Library Management Systems – online discussion

Google-hangouts-634x240 Last Saturday the School Library Association of Victoria conducted its first member discussion via Google Hangouts.  While trialing it for some time, this was the first event involving members who had registered an expression of interest in being involved.  It was a great success and will be a valuable platform for future member discussions.

The topic on Saturday was Library Management Systems (LMS).   It was not a vendor event but rather a demonstration of the system from the user’s point of view.  Members who are actually using the systems demonstrated them to Hangout participants and discussed their use and value to them.   The discussion had the valuable support of Renate Beilhartz, Library Studies teacher from Box Hill Institute.  Renate would be familiar to many through her presentation of RDA courses on behalf of SLAV.

Library Management Systems discussed were:

  • OCLC Worldshare by Camilla Elliott (Mazenod College)
  • Destiny  by Miffy Farquarson (Mentone Grammar)
  • Infiniti by Pam Saunders (Melbourne High School)

SLAV will hold fortnightly Hangouts with more indepth discussions on a full range of  LMS options during Term 3, commencing Thursday, 24 July – 4.00 pm.  Every library has its own needs.  This is an opportunity for you to be informed by colleagues who are satisfied users of their LMS and are happy to discuss it with SLAV members.  Full details on how to register your interest in being involved will be available on the the SLAV website.

History resources from Sovereign Hill

In this guest post Peter Hoban, Education Officer at Ballarat’s Sovereign Hill, introduces the comprehensive range of online resources and events produced by the Sovereign Hill education team.

Sovereign Hill Education is using online tools to make AusVELS history accessible to teachers and students.

Our free webinar series for teaching History will kick off this year with a presentation from the staff of Canadian Lead PS. This innovative school trialled AusVELS History across the whole school in 2012 culminating in a wonderful school community history night called “Back to the Future Fair”. The night featured student work amidst community group presentations and created a real sense of excitement and a real audience for their students. Teachers will discuss their experiences in a one-hour after school webinar on 20th of March.

This program inspired us to develop a teaching kit for Level 5 History. Called The Settlement of Victoria, the kit provides links to online collection items from some of Australia’s most reputable institutions so students can study the fascinating story of the settlement of our state. The kit culminates in students using the skills they have learned to complete a research project about a famous Victorian and a Diigo bookmarking group has been developed to share useful research websites for this project. It is hoped that teachers and students will share good websites they have found to help other students from across Victoria. The free online kit is being supported by web conferences to explore it. The first is on the 14th of  March.

The second webinar features two authors. Peter FitzSimons has recently published “Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution” and has a string of other titles to his credit. Many teachers will also be familiar with Doug Bradby, author of the “Seriously Weird History Series” that kids love. Both will be online to discuss the importance of story-telling in engaging audiences from 4.30pm on 2 May.

Lastly, Sovereign Hill Education has been working with local secondary History teachers to provide good ideas and resources. An AusVELS History Diigo group presents links tagged according to AusVELS but at present has a strong focus on Years 7 and 9. An Edmodo group called History Teachers PLN has also been created so teachers can ask questions of each other and seek advice. All history teachers are invited to sign up to Edmodo and join this group. You can use the group code i4pz2q or join using this link.

To book for any of these sessions or to find out more call (03) 5337 1188.

Thanks to Peter and the rest of the team for putting together such fabulous resources. We look forward to attending the upcoming webinars. 

 

Learning with Gusto

Today’s guest post comes from Emma Reilly, Education officer at the State Library of Victoria. Emma explores some  online resources related to food and introduces a free webinar that will run on October the 16th.

The State Library of Victoria is currently presenting a free exhibition, Gusto! A culinary history of Victoria. The exhibition explores Victoria’s historic and contemporary culinary landscape, featuring gastronomic treasures from the Library’s collections – from the first Australian cookbook, published in 1864, to an actual World War I army biscuit. To support the exhibition, the State Library of Victoria has produced a Gusto! Education resource for Years 3-6 of the Australian Curriculum (VELS Levels 3 & 4).

When we consider the Masterchef phenomenon, issues of global food security, health, well-being, ethics and nutrition, it is fair to say food certainly plays an important role in the lives of students today. In an upcoming free professional learning opportunity, educators from the SLV and Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation will explore engaging learning experiences through the themes: Food and Identity, Food Supply and Eating In.

