Author Archives: slvadmin

PLN reflection: Catherine Morton

Posted on by
1

This year’s Personal Learning Network (PLN) program recently ended with over 150 people taking part. In the next few weeks Bright Ideas will feature guest posts from PLN alumni with the first being from Catherine Morton from Whitefriars College.

This year l completed the Personal Learning Network (PLN).

In May I wrote my first blog post…

“I’ve recently returned to teaching after working in the wonderful public library world. In my new position as a teacher librarian in a secondary college, l’m interested in exploring and learning the Web 2.0 world and am excited about the potential applications in my work with students and teachers. I’m feeling a little hesitant as l’m sure there’ll be challenges along the way. I’ve had some already. So the opportunity to learn from you all and my colleagues, who are well along the Web 2.0 road, will help my travels. Look forward to meeting you along the way”.

But by my last post in November…

“To think l’ve completed the PLN and about to post my digital story! It’s a great sense of satisfaction and achievement. It’s interesting that the frustrations, the enormity of the workload and the feeling of being overwhelmed have faded into the background.

I chose Animoto as it’s relatively easy to use and l’m quite happy with the results. There are some features that could be improved, however it’s a tool that l would use with students. The PLN program has been just like travelling, being introduced to new places and people, experiencing things for the first time and all of the emotions associated with travelling. The music l selected is titled ‘Flying’ by Mike Strickland, which l feel is quite a reflective piece and also a very appropriate title. Not that it was always a smooth flight as l weathered storms, heavy rain and grey days, along with sunshine and blue sky!

It’s been a year of so many learnings. Thanks to the PLN support team at the SLV. Your guidance, encouragement and support have been greatly appreciated. Thanks to the wider PLN community for your generosity in sharing knowledge and supporting my journey. There are improved outcomes for both me as a teacher and the students. I’ll always continue to travel.”

Some of my reflections on the PLN – I’ve gained more confidence with Web 2.0 tools, and have used some of these tools, both in the library and in my teaching. Now l feel l’m one step ahead of the students. I used the SLV ergo website to teach research skills to Learning Support students. I’ve benefited professionally by joining Twitter. I’ve also benefited personally from the PLN as I’m setting up a blog for my upcoming overseas trip! My goal is to continue to explore, learn and assist with educating students and colleagues in using these tools. If we have the ability to locate information, we can find anything.

The PLN program will be running again in 2013. For further information email learning@slv.vic.gov.au

#pencilchat

Posted on by
Reply

Over the past couple of days the #pencilchat has been trending on Twitter with educators using the allegory to comment on technology use in schools.

Discussing the ‘dangers’ of  pencils, how they’re just a passing fad and more, people humorously voiced concerns about the challenges of using technology (and pencils) in schools.

Good education has a great article, Why #Pencilchat May Be the Most Clever Education Allegory Ever, about how the tag discussion began and evolved.

Photo by Nalini Prasanna

Photo by Nalini Prasanna

Our space: digital citizenship resources

Posted on by
Reply

Our space is a website providing education resources for exploring the ethics of digital citizenship with students.

Our space

Developed as part of the GoodWork project and in collaboration with Harvard Graduate School of Education and Project New Media Literacies, the website offers pages of lessons and fact sheets to support students’ use of social media and the web.

Lessons are grouped under five themes – participation, identity, privacy, credibility and authorship/ownership.

Ethical engagement is at the centre of the program so the focus is on students’ personal responsibilities and behaviours. A great resource to share with colleagues and to potentially look at when planning for 2012.

Volumique

Posted on by
Reply

Volumique is a French publishing company that explores book creation as a new computer platform, with particular emphasis on how physical paper books can interact with smart phones. They also experiment with interactive story telling and game.

With projects like Pirates (paper board game using smartphones), the book that disappears (a book you have 20 minutes to read before the pages turn black) and Balloon (an Ipad virtual reality pop up book), there are lots of lovely ideas to explore.

Volumique

It’s wonderful to think that artists and publishers are thinking so creatively about where books can go in the future and how technology can augment the experience of storytelling.

To see more of their recent work, take a look at the Volumique Vimeo channel.

