff! Parents or other sponsors can contribute to the store and add their very own rewards for their kids.

How do they accumulate RR Miles? By reading, and telling us what and how much they read! They’ll get bonuses for reviewing their books, and making recommendations to friends.
A fun dashboard gives them a quick view of their friends, their status updates, what they’re reading and how much. This actually makes reading really cool!

As an added bonus, parents and/or other sponsors can set up and track their own reading reward programs. For example, 1 outing to the movies for every 600 minutes reading. It’s up to you!
Teachers can set up a group for their class, and track reading progress individually or as a group. Setting a group target is a fun class motivator, and our interactive chart let’s everyone see how they’re doing! If you like to use reading logs, you’ll love Reading Rewards. Using our online system with built-in parental validations, you can say good-bye to all those sheets of paper…

Reading Rewards declares that it is:

  • A completely safe social network
  • The only people kids can interact with on the site are their friends
  • Parents have to approve all friend connections
  • Parents can see and even edit content published to their kids pages

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We know that peer recommendations are all important, so here is a tool that helps students to share which books they liked (and didn’t like).

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Certainly worth investigating! Thanks to Richard Byrne from Free Technology for Teachers for passing on this link.

WikiNorthia

Documenting stories from people in Melbourne’s north, WikiNorthia is a wiki with two main assets.

  1. It is open to contributions from anyone.
  2. With topics such as:

  • art and literature,
  • buildings,
  • community,
  • environment,
  • events,
  • people,
  • places,
  • sport and recreation,
  • transport and
  • work and commerce,

there is a vast array of resources available for research.

WikiNorthia

The about page explains the origins of the wiki:

WikiNorthia is an innovative project that will encourage people across five local councils with rich cultural histories and diverse communities to get together and tell their stories providing a snapshot of life in the north of Melbourne now as well as the past. The project is the first of its type in Victoria and in fact Australia.

Students in the regions catered for by WikiNorthia could find an audience for specific pieces of work as well as using the wiki as a research resource. Support materials will be useful for teachers and students.