Bright ideas at my school: Ria Coffey

Posted on November 25, 2011 by slvadmin

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:

Google image search: advanced features

Posted on November 10, 2011 by slvadmin

Most students use Google’s image search but have rarely seen the advanced features of the engine. The advanced search option, which appears to the right of the search bar, lets you limit your search to line drawings, faces, specific colours, size, file type and more.

One example where you could use this feature is if you were looking for an outline of a country. By limiting your search to line drawings, you could very quickly find relevant maps without trawling through every other kind of image.

Google images also lets you drag and drop images from your desk top or other website into the search bar and gives you results for similar images. Google has a video you can watch demonstrating this feature.

QR codes: Ria Coffey

Posted on November 9, 2011 by slvadmin

Guest blogger Ria Coffey, teacher librarian at St Patrick’s College in Ballarat, shares some ideas about using QR codes.

QR codes (abbreviated from Quick Response codes) are a great way to communicate with students and staff. QR codes are a form of barcode you can link to things like websites and read with your smart phone.

They have become popular because they can transmit a lot of information, including geo-coordinates, urls and text. You may have seen QR codes in magazine adverts, on a billboard or website.

To create a QR code, use a QR code generator like Kaywa.

For example, this is a simple message I made for students at my school.

To read the code, download a free application from the iTunes store to your smart phone. QR codes are free and fun to use and the students love reading the messages.

Timeline generators

Posted on November 8, 2011 by slvadmin

There are many online timeline generators that students can use to present their work. Three good examples are Tiki Toki, Timeglider and Timetoast.

Tiki Toki

Tiki Toki is a visually impressive application that uses text and images. You can have more than one timeline on the same page and collaborate with different people on the same timeline. This example uses Tiki Toki to show the history of democracy in the Middle East.

Timeglider

Timeglider doesn’t use images but lets you build more complex timelines, including more detail, references and events with different levels of importance based on text size . You can zoom in to see events as they happened hour by hour or zoom out to see centuries pass by. Here is an example of a Timeglider timeline created on World War I.

Timetoast

Timetoast is simply designed but does have the advantage of offering a dynamic layout or a plain text version that appears in a table, offering students a different way to view their work. Here is a Timetoast example showing the history of atomic structure.

Reading Culture: SLAV & NGV conference

Posted on November 3, 2011 by slvadmin

In collaboration with the National Gallery of Victoria, SLAV is presenting a conference on Friday, 11th November called Reading Culture: collaborate, create, celebrate, exploring the place where visual literacy, story telling and technology meet. The event contributes to the NGV’s 150th anniversary celebrations.

The full day program includes some of the following speakers:

Sue McKerracher from the Library Agency discussing The National Year of Reading
Authors Alice Pung and Alison Lester
NGV educators on Surrealism, New Guinean art, Albrecht Düre, Indigenous and Medieval art and how to use art as inspiration for creative writing and inquiry based learning

A number of teacher librarians will also be speaking on the use of ebooks, iPads, online book clubs and digital story telling.

Some places are still available so if you would like to book, complete a registration form included in the conference flyer or contact SLAV directly on 03 9349 5822.

15 second place: new media tool from ACMI

Posted on October 27, 2011 by slvadmin

15 second place is a new website and mobile application from ACMI that lets people create and share 15 second videos, often based on themes and challenges. For example, a recent challenge involved moonwalking from one side of the screen to the other. When edited together, these videos will make one continuous moonwalk!

You can create playlists, add and search by user generated tags and view other people’s favourite videos. The site offers students an opportunity to use mobile devices to share moments and experiences from where they are, anywhere, any time. For more information, you can also visit the FUSE projects blog.

My fake wall

Posted on October 25, 2011 by slvadmin

Although Facebook may not be available in many schools, there are a number of applications you can use to recreate look-alike pages with students . My fake wall lets you create a fake wall, unrelated to the Facebook site, with commonly recognisable features.

Students can use the site to explore historical and fictitious characters, narrative and more by creating conversations through posts and comments. One example given on the site is a fake wall from Elizabeth I’s perspective.

