Feature blog – Ballarat Grammar School

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

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

CodeX - The Ballarat Grammar Resource Centre blog

CodeX - The Ballarat Grammar Resource Centre blog

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

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

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

iWise

iWise (wisdom search engine) is a useful site. It is a repository for all number of quotes (some useful, others not). Users can search for quotes by entering name of person, partial quote or by using the categories section.

iWise homepage
iWise homepage

Categories such as

  • books – reading
  • writers and writing
  • education
  • children

and many more will be useful to us as educators.

iWise quotes can be downloaded directly into Powerpoint or embedded in to Facebook, retweeted by Twitter users etc. iWise is also available as an iPhone app.

Beyond the happy ending

An article worth reading that appears in today’s Melbourne Age as well as the UK’s Guardian.

Beyond the happy ending

JACKIE KEMP

September 7, 2009

One day recently I heard an unearthly wailing coming from my 11-year-old son’s room. It was like no sound I’d ever heard from him before. He doesn’t normally cry at television or films but, curled up alone in his bed reading, when the fantasy character he identified with met a grim end, vanquished by the forces of darkness, he found it absolutely devastating.

Having perhaps antiquated expectations of children’s fiction, I flicked through the book, sure he must have misinterpreted the ending. I was wrong.

A friend complained to her daughter’s school after finding her 10-year-old in shuddering hysterics over a book about the Holocaust. “It was so graphic about the horror of the train journey to the death camps: people were dying and being shoved out of the train. It ended with the main character going into the gas chambers.

“My daughter didn’t know anything about the Second World War or the Holocaust. She was completely unprepared — she was given it because it was at the reading level she was at. The teacher hadn’t read it.”

Author Anne Fine recently mused at the Edinburgh Book Festival about the effects of the bleakness of some of today’s children’s books on vulnerable youngsters. This provoked a rash of sneering from the literati, and painful — and clearly unjust — comparisons between the former children’s laureate and Enid Blyton. But Fine obviously touched on something of interest to many when she asked whether realism “may have gone too far in children’s literature”.

Alison Waller, senior lecturer at the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature (NCRCL) at Roehampton University in south-west London, says: “As a children’s writer, Anne Fine has a very strong sense of a pastoral obligation to her readers. You can see that in her work. But many writers for children and young people don’t feel like that. They believe they should just write what they want and leave it up to the reader to interpret.”

Patrick Ness, author of The Knife of Never Letting Go, a violent, dystopian fantasy, believes that fiction should reflect reality and that “good doesn’t always triumph”.

He says: “When I was young, there was still the compulsion for books for the young to teach an ethical and moral lesson. The bully always got his comeuppance. I knew that was shit. That wasn’t what happened in my school.

“I think that if you tell the truth about the bullies getting away with it and the violence and the tough realities of life, then when you tell the truth about love and optimism, they will take it more seriously.”

He feels that, despite the violence and torture contained in the text, a book like his could still be useful in the classroom. “A class of teenagers can discuss when the character chooses right and when he chooses wrong. There is a time when he shouldn’t use the knife and he does, and there is a time when you are rooting for him to use it but he doesn’t, and the class can talk about how it can be right to feel that.”

Teacher Ann Young insists there is a place for dark stories in the classroom. “I just read a book called Nightjohn, by Gary Paulsen, about slavery, to a class of boys who said they weren’t interested in reading. They are also learning about the reality of slavery and it really held their attention.

“There are some books the children read that do make our school librarian roll her eyes: Before I Die is apparently about a teenager who does lots of things like have sex with various people because she knows she is about to die. But teenagers do seem to be drawn to the dark side. I think it is just part of exploring what is inside them.”

Sheila Rodger, head of English at an Edinburgh school, says: “I am amazed by the nitty-gritty reality of some of the books the children choose to read. I think perhaps there is an absence of metaphor. They can be a bit obvious and so the imagination isn’t stimulated.”

Children’s writer and teacher Bernard Beckett says using modern literature is a key tool for getting children to understand and explore the world around them. “I am in absolute awe of the moral power of literature. The stories we construe are crucial to our expectation of the world.”

