PLN 2012 Update

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Kelly Gardiner

The 2012 PLN course is bowling along, with the 150 participants back to work this week after a break in formal coursework over the school holidays.

But in spite of the vacation, many people took the time to catch up or even work ahead, do extra reading and activities, and take part in one or more of our events.

Two catch-up sessions enabled anyone who was in town to drop into the computer lab in the State Library of Victoria to meet the PLN team and fellow participants in person, ask questions, and talk through the first few units of work.

We’ve tried a few different things this year, and amongst them was our first Tweetchat. About 20 participants on either Twitter itself or via Tweetchat, using a special hashtag (#VicPLN2012), asked and answered questions and then just chatted about their PLN experiences and tools they use in their schools.

Tweetchat allows you to participate in an online chat session but strips out all other Twitter chatter so you can concentrate on the one hashtag. It also makes life a little easier by inserting the hashtag into your messages automatically, to help you tweet faster (other services such as Today’s Meet are similar and very handy): some tweetchats move so fast it’s hard to keep up with the one conversation, let alone seeing off-topics tweets as well.

If you use HootSuite, you can save the topic as a stream: we’ve embedded ours in the PLN blog, so you can see what happened and how the chat worked.

We also used Storify to curate a summary:

PLN 2012 Tweetchat on Storify

The next few units in the PLN course include the hot topics of mobile use, digital citizenship and online footprints. We’ll feed the discussion back into Bright Ideas for your input too.

E-literacy: Think differently, act differently, learn differently conference

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Cam Hocking

On March 16 SLAV held the “E-Literacy: Think differently, act differently, learn differently” conference at Etihad Stadium. The conference highlighted the importance of the school library and the positive influence librarians can have on the culture of a school. The presentations from the conference can now be found on the SLAV website.

The day began with a presentation by Dr Ross Todd from the Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries at Rutgers University. Dr. Todd spoke passionately about the positive influence that school librarians can have on teaching and learning. His work highlights the role of school librarians as innovative leaders of professional learning. His presentation contains results from studies into effective school libraries and contains many quotes from teachers about the importance of the school library.

Dr. David Howes from V.C.A.A. spoke about the Australian Curriculum and a new Extended investigation study for Unit 3/4 VCE in his presentation. With an emphasis on general capabilities and cross curricular priorities in the Australian Curriculum, the school library will continue to play a critical role as a hub of learning in the school. The importance of documenting this work was highlighted in Pru Mitchell’s presentation, which includes some great tips for keeping evidence of work relating to professional standards. Presentations were also given by three schools about the Web Elements Engaged project. You can find out more about this great project at the WEE project wiki.

Perhaps one quote from the day best sums up the importance of school libraries. Taken from Dr. Ross Todd’s presentation, it reads:

“Libraries are the verbs in the content standards. Wherever verbs such as read, research, analyse, explore, examine, compare, contrast, understand, interpret, investigate, and find appear in the standards, Teacher Librarians and library resources are involved.”

(Oxnard Union High School District)

Zotero available for Chrome and Safari users

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Yen Wong

Good news for users of Zotero, with the service now available to users as a standalone program. For those unfamiliar with Zotero, it is a free online bibliographic management tool. It enables you to collect and organise your resources (books, images, journal articles, newspapers, videos, websites, etc.) and helps you put together a bibliography – plus it’s really easy to use. There is also an opportunity to create an online community to share and collaborate.

Up until this point, Zotero was only available through the Firefox browser. Now the service has been updated to a standalone program with plugins for Google Chrome and Apple Safari users too. All you need to do is download Zotero version 3.0 on either Chrome, Safari, or Firefox browsers.

You can find more information about this new enhancement at the Zotero blog.

To install Zotero 3.0 go to the download page

To learn about the functionality of Zotero, watch these short videos.

PLN update

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Kelly Gardiner

This year’s Personal Learning Network (PLN) course is underway, and we’ll bring you updates to refresh the memories of alumni and perhaps update your own web toolbox and PLN community.
The 2012 intake began simply, with discussions and reading about the idea of PLNs, creating a Google account and Reader subscriptions, and a couple of tasks to introduce some bright ideas early on.
Participants posted a message on Wallwisher about what they hoped to achieve in the course, and placed themselves on a Google map: both tools that can be used to collaborate with colleagues and in libraries or classrooms. It also gave participants a means of sharing information and reading about other people’s hopes and fears.

The next task was to set up a PLN blog, a huge task for people who’ve never done such a thing before. The blogs are coming in thick and fast, with some great posts and designs already. Take a little look here.
A web conference including a discussion with Miffy Farquharson (Mentone Grammar) and Celia Coffa (St Luke’s, Blackburn) introduced people to the Elluminate/Collaborate software and allowed us to connect and talk.
This week, people are launching themselves into social media, signing up for Twitter, facebook and testing out Skype.
The VicPLN facebook group is part of the course but also an ongoing PLN community to which you are all welcome.

A number of PLN participants have asked whether there are any classes or schools out there who’d like to connect through Skype or blogs.
Any takers?

Love and Devotion education resources

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Cam Hocking

Today sees the opening of the Love and Devotion: From Persia and Beyond exhibition at the State Library of Victoria. The exhibition features a number of rare Persian manuscripts from the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. The State Library of Victoria education team has produced a resource for teachers that examine the manuscripts and the stories told within.

The resource includes several inquiry units and activities that can be used to explore the famous tales. Templates have been provided which feature characters from the manuscripts, so your students can create puppets or make their own comic. There are a number of picture files including characters and backgrounds that can be downloaded and used to create digital comics in programs such as Comic Life.

The exhibition is free and is open until July the 1st, 2012. Information about bringing school groups can be found here. Teachers are also invited to a special evening viewing of the exhibition on March 20th from 5.30-7.00pm.