Some of the highlights of the webinar will include:
• Get some Bright Ideas about bringing to life online media using simple thinking routines.
• Be introduced to engaging digital learning tools such as Glogster, Story Scrapbook, bubbl.us and Google Maps.
• Learn how to access extensive digitised resources for the primary classroom using the SLV catalogue and Gusto! research guide.
• Get a backstage pass to the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation Professional learning community, The Shared Table.

Have we tantalised your tastebuds? Sink your teeth into this Blackboard Collaborate session on October 16th at 4.00pm-5.00pm.

The three literacies of comics

Updated: Here’s the recording of the webinar on comics and literacy held on 10 September. This post introduces some of the ideas and resources discussed.

Comics are often misunderstood. Many people, when they think of them at all, think of them as being the preserve of superheroes and three panel gag strips in the newspaper. Comics embrace works of all genres and they are increasingly finding a place in classrooms around the world.

A commonly used definition of comics is “sequential art.” Images, when viewed in order, give a sense of the passage of time.

 

Image source: http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/carl/3a/02.html

This simple two-panel comic from Scott McCloud, the author of Understanding Comics, demonstrates this point. By “reading” the placement of these images as a time sequence, we build a narrative.

The art form of comics imposes no boundaries on genre, content, or indeed artistic merit. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, telling the story of his Holocaust survivor father, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Reading comics is an engaging experience that embraces traditional literacy skills, but also brings other skills into play as well.

Literacy skills

Most comics have words, in the form of speech, captions, or both. These written elements become uniquely engaging through their embedding in the comics medium.  Many of the core concepts of literacy learning can be explicitly addressed. Sequencing and ordering of ideas is at the very heart of comics, and inference and deduction from context are also well supported by the inclusion of visual imagery. This additional visual support provides another way in to a story, and can provide an often much-needed boost to visual learners.

The use of comics in literacy teaching is finding increasing support in academic circles, as these studies show:
Comics Are Key to Promoting Literacy in Boys, Study Says
For Improving Early Literacy, Reading Comics Is No Child’s Play

Visual Literacy

Comics not only have to be read as literary texts, they also have to be read as visual texts. The artistic choices made in producing a comic shape the experience of the comic. To appreciate a comic fully requires an understanding of the elements and principles of visual design.   These elements provide a common vocabulary to talk about images that can be used across the curriculum. This allows students to think about the composition of an image in the same way they consider the composition of a written text. This idea can be expanded by considering individual panels of a comic like shots in a movie. What is visible in the shot? How is it framed? Why were these choices made?

Comics literacy

Comics are constructed in a particular way, and they use their own grammar and syntax. Each image in a comic is called a “panel”, and the space separating them is known as the “gutter”.  Speech is enclosed in “balloons” and internal dialogue is often placed in “thought bubbles”. Panels are read in the same direction as usual reading order, which can often come as a surprise to first-time readers of Japanese comics!

Most of us are so familiar with reading comics that these procedures become transparent, but they are learned skills, and a vital part of reading comics.

Tools and resources

Given the place comics can have in class, here are some online tools and resources to help you and your students make their own:

Comic Life – one of the most popular comics makers, which is now bundled with EduStar for use in public schools. A simple drag and drop interface allows you to create comics with your own images.

ToonDoo – free online comic creator. Use images from the site, share your creations, and view comics made by others

A great site for news and reviews about comics is No Flying, No Tights, which as the name suggests, looks well beyond the usual superhero fare.

 

 

Victorian PLN webinar recordings

The current Victorian PLN course is now winding down as participants begin reflecting on their course through digital stories and catching up on any units that they may have missed during the term.

Over the 12 units of the course participants have discovered great web tools, written blogs, explored curly issues like digital citizenship and discovered the wonderful community of educators that exists online. You can connect with the participants and the wider VicPLN community at the Facebook group, which now has close to 200 members.

A major feature of the course were the regular web conferences which covered a range of topics. You can access the recordings below. The sessions were:

Getting started with your PLN and blogging

Organising information online (Twitter, Blogging, IGoogle)

Integrating technology into schools (featuring Tony Richards)

Online databases and search skills (featuring Andrew McConville from the State Library of Victoria)

Gaming in Education (featuring Paul Callaghan)

PLN wrap up and final reflection

All of the recordings will open in Blackboard Collaborate (or Elluminate). For help getting started with this web conferencing tool, have a look at the web conferencing guide on the Victorian PLN blog.

Sovereign Hill Education Resources

Our guest post today comes from Sovereign Hill Education Officer Stephanie Rosestone. The Sovereign Hill team have some great free professional development opportunities and resources for teaching history.