His recent book, Genesis, uses a child in a future, utopian society taking an exam about the past to explore the theory of evolution. Beckett says: “The trouble with the ethical debate around children’s literature is that it tends to be hijacked by a very select group of social conservatives whose morality I find abhorrent; a morality that, for instance, has persecuted homosexuals.”

But he does have concerns about books for children that portray a depressing world view. “I am an irredeemable optimist. One, I think it is a damn fine way to live your life. And, most of the time, drivers do stay on their own side of the road. Most people don’t kill you.

“Two, more energy comes from optimism. That is a stronger energy than the one that comes from saying everything is terrible and we are all going to die.”

Kim Reynolds, director of the NCRCL, says there is a fashion for dark fantasy books, which seem to appeal to teenagers. “Since the ’50s, when the Catcher in the Rye came out, we have had teenage fiction under the nought to 16 umbrella, and what teenagers can cope with is different from what younger children can,” she points out.

“Nihilism seems to appeal to some teenagers. It seems to talk to the inner turmoil they are experiencing and in some ways it corresponds to their emotional stage.”

She voices some reservations about books like Ness’s. “It has a really hopeless and brutal ending. You aren’t really left with any hope at all. It is quite nihilistic. And you aren’t prepared for it because it is a children’s book and it doesn’t signal that it isn’t going to have a happy ending.”

Of another fantasy book, Tender Morselsby Margo Lanagan, Reynolds says: “I really question whether that should be regarded as a book for children. It doesn’t offer very much in the way of hope at all.”

Perhaps parents and teachers can no longer afford to assume that everything in the garden is lovely — or that everything in the children’s department of the bookshop or library is. Like the restricted section in the Hogwarts library, some of these books may bite. GUARDIAN

Hey! Teenager of the year

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

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

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

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

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

Infloox

Infloox is a website with an interesting idea.

Introducing infloox™, the website on influential people’s influential books!

Let’s say you are interested in Agatha Christie! infloox™ allows you to find:

  • her favourite books or authors;
  • the most famous readers of all her books, and why they liked them;
  • whether one of her books served as an inspiration for some other book.

But that’s not all! You can also search this website, to find the favourite readings of entire countries, regions, job types, cultural movements or groups in general. Do this through our “collective search” feature!

  • Agatha Christie’s favourite books / authors (infloox™)
  • The most famous readers of Agatha Christie’s works (outfloox™)
Get details on Charles Dickens:
Infloox
Get details on Bleak House:

  • Dickens’s sources of inspiration
  • Influence of Bleak House on other books
  • The most famous readers of Bleak House
How Bleak House influenced Agatha Christie:

  • Sources for the information provided
  • Details concerning this influence
  • Weight of this influence
  • Visual cues for this influence

This example centered around Agatha Christie and, by extension, around one of her favourite authors: Charles Dickens. Of course, both happen to be writers of books; but this is just one example! You can find similar pages for any other types of famous persons: not only writers, but also politicians, movie actors, scientists, tycoons, jazz musicians, astronauts, impressionist painters, etc. — anyone who enjoyed reading, or who might have been deeply impressed, influenced by one or more books in particular. That makes lots of famous people!

 

And if you want to find directly the influence of a book, or of an author, on a famous person, or on another book, simply type both names or titles in the search box, for example: “bill clinton macbeth shakespeare”.

Want to know more? Here’s additional stuff on how this website works:

The monkey
know our vision — and what we want to accomplish!
A bird’s view
what were you missing before infloox™ was invented?
Methodology
are we really that pedantic? Well, it’s up to you to find out!
Buzzwords
welcome to the world of infloox™! Here are some of the buzzwords we use again and again throughout this website!

(Do just beware of the advertsing on the site before you use it with students, it was slightly risky the day of my visit. However, this does appear to be fixed now as of 30/8/09 – see comments below.) Thanks to Jean Anning and Joyce Valenza for passing on the details of Infloox.

ePals

 ePals promotes itself as ‘the internet’s largest global community of connected classrooms.  It is a free resource that offers collaborative school projects, eMentoring as well as ‘ePals on the web’.

