Links to lots of teacher resources are available here. Created and maintained by Gail Shea Grainger, many sites are US oriented. However, there are quite a few sites that would be useful for Australian educators. Subjects available include:
Worth a look to see if there is something you can use or adapt for your own school.
Thanks to Whitefriars College teacher librarian Tania Sheko for sharing another of her virtual creations. This time, Tania has developed a blog to support her year 7 English class. Tania explains:
http://englishwfc.wordpress.com/ is basically something I started to support the year 7 English class I teach collaboratively with an English teacher at my school. I decided to document the progress of our journey through this class because I’d read other teachers’ blogs and found them to be helpful and inspiring. I wanted to include what worked and what didn’t work and why. I think it’s important to be honest so that readers can benefit from your experience. I include resources and links, student work, videos used and created, in the hope that a teacher may find something they could use – an idea, a word of caution, recommendations or advice. I also include a short list of my favourite English teachers’ blogs. These have been a wonderful, rich resource for me.
I also find that making myself record what we do in class is a worthwhile discipline. Nothing is forgotten or wasted, and I can look back to review what we’ve done, as well as clearly see the path we’ve taken and how far the students have come.
Thanks again Tania for your contribution to the world of Web 2.0 and for sharing your efforts with the readers of Bright Ideas.
This article, which was recently published by The Journal, is worth a read in relation to the social media risks to students. It may also be worth passing onto any staff who have an online profile.
By Bridget McCrea 08 October 2009
Name an online social networking site, and there are liable to be thousands of teachers, administrators, and students using it connect with people. Whether it’s Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or one of the more “specialized” online venues, all are replete with individuals looking to tap into the growing social networking wave.
Like any new, uncharted innovation, online social networking comes with risks not associated with many “traditional” ways of connecting with people. Unintentionally offend someone in person at a bookstore, for example, and the repercussions are likely to be minimal. But post a photo that others deem “offensive” on your Facebook page, and you could risk alienating others and even setting yourself up for potential lawsuits.
In her recent report, “Risk Management and Social Media: A Paradigm Shift,” Maureen O’Neil, president of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), called social media tools like blogs, message boards, and social communities the “fastest growing segment” of Web content. “These forms of social networking upend the traditional form of top-down information dispersal because information freely flows in and out of an organization,” said O’Neil.
The problem is that social media can expose organizations to significant risk, not the least of which is serious reputation damage, said O’Neil. That’s because social media is still largely the “Wild Wild West” of the Internet: It’s widely used, yet there are technically no set rules attached to it in terms of conduct. The good news is that institutions can take an active approach to influence and counteract their schools, students and teachers that are portrayed on these social media sites.
“That requires businesses to create an Internet reputation risk management plan that addresses what visitors to your site express, what your employees share on other sites and most significantly what things are said about your organization on sites over which you have no direct control,” said O’Neil. She suggested organizations actively engage on social network venues to understand how reputation can be impacted by the interactions, and then gather information on the social media activities under consideration.
From there, assess the areas of vulnerability, create counteraction plans, and communicate them to employees. Dedicate at least one employee to the monitoring of your online reputation, remarked O’Neil, and build a process to identify new reputation risk elements as social media evolves.
“The risks organizations face as a result of participating in social media are real, but so too are the benefits,” she said. “Don’t let risk blind you from taking advantage of the transformational communication opportunities that arise from social media.”
For schools, the need for risk management is especially high because teachers, students, and administrators alike are enjoying the benefits of connecting with one another online. Whether administrators are posting information about a recent school event, teachers are bouncing ideas off of one another, or students are posting photos of their weekend events, all of the information being shared is available for anyone to see and comment on.
The single biggest risk in social media circles is undoubtedly the participant’s utter lack of control over where the information is going, how it will be posted, and who is going to be able to access it. To avoid potential problems in this area, pay particular attention to what pages that online information is linked to, what types of pages are attached to the information, and which photos are included.
Schools looking to beef up their social media risk management strategies can start by setting up guidelines around their employees’ and students’ use of sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, to name just a few. Stress the fact that, once posted online, comments and photos “never go away,” even if the individual poster deletes them.
Sarah Evans, an Internet marketing consultant and director of communications for Elgin Community Collegein Elgin, IL, said schools should pay particular attention to the feedback being posted about the institution and its students and teachers. Assign someone to “search” the various sites (for the school’s name, for example) on a regular basis to essentially “police” the institution’s brand and make sure it’s being represented properly in the social media.