Future of Education: search literacy

Posted on by
Reply

This Friday at 12pm AEST time, Steve Hargadon will be hosting a panel discussion on search literacy as part of his Future of Education series.

The panel for the session includes Google Search Education Fellow, Tasha Bergson-Michelson and Debbie Abilock, multi-award winning librarian, curriculum advisor and content developer for Noodle tools.

The group will be addressing questions like:

  • Is everything we need online?
  • How do you teach students to be resilient in their technology use, especially with web tools constantly changing?
  • What role to schools play in teaching search literacy skills?

Future of education

Sessions are run in Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate) so you can ask questions and be involved in the discussion if you’re able to log in at the scheduled time. Otherwise all the sessions are recorded and you can listen to them in your own time.

Future of Education is an interview series which features many significant thinkers from  international education and technology communities including the likes of Sir Ken Robinson, Will Richardson and Howard Gardner.

Australian digitised newspapers on Trove

Posted on by
Reply

The National Library of Australia coordinates a number of online projects bringing together resources from institutions all over the country. One of the most powerful of these is Trove’s digitised newspapers.

Trove digitised newspapers

The database hosts digitised versions of 216 newspapers from all over the country, including the complete Melbourne Argus from 1848-1856 and many regional newspapers. The project was in beta for some time but is now running as part of the broader Trove website.

All newspapers have been digitised in full and have transcripts produced by OCR (Optical character recognition) software. The small errors produced by this process are corrected voluntarily by people using the site. The community correcting the text is doing a great job but encourage students to take part and correct articles if they use them in their research.

As always with newspaper research, dates are everything and the calendar search option is a great way to look at a range of publications but still target a specific date range. You can also search by state or publication title and then refine by date.

An excellent resource for a many subject areas, Trove’s digitised newspaper are well worth a look.

Bright ideas at my school: Ria Coffey

Posted on by
1

Ria Coffey from St Patricks College (SPC) in Ballarat talks about a simple but effective way to support broader staff use of technology and to increase the library’s profile in your school.

As part of our library’s strategy to be “fierce” (Dr.Joyce Valenza), to become experts in e-learning and to suggest tools to help develop information literacy school wide, I send out a weekly email to all staff called ‘SPC Bright Ideas’. It’s modelled on the Bright Ideas blog and talks about online tools and how to use them in the classroom.

I keep it short and consistent in style, it’s emailed at the same time each week and it’s always checked over by the school IT staff.  I get ideas from lots of different sources including Twitter, Bright Ideas and Dr. Joyce Valenza and Buffy Hamilton’s wikis. I also subscribe to a number of weekly feeds that generate heaps of ideas.

Staff at the school have been very receptive, especially those who’ve found an idea relevant to their work and have connected it to their teaching and learning. Ideally, I’d get to more Faculty meetings so I could discuss how and where these ideas could be implemented into curriculum.

All the SPC Bright Ideas are also added to the Library website for reference.

Here’s an example of a recent SPC Bright Idea.

SPC Bright Idea

This week’s SPC Bright Idea focuses on the use of Wall Wisher.  Wall Wisher is an online tool that allows contributions via sticky notes to a collaborative “wall”.  The teacher sets up a page, instructs students to access the URL and then contributions can be made by teacher and student.  (The notes posted by students must be approved by the teacher before they are displayed publicly).  A great tool for brainstorming and discussions, it is accessible at http://www.wallwisher.com/

Here is one my Year 9 class and I did this week:

Wall wisher example

danah boyd: debating privacy

Posted on by
Reply

danah boyd, academic and senior researcher at Microsoft, recently posted her responses to a Wall Street Journal interview on privacy and social media.

danah boyd blog

Some of the ideas she discusses include how people (particularly teens) use complex strategies to maintain their privacy when it matters to them. They’re still public but are deliberately ambiguous so they can control who understands their meaning. Will Richardson in a commentary piece on danah’s post talks about how these skills are a kind of literacy educators need to think about.

There’s also some discussion of how social media environments are easily as complex as day to day social interactions and require the same sophisticated skills we use to make sure our behaviour suits the situations and people we’re with.

danah boyd’s blog is definitely one to follow if you’re interested in social media, privacy and how communication is changing in an online world.