Homepage
Homepage

From the website comes the following information:

The Social Network for Learning

ePals is the largest and fastest growing K-12 online community for meaningful learning. More than half a million educators and millions of learners across 200 countries and territories safely connect, collaborate and build community.

  • Schools around the globe use our school-safe email and blog tools.
  • Deep learning is catalyzed through collaborative learning projects and experiences such as In2Books, ePals’ research-based curriculum-aligned eMentoring program.

Exchanging ideas and questions in a meaningful way with other learners – down the block or around the globe – generates great excitement about learning and builds 21st century digital literacy and learning skills.

ePals was written about recently in The Journal. The text of the article follows: 

ePals Boosts Language Translation Capabilities

By David Nagel

08/19/09

Education technology provider ePalshas upgraded its ePals Global Community by expanding its instant translation capabilities. The service has now added 26 additional languages and can now translate text in a total of 35 languages.

Some of the new languages supported by the translator include Arabic, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hindi, Polish, Russian, Swedish, and Vietnamese

ePals is a free resource that reaches more than half a million educators and millions of students worldwide, offering collaboration tools, social networking capabilities, and school-oriented features like Classroom Match, SchoolMail, SchoolBlog, and In2Books.

  • Classroom Match is a tool designed to let teachers connect with other classrooms or online projects around the country.
  • SchoolMail is an integrated, teacher-monitored e-mail system that includes 72 language-translation pairs, spell checking, virus and spam filters, and file-sharing capabilities.
  • SchoolBlog is a literacy education tool that offers teacher-supervised message boards that encourage students to express ideas and collaborate with peers and instructors.
  • In2Books is an online literacy curriculum based around a dialog between a student and an adult mentor designed to improve student achievement on standardized tests and increase critical thinking and writing proficiency.

According to ePals, more than 500,000 teachers and “millions of students” around the world use the online service. Further information can be found here.

The In2Books section of the site may be of interest to Primary School teachers:

With In2Books, 3rd – 5th grade students:

  • Are connected with carefully screened adult pen pals
  • Select and read 5 books closely each year
  • Engage with adult pen pals who read the same books
  • Exchange 6 online letters each year with their adult pen pals

and,

With In2Books, teachers: the learning with in-class discussions about the books and related instruction in genre and literacy skills.

Reinforce and extend

Certainly worth perusing.

Making the right to read a reality for kids

This article appeared in Saturday’s Age newspaper and is so inspiring. What a wonderful job Suzy Wilson has done in bringing books to indigenous children.

Making the right to read a reality for kids

August 22, 2009

Bookseller Suzy Wilson couldn’t believe the prevalence of indigenous illiteracy, so she did something about it, writes Clare Kermond.

IT WAS just over 12 years ago that Suzy Wilson’s life took a sharp right turn. Days away from the start of a new semester, the then lecturer in early childhood education had a nasty run-in with her boss. She resigned on the spot, joking to her husband that night that she might finally follow her dream of opening a bookshop.

Luckily for many people, including Ms Wilson, that dream became a reality. She opened Brisbane’s Riverbend Bookshop 11 years ago and adores the life of a bookseller. She is passionate about the value of books and reading, and for the past six years has used her connections in the book world to promote another cause close to her heart, indigenous literacy.

When Ms Wilson, 49, first heard some of the statistics for reading and writing in indigenous communities she could not believe that such a grave problem was receiving so little attention.

”I found the figures completely unbelievable, and the fact that I didn’t know about them. It was like finding out about the stolen generation – you couldn’t believe that was going on while you were at school.”

At first Ms Wilson set herself a modest target, planning to organise a raffle at the shop, maybe donating a shelf of books. But with her background in early childhood education she saw an opportunity to do some good for two causes, indigenous literacy and children’s reading in general.

Ms Wilson approached the seven schools in her local area and pitched the idea of a reading challenge, with each child paying five dollars to meet the target of reading 10 books; the children would get a certificate and the money raised would pay for books and literacy support for remote indigenous communities.

Schools leapt at the idea. Ms Wilson says teachers especially liked the theory that children were helping other children learn to read. For the first challenge, in 2004, 112 schools signed up and more than $25,000 was raised.