“You want to make sure that you’re portraying the same experience online that you do when people enter your institution’s doors,” said Evans, who pointed out that all social media sites incorporate a “search” function that allows users to type in keywords and “see what people are talking about in real-time, online.”
Also check out exactly what the content looks like before exposing it to the rest of the world. (If one of your teachers has his or her own Facebook page, pull it up online and see what it looks like to others.) Pay attention not only to the teacher’s or student’s own comments and postings, but also to the feedback being posted by “friends” who are reading–and commenting on–those social networking activities.
Article in today’s Age regarding the introduction of the e-book reader Kindle into Australia.
iPod for books Kindles excitement
October 9, 2009
IT’S the iPod for book lovers. The Australian publishing industry was abuzz yesterday over the announcement that Amazon.com’s foray into the world of electronic readers, the Kindle, is coming to Australia.
The electronic reader, Amazon’s biggest-selling product ever, has previously been available only to US consumers. A new version that can download books, newspapers and periodicals wirelessly in more than 100 countries will begin shipping this month.
Kindle is a reading device that uses the same technology as 3G phones.
About 200,000 books will be available for Australian customers to download through the device from October 19.
People will be able to read newspapers and periodicals from around the world, such as The New York Times, and Britain’s Daily Telegraph. The Kindle will sell for $US279 ($A314). Sony’s e-reader model begins at about $100 cheaper.
Amazon’s vice-president of Kindle, Steve Kessel, was on the campaign trail yesterday and was adamant that Kindle will run seamlessly on Australia’s mobile network.
”The 3G wireless connection means you can be reading a book less than 60 seconds after you order it,” Mr Kessel said.
Classroom Web Tools is a nicely organised resource site for teachers wanting to identify Web 2.0 tools for a specific school subject.
Krystie Alleaume, Senior Project Officer at the Innovation and Next Practice Division of the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development has sent Bright Ideas the following information:
Would you like to learn how to run your own Elluminate session?
Have you thought about the potential of using Elluminate with students or teachers?
We have arranged a series of moderator training sessions for Term 4: Getting Started with Elluminate and Next Steps with Elluminate. Details and dates are below. These sessions are completely free, but places are limited to 15 per session, so get in quick!
To register, visit: http://www.education.vic.gov.au/researchinnovation/virtualconferencecentre/use/training.htm
Getting Started with Elluminate – Moderator Training (Part 1)
This 90-minute class is designed for anyone new to Elluminate who wants to learn how to facilitate an online class or meeting. The class will teach moderators classroom management skills, methods for establishing social presence, classroom capture and basic content management. The class will offer hands-on practice to reinforce the Elluminate features taught during the session. After completing this class, you should attend the Next Steps with Elluminate Live! for Moderators.
Dates:
Tuesday, October 20, 2009, 3:30 5pm
Thursday, November 5, 2009, 3:30 5pm
Tuesday, November 17, 2009, 3:30 5pm
Tuesday, December 1, 2009, 3:30 5pm
Next Steps with Elluminate – Moderator Training (Part 2)
This 90-minute class is the second class in the moderator training series. Participants must take the Getting Started class first. In this class, more advanced classroom and content management skills will be taught. Additionally, classroom collaboration tools such as Application Sharing will be taught. Participants will have the opportunity for hands-on practice during the session.
Dates:
Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 3:30 5pm
Tuesday, November 10, 2009, 3:30 5pm
Tuesday, November 24, 2009, 3:30 5pm
Tuesday, December 8, 2009, 3:30 5pm
It is well worth the time and effort to learn how to be an Ellminate moderator.
Bright Ideas featured Glogster back in March. Now there is Glogster.edu designed specifially for schools. From their website comes the following information:
A New World of Educational Innovation Awaits You
Glogster EDU is your original educational resource for innovative and interactive learning. Glogster EDU was conceived to imaginatively, productively, and collaboratively respond to the dynamic educational landscape and exceed the needs of today’s educators and learners. We value the participation of educators and strive to assimilate their contributions to Glogster EDU, Glogster EDU is yours! Educators from all over the world are integrating Glogster EDU’s resourceful platform to make traditional learning more dynamic, more interactive and more in tune with learners today. Most importantly Glogster EDU is FUN for teachers and learners alike!
Why Glogster EDU?
For Educators:
- A creative, dynamic, and innovative digital outlet that captures learner’s excitement for online creations, keeps learners engaged in course content, and makes teaching and learning more fun.