This year Sovereign Hill Education is running free webinars offering professional learning opportunities for teachers. In Term 2 there will be two webinars: How to find good resources for teaching history (Thursday 3 May) and Innovative history teaching in practise (Mon 14 May). For more information and to register visit here.
 
If you’re going to be teaching Australian History, Sovereign Hill Education has a number of free online resources to support your programs. Our Education Website is a great place to start. Here you will find a Teachers section that includes Bibliographies of Resources, Teaching Kits, VELS units and upcoming PDs (including a one day conference AusVELS History in the Primary Classroom in July). There is also a section called Talking about Learning that includes videos of teachers and students talking about their experiences of teaching and learning history. The Students section of our website includes images, research notes and audio files retelling excerpts of primary source documents.
 
We look forward to being part of your Professional Learning Network. You can find us on Twitter @GoldfieldsEd or you can follow our blog where we will be sharing resources, news and ideas.
 

 

eT@lking: Retribalizing, Literary Style: Virtual Book Clubs and Bookcast

Thanks so much to teacher extraordinaire Anne Mirtschin for passing on the following information about this free online learning session:

Time: October 27, 2010 from 8pm to 9pm (AEDT)
Location: elluminate webinar
Event Type: online_pdelluminatenetworking
Organized By: Anne Mirtschin

McLuhan (see the video) predicted we’d have to leave the bookworld behind to be “with it” in the electronic world but with social media we can do it all. Learn about an evolving virtual book club model, online or inworld, that culminates with the screening of collaboratively produced bookcasts, multimedia aesthetic responses to books.

To preview bookcasting, check out this ncbookcast festival You can post questions and comments to the wiki discussion.

Meet our Presenter: Cris Crissman, PhD, Distance Learning Consultant, USDLC, Adjunct Assistant Professor, NC State Writer and Producer.

Bio: Cris teaches the “Learning Through Literature with Young Adults” graduate class at North Carolina State University. After ten years of exploring online book clubs, she took the class and the book clubs inworld to Second Life. The students self-select genre book clubs and work collaboratively to produce bookcasts to share with the whole class and the world. Inservice teachers have applied the model in their classrooms. Every year the class leads a virtual author study for teen readers in the state and this year the featured virtual author is Australian Melina Marchetta whose award-winning Finnikin of the Rock is drawing rave reviews from American teens.
Link to join this session

Sounds like a fabulous opportunity to learn much more about a topic close to our hearts. And as Cris is presenting at 5am her time, a large audience would be welcome!

The recording of this session is available for anyone to listen to. Thanks to Anne Mirtschin for forwarding this link.

School Laptop Management

Helen Boelens passed on information on this webinar regarding school laptop management:

View this email onlinehttp://www.eschoolnews.com/e/webinars/Laptop_Management4.htm

eSchool News Logo
2009 Free Webinar Series
2010 Free
Webinar Series

Worry-free Strategies for School Laptop Management

Free 2010 Webinar Series

Date: Wednesday, Feb 03, 2010
Time: 2:00 pm ET / 11:00 am PT
Duration: One hour (15 mins for Q&A)

Laptops are becoming an essential part of education, but the difficulty of managing them has serious consequences for students and staff. Many districts have found that loss or theft can be costly, damaging student morale and hurting limited budgets. However, implementing secure, cost-effective 1:1 programs has proved difficult, requiring a great deal of administrative effort.

Join us on February 3 for a discussion with a district IT leader that has found an easy, cost-effective way to manage a 1:1 program. Joe Fives, Director of Technology and Information Services for Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools, will share his experience securing his students’ technology resources in an area with a high crime rate.

Register at:
http://absolutewebinar-blast3.eventbrite.com/

Sponsored by:
Powered by:
Absolute Software
Elluminate

Register Now… Space is limited!!

Register Now

Learn how a proactive school district:

  • Tracks over 6,000 MacBook® computers, even when they leave school networks
  • Drives down theft rates, bringing peace of mind to students and teachers
  • Recovered several missing laptops and even one runaway student!
  • Got school board and grant approvals for technology objectives
  • Applies tracking for IT administrative tasks
Webinar Speakers:
Joe Fives
Director of Technology and Information Services
Kansas City, Kansas Public School District
Joe Fives
Geoff Glave
Product Manager
Absolute Software
Geoff Glave
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Although US based, there could be some relevant information for any schools that run a laptop program. This webinar begins at 6am AEDT on Thursday 4th February. Thank you to Helen for the information.