”The message we always give to schools is, ‘Can you imagine a world without books and reading?’ A lot of these [indigenous] kids don’t even see a book until they get to school and then they start learning to read in what is often their third language. Think about how hard that would be. My children have done Italian all through primary school and they couldn’t read a book in it.”

Ms Wilson’s idea has grown into the Indigenous Literacy Project (ILP), a national scheme backed by the publishing and bookselling industry around Australia. The fund-raising ideas have broadened too, partly to avoid doubling up with the Premier’s Reading Challenge, which most states now have in all schools. Each year on Indigenous Literacy Day, September 2, publishers and booksellers that sign up donate 5 per cent of their takings to the project. Schools fund-raise in a variety of ways.

For the first time, there will also be a benefit concert on Tuesday at the Melbourne Town Hall, organised by one of the project’s ambassadors, Felix Riebl of the Cat Empire band, and with some big musical names including Paul Kelly and Archie Roach.

Ms Wilson says some people question how the literacy problems in indigenous communities could have become so serious but even minimal research finds some obvious answers. ”There’s health issues, there’s English as a third language, there’s no access to books, there’s also things like consistency,” Ms Wilson said. ”One principal told us that five of the teachers were new in the last three weeks. How do you address literacy if the teachers are turning over that quickly? There’s also truancy and just getting kids to school over long distances. At the first school I ever visited the library consisted of a few boxes on the floor of a classroom and the school had been built on the floodplain and it flooded four times a year, so they lost their books.”

Tara June Winch, an indigenous author and another ambassador for the ILP, has run several workshops with children in indigenous communities in Arnhem Land. She is clearly moved when she talks about meeting young children who have never handled a book.

”It’s so important to build up that idea of books at home for the little ones. My daughter is 3½ and she’s always had books around. One thing I noticed going out to Arnhem is watching the children opening the book, turning the pages, it’s the first step in learning to read.” June Winch is organising board-and-cloth books for babies as part of her work with the ILP this year.

Ms Wilson is one of a committee of six volunteers who run the ILP with some paid administrative help. Although the project has raised more than $500,000 since it started five years ago she says some days the challenges can seem overwhelming. ”When we’re all getting a little bit tired and burnt out we go on a field trip to the Katherine. You see these kids opening a box of books and it’s like five Christmases have arrived all at once. They’re the very real joys.”

Songs for Stories, the benefit concert for the Indigenous Literacy Project is at the Melbourne Town Hall at 7.30pm on Tuesday.

 

http://indigenousliteracyproject.org.au

http://www.mwf.com.au

Congratulations to Suzy and everyone involved in this wonderful project.

Feature blog – Emmanuel College

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

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

Blog homepage

Blog homepage

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

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

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

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

Happy Book Week.

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

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

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.

Feature blog – Rosebud Secondary College

Samantha Jeacle, teacher librarian at Rosebud Secondary College has kindly shared information on her excellent Year 8 reading blog, called “That reading blog thing…”

"That reading blog thing..." homepage

That reading blog thing... homepage

We set up our reading blog as part of our Read Every Day program. Students in Year 8 are involved in the program for one of their five English lessons, for one semester per year. The goal in setting up the blog was to allow the students to share information about books they have enjoyed with their peers in a way that is enjoyable and easily accessible. Previous to the blog we were asking the students to deliver a short speech to the class on a book, but this was really tedious and the students hated it. So, after completing the WEB 2.0 online PD, I decided to set up a reading blog. The students are now expected to post a comment to the blog at least once for the semester. One thing we are focusing on in the reading program is genre (the students are expected to read across three different genres) this is why the pages on the blog are arranged as such. Students are expected to identify the genre of their book and pick the right page to post on. Then, while they’re there, they are exposed to other books in the same genre that they might like.

The response to the blog has been really positive. The students were sceptical at first, but once they made their comment and saw their name ‘on the Internet’ they really quite liked it. Some students have even made multiple visits.

History/war page

History/war page

 We would even encourage other teacher librarians to comment on the blog about YA fiction they would recommend for Year 8 readers too.

 Thanks Samantha for taking the time and effort to share your hard work with Bright Ideas. It’s heartening to learn that the students’ responses have been positive.