- A private and safe platform, monitored directly by teachers. Teachers control all the activities of their learners.
- A valuable teaching tool that integrates diverse core subjects including math, science, history, art, photography, music and more for individual learner portfolios, unique alternative assessments, and differentiated instructional activities.
For Learners:
- A fun, imaginative, and powerful learning experience which fosters independent creative self expression, positive learner-teacher relationships, and teamwork on collaborative class projects.
- A vibrant, multi-sensory learning experience which integrates learner’s knowledge and skills into traditionally text-oriented subjects and motivates learner’s desire to explore topics in which they may previously have been less interested.
Glogster now supports videos from SchoolTube!
From now on you can easily search and embed SchoolTube videos directly from your Glogster edit tool!
Animoto was reviewed in May and have also released an education specific application. This information comes from their flyer:
Your classroom will never be the same.
FOR EDUCATION
http://education.animoto.com
Animoto for Education
Your students are using the Internet to learn already, so engage them on their own turf with Web 2.0 tools like Animoto. Animoto is a web application that turns pictures and text into beautiful video clips with the click of a button.
Use it to create content for your lesson plans, assignments, or course materials – or even have your students create their own educational pieces.
Free All-Access Passes
Teachers and students get free All-Access Passes, giving them unlimited full-length video creations. Check out case studies and apply at:
http://education.animoto.com
Post your videos to YouTube, put them on your class’s blog, download them for in-class presentations, email them out to parents, use them to recap a semester or year, and so much more! Welcome to the cutting edge of online educational tools.
Further to an earlier post about virtual excursions , here is another site which may be useful. eField trips, although US in origin (and some eField trips will be irrelevant to schools outside the US), supply a number of eField trips that may appeal. All eField trips are free and have been developed by Distance Learning Integrators.
A list of trips include:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Some eField trips were deveopled a few years ago, however, they are still worth considering for use with classes.
In an ironic twist, Saturday’s Age published two stories about e-books. One by author Carmel Bird (see previous post) who states that the intimacy of turning the pages of a book can never be replaced. The second by Jane Sullivan explains how readers of The Age can access a new and exclusive digital story:
Now screening: a digital book for you
JANE SULLIVAN
October 3, 2009
“NOBODY is going to sit down and read a book on a twitchy little screen,” US writer Annie Proulx said in 1994. “Ever.”
What a difference 15 years make. Today, millions read books on a variety of “twitchy little screens”: laptops, e-books, iPods or iPhones. And from October 12, Age readers will be able to read a serialised story on their mobile phones.
In the tradition of Charles Dickens, who launched his novels in serial form, Melbourne writer Marieke Hardy has created a 20-episode story, to be sent out to mobiles over four weeks.
”It will be quite riveting,” promises The Age’seditor-in-chief, Paul Ramadge. “Marieke is a wonderfully talented and immediately engaging writer.” The idea is to test the story’s reception, get reader feedback and develop the potential to talk to Age readers “in multiple ways”.
It’s probable that this is Australia’s first sizeable fiction written for the mobile phone. But in Japan, millions of readers are devouring novels on their phones, often when commuting to work or school. They download the novels – usually racy romances – and read them in 70-word instalments.
As many as 86 per cent of high school girls read these phone stories, and the novels subsequently turned into print form have raced to the top of bestseller lists.
In other countries, alternatives to the traditional book are catching on more slowly. But Nick Cave wrote the first chapter of his novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, on his iPhone, and the book is available as an iPhone application.
Hundreds of other titles are being downloaded on to e-book readers such as Kindle or Echo Reader, or smartphones such as iPhone or iPod touch, either free or for a fraction of the price of a print book.
Melbourne mobile media theorist Paul Green does not see these alternatives taking over from print. “The novel is going to be pretty awkward to read on the small screen,” he says. “But there will be a place for the audio book, and a trend towards reading and writing short books with short chapters on these devices, as their screens get bigger.”
Sydney writer Richard Watson, author of Future Files, thinks the publishing world is about to undergo a seismic shock. Books as we know them will exist beside a host of new alternatives.
The creation of a book may not include an agent or a publisher: instead, authors will self-publish using software and online services such as Blurb, and search out niche markets. As well as downloading books, readers will print them through automated publishing machines, or buy e-books in 99-cent instalments.
It’s enough to make you want to get away from it all and curl up with a book.
Details of how to register for The Age mobile phone story will be announced next week.
