The creative people at Flowtown have created this fabulous social networking map:
It is very interesting to look at social media use in terms of country populations; this could be useful to share with colleagues and students. What are your thoughts about the popularity of some of the tools?
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.
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:
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.
This is a terrific example of using Glogster edu (see earlier Bright Ideas post) to promote reading. Anita Beaman has devloped this glog to further promote interest in a popular genre of books.
Glogs can be linked online for the full multimedia experience as well as printed out and laminated for display in the library or classrooms. This could be a good thing for librarystaff to create, or to encourage students to make either as library monitors or for creative response to text.
Since Book Trailers have taken schools by storm and many classes are using them as creative ways to respond to texts, one question is how to assess them.
Whitefriars College library coordinator and School Library Association of Victoria President Rhonda Powling (@bibliokat) has developed a fantastic rubric for assessing book trailers and it could be adapted for other creative text responses.
Many thanks to Donna for sharing this fantastic resource.
Our Lady of Mercy College Heidelberg has a library Twitter account.
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 useTwitter 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 – Multimedia Encyclopedia
Looking for an online, multimedia, real time encyclopedia? Mashpedia is just that and is worth using with students.
School Library Association of Victoria 50th Anniversary Gala Dinner | Bright ideas
2010 SLAV awards | Bright ideas
Information on the School Library Association of Victoria awards for 2010.
Microsoft Education: Lesson plans, tutorials & education resources
Microsoft is offering another free download aimed at the education market. Learning Essentials provides the following resources:
Learning Essentials adds curriculum-based templates and toolbars to Microsoft Office Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to guide students and teachers through projects. There is a separate set of tools for teachers and students. Some language versions include tools to create e-learning content.
New Titanic expedition will create 3D map of wreck
Google Lit Trips @ Mooroopna SC | Bright ideas
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.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Looking for an online, multimedia, real time encyclopedia? Mashpedia is just that and is worth using with students.
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.
Members, former members and supporters are invited to the School Library Association of Victoria, 50th Anniversary Gala Dinner at:
The Ballroom, Rendezvous Hotel, 298 Flinders Street, Melbourne on Thursday 9 September 2010.
Drinks and canapés from 6.45pm.
Cost: $70.00 per guest
A wonderful opportunity to celebrate the history and achievements of your association and share memories and stories with colleagues from across the state.
Booking Form available at:
http://www.slav.schools.net.au/downloads/01home/Gala_Dinner_0910.pdf
The School Library Association of Victoria are proud to announce their 2010 Awards. The John Ward Award, The SLAV Research Fellowship, The SLAV Innovator’s Grant and the SLAV School Leaders Award are presented each year. Applications close on Friday 17 September 2010. This is a fantastic opportunity to recognise the contributions of a colleague.
John Ward was a founding member of SLAV in the early 1960s, a founding member of Australian School Library Association in 1968 and a founding member of the International Association of School Librarianship.
He held the positions of Secretary and President of SLAV for many years and was the Secretary of ASLA during the 1970s, a period of rapid library expansion.
In recognition of John’s contribution to our profession, the SLAV Council established the John Ward Award in 1998, with a professional development grant of $2000 to be awarded annually.
The recipient/s must demonstrate an outstanding contribution to learning and teaching at their school and raise the profile of the profession through their role as teacher-librarian.
In recent years education authorities have based curriculum reform on the results of research projects that have been carried out here and overseas.Academics and practitioners alike have emphasised the need to carry out action research projects and document the impact that our school library programs have on student learning outcomes.
The SLAV Research Fellowship supports research projects that involve school libraries in learning and teaching.
The fellowship will take the form of a $1000 grant to provide practical support to a teacher-librarian implementing a local research project.
Sponsored by Pledger Consulting Pty Ltd – Links Plus
In conjunction with Pledger Consulting, SLAV is particularly pleased to sponsor an award that goes to an innovative library or school team. Teams may self nominate or be nominated by SLAV branches.The grant will consist of a package of SLAV professional development and/or publications to the value of $800 plus $200 worth of Pledger Consulting products.
SLAV would like to take this opportunity to thank Pledger Consulting for their generous sponsorship of this award. Over a period of many years Pledger Consulting Pty Ltd has provided directories of internet sites to learners, teacher-librarians and teachers in schools. All of their products are designed to guide research and save time for students, teachers and librarians.
The SLAV School Leader Award
Research has indicated that principal or school leader support of the library program is critical in encouraging teacher / teacher-librarian collaboration and in making the library program an integral part of the learning and teaching of the school. (Colorado Study, 1999)The SLAV School Leader Award is made to a school leader who demonstrates outstanding support of the school library and the work of the school library team.
The award recipient will be recognised by the presentation of a certificate at the International School Libraries Day Dinner. School leaders can be nominated by a teacher-librarian or the school library team (SLAV membership required to nominate). School personnel who are members of the school leadership team within the school are eligible to be nominated.
An important article was published in last week’s Age newspaper on the wonderful teacher librarians in our schools. Well done to all involved to highlight the issues schools are facing and to outline what our job really does involve.