If this then that

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Cam Hocking

Many of us rely on a variety of web tools to stay in touch with new posts, keep track of links and then share valuable resources. While some of the more popular services allow you to link your accounts together and share with one click, what can you do if two of your favourite tools don’t work together at all?

If this then that (IFTTT) allows users to create rules that link online accounts together. Using a simple trigger (if this) and action (then that) format, you can automate an action based on an event. For example, you could automate a task so that whenever you favourite a tweet then the link will be automatically added to your Delicious bookmarks. You might want any links you post on Facebook to automatically be added as a new note in your Evernote account, or have any photographs you upload to Instagram appear in a new Tumblr post. There is a full list of supported tools on the IFTTT website and developers have indicated that more tools will be added over time.

Any rules you create can be shared as ‘recipes’ for other people to use, and there are a number of pre-made recipes that you can add to your own account.

Here’s the way you can get started and make your first automated task.

Create an account at If this then that
Visit the channels page and activate the accounts you want to use. You will need to provide your username and password for each service.
Visit the tasks page and click Create new task. Click on IF THIS and then select the account that will be the trigger.
Choose a trigger related to the account. For example, a trigger from Twitter could be if you send a new tweet, or you retweet, or you send a tweet with a particular hashtag. Choose your trigger and click create trigger.
Now choose THEN THAT and choose the account that the event will be created in. Then choose the action that should occur.
Depending on the account you are using, you may also be given further options to customise the action. Once you are happy with the action click Create action.
The task should now be active, and If This Then That will check for new activity every fifteen minutes. If you’d like to share the rule you’ve created then click on the mortar and pestle icon to create a recipe that can be used by other IFTTT users.

Does it all sound a bit complicated? The video below runs through an example of creating an automated task.

Meeting of the Minds 2012

Posted on February 28, 2012 by Cam Hocking

The inaugural Meeting of the Minds Unconference (#MOTM12) was held over the weekend of February 25-26 at the Quantum Victoria facility. Educators came together from all over Victoria and from interstate to discuss the role of technology in learning.

The guiding motto of #MOTM12 was “The shortest distance between two people is a story.” Participants were invited to create their own digital story before the event and then to share them on the Meeting of the Minds website. This was just one of the interesting ways that participants were encouraged to share their thoughts and meet each other. Attendees were even tasked with making lunch for their partner!

The organisers of the event had obviously spent a great deal of time thinking about how to have attendees collaborate and guide the content of sessions. A shared display area and sticky notes were used to collect ideas and suggestions, which were then grouped into sessions that were then run by participants. Shared notes were collected in Google Docs and sessions were streamed live with many people joining in the discussion on Twitter using the #MOTM12 hashtag.

There were lively discussions about using technology in the classroom and the importance of self directed learning, not just for students but also for educators. Many participants discussed the way professional learning might be improved and encouraged within their schools. One great idea was to gather for a coffee at the start of each day for a 5 minute sharing session.

Have a look at a Storify of the event, produced by online attendee Roland Gesthuizen, to see how it all unfolded. You can also visit the #MOTM12 website to find out more. Shared notes from each session can be found in the Spaces menu.

Congratulations to the event organisers Jess McCulloch, Tony Richards and Andrew Williamson for putting together an event that allowed educators to get together and collaborate in such an interesting way.

The Victorian PLN is almost here

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Kelly Gardiner

The next round of the Victorian Personal Learning Network is now less than two weeks away, so get ready for a new influx of blogs to read and educators to meet when the course kicks off on March the 5th. The course aims to help educators build their own PLN and learn about some of the great tools available on the web.

As with previous years we are sure that the Bright Ideas community will get together to support these new participants. Many of you would have completed the Victorian PLN in the past, so hopefully you’ll be able to help people along as they build their own network. It might even be time for you to brush up on your own skills by doing the course again. You might like to form a PLN group at your school to take the course together.

So why should you or your colleagues do the course? Here’s a participant’s reflection on the 2011 program.

“Doing the PLN was a decision to ensure that I was keeping up with the world. I learnt a lot of new things from doing it, and it gave me opportunities to explore tools that I’d heard about but never really had the interest to pursue any further – like Twitter for example. This forced play, and the space set aside to investigate things was useful for my learning.”

Please encourage your colleagues to take part in this great course. Enquiries can be sent to learning@slv.vic.gov.au and course details are available at the State Library of Victoria website.

Privacy in networked publics

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Cam Hocking

RMIT’s School of Media and Communication recently hosted a talk by Dr. danah boyd, an influential researcher into the way young people make use of social media and technology. The talk, which is available for download, was a fascinating insight into danah’s work with young people. danah explored the ways teens make use of social media and their attitudes to privacy in what are essentially public spaces.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of danah’s talk was the concept of teens ‘hiding in plain sight’. Teens used to socialise at shopping centres and malls, but now much of their socialising and ‘social grooming’ happens online. To many teens sharing is an important aspect of staying connected with their friends and danah’s interviews expose the very different attitudes that teens can have to privacy.

Interestingly, danah has found that although teenagers may share publicly on sites such as Facebook, this doesn’t always mean they expect this information to be viewed or commented on by everyone (particularly their parents or teachers). Several of danah’s interview subjects revealed ingenious ways of using both structural tricks or codes to protect their privacy whilst still sharing with their friends. If we think back to our own childhoods, many of us probably used similar tricks to communicate with our friends when older people were around. It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

To find out more about danah’s work (including the reason for her lower case name) visit her website, or follow her blog. In a time where the media often resort to scaremongering when exploring how young people use social media, danah’s research provides some balance to this very important discussion.

School Library Association of Victoria

Category Archives: Professional learning