It will be interesting to gauge the response to the digital story.
This lovely article by author Carmel Bird appeared in Saturday’s Age:
CARMEL BIRD
October 3, 2009
IN A photograph of the Obama family at home, taken by Annie Leibovitz in October 2004, surrounded by images of Abraham Lincoln and Muhammad Ali, there lies, all alone on a clear surface, front and centre, a slightly dog-eared copy of Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. It’s a cosy, informal family portrait, suggesting maybe that just before it was shot one of the parents was reading the storybook to the little girls. The book, flat on the table, draws the eye, and suggests that the photographer has interrupted an intimate and blissful moment, a moment familiar to many parents and teachers.
I treasure memories of lying in my father’s arms while he read from a green-covered volume of The Wind in the Willows, a book that gradually fell to pieces from loving over-use. The books I read to my daughter have a glow and resonance in my mind and heart. Some are still in either my possession or hers, but sometimes I think of one, and if it is lost, if it is out of print, I rush to find a second-hand copy. These replacements have a special quality of their own; they are part of a treasury of reclaimed and revisited moments of intimate bliss.
I recently got a replacement copy of a picture book called Miss Jaster’s Gardenby N.M. Bodecker. This is a story about a hedgehog that becomes part of the garden to the extent that flowers grow in his prickles. A rather poignant thing about the book I got is the inscription in handwriting — “To Grayson from his loving Aunt Jeni and Uncle Brett, for Christmas 2003”. But then maybe our old copy has wound up on someone else’s nursery bookshelf. I hope so.
On the day I received Miss Jaster’s Garden in the mail, I was writing a speech to give at the launch of Glenda Millard’s gorgeous new picture book, Isabella’s Garden. And I was listening to the radio. There I heard someone speaking about the coming disappearance of books as paper objects. They will be replaced by electronic devices of various marvellous kinds. This assertion seems to be quite widespread, but was strangely at odds with my pleasure in the two picture books on my desk.
In lots of ways I am old-fashioned, but I am also pleased to use quite a bit of modern technology. I don’t deny that there are and will be ways of reading that do not rely on blocks of paper covered in black type. I read things on the web and I often enjoy the experience. But if books as books are going to disappear, what will replace those Wind in the Willows/Charlotte’s Web moments that nourish the love between adults and children, and that sow the seeds of storytelling and language?
Does it matter? I think it does. I was reading How Fiction Works by James Wood. Referring to the “cherry-coloured twist” in Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester, Wood says: “Reading this to my daughter for the first time in 35 years, I was instantly returned, by the talismanic activity of that cherry-coloured twist, to a memory of my mother reading it to me.” The book, the language, the melody of it all, are part of the embrace of the mother for the son, the son in turn for his daughter. The stories of Potter are not simply a collection of disembodied words, but are part of something organic and emotional that goes where electronic reading devices possibly cannot go.
And it’s not just the children’s storybooks that will disappear with the book, so will the beloved physicalities and idiosyncrasies of all books. I have a lot of books, although I could not be described as a “collector”. They line the walls of several rooms and make me feel at home. In a mild and haphazard way, I am a collector of different editions of The Great Gatsby. I love all the different cover designs. Apart from fascinating differences, each edition brings back memories of when and where I got it, when and where I read it.
There is a moment, perhaps more touching now than when it was written, when Nick encounters the owl-eyed man in Gatsby’s library. The man asserts with amazed excitement that the books on the shelves are not fakes. “Absolutely real — have pages and everything.”
So altogether it seems to me it will be a sad world if books are completely replaced by other devices delivering text and information. Who would not want to see the pages turning, to hear the voice of their father intoning: “So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped.” The words are good, but my father’s voice coupled with the memory of the velvet autumn leaves on the armchair gives them a marvellous added resonance. Or if you are James Wood reading to your daughter, you can hear your mother in your own voice, possibly reading from your childhood version of the book: “Everything was finished except just one single cherry-coloured button-hole, and where that button-hole was wanting there was pinned a scrap of paper with these words — in little teeny-weeny writing — NO MORE TWIST.”
You can find the texts of Potter and Kenneth Grahame on the web, where you might have the added entertainment of pop-ups offering you lovely Russian girls or cures for blindness, but I believe that nothing can really replace your mother or father holding you in their arms while they read you the story from the dog-eared little book.
Technology and e-books have their place, but who can deny the pleasure of reading and sharing a book that you can touch?