Whether it be as an alternative to book reviews or simply a way to explore relationships between people from fiction and history, My fake wall is a fun way to engage with character, story and biography.

SLAV conference reflections: Hamish Curry

Posted on October 20, 2011 by slvadmin

Hamish Curry, Education Manager at the State Library of Victoria shares his reflections on Monday’s SLAV conference where he presented on how to create with library data.

About 200 library technicians and assistants arrived at Etihad Stadium on Monday 17th October to hear more on SLAV’s theme of ‘Activate the learning with emerging technologies’.

As always, the SLAV conference engaged us with tools, ideas, resources, and networks. There were a series of great presentations from the likes of Jenny Ashby (Epsom Primary School), Greg Gebhart (Australian Communications and Media Authority), and Camilla Elliott (Mazenod College).

Jenny Ashby took centre stage in the morning to help the audience ‘Activate your 21^st Century Mobile Libraries’. There could have been no better example of this than in her great discussion of ways in which QR (Quick Response) codes could be adapted for and embedded in library practices. As her presentation progressed, with QR Codes displayed on the screen, audience members madly lifted their smart-phones into the air to decode and access the content. My take-away from Jenny’s presentation is how easy it now is to integrate mobile phones into the normal business and learning of the school environment. Some of her great links included:

QR Code generators – Kaywa and Gorillascan

QR Treasure Hunt Generator – Class tools QR treasure hunt generator

After morning tea, Camilla Elliott did an outstanding job filling in for John Pearce, who was a late scratching. With a strong focus on motivating us to learn more about how Google works, Camilla also highlighted some excellent search tools that acted as great educational alternatives to Google, such as Boolify , Sweet Search, and DuckDuckGo.

Greg Gebhart from ACMA woke us all up with some startling realities about young people engaging with social media and various networks online. It was hard not to feel frightened of the online environment and worried about the growing numbers of primary school students participating online without guidance from teachers and parents. Cybersmart provides some useful resources and information to address these concerns, but ultimately it is the challenge of educators and libraries to model and mentor digital citizenship and digital literacy for all students.

The afternoon was a mind-blowing smorgasbord of presentations from Judith Way (Kew High School), Tania Sheko (Whitefriars College), Tony Richards (IT Made Simple), Vincent Trundle (ACMI) and Camilla Elliott. I attended Camilla’s presentation and it was chock-full of great sites and resources around maps. Highlights included NearMap, ScribbleMaps and Google Lit Trips.

My own presentation was titled “I’m a Library Hack!” and aligned with a number of the topics from the other presentations around the use of maps, augmented reality, social media, and library data to help engage and enrich the experiences of teachers and students within the school and online environments. A key focus was the Libraryhack competition run by the National State Libraries of Australasia earlier this year. My presentation is available here.

You can also follow some of the conversation from the day on the Twitter hashtag #slavconf.

FUSE interactive resources: Elluminate session

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Kelly Gardiner

Some of Victoria’s leading cultural and educational organisations have created a range of innovative digital learning tools now freely available through FUSE.

Heath Graham will be presenting an Elluminate session exploring classroom applications for these resources on 27^th October at 4.30pm.

To find out more, visit the FUSE Projects blog or register at DEECD’s Educators’ Guide to Innovation website .

Google+

Posted on October 13, 2011 by slvadmin

Google’s new social networking site Google+ is similar to Facebook but includes features that have a range of professional applications for schools and libraries.

Circles let you group friends together and post, chat and video conference with them exclusively, effectively making a private channel. Just as you can create a circle for your family or close friends, you can set up circles for staff from different subject areas, schools or even based on projects you’re working on with schools in other parts of the world.

Hangouts let you video conference with a group of people in real time. This has obvious uses when connecting to people in other schools, cities or countries.

At this stage Google+ is still in beta so it’s only available to people over the age of 18 with a Gmail account. Google has stated that they plan to test the platform for security so that they can open the network to all people over the age of 13. When students can access the service, circles and hangouts could be an incredibly useful way for educators to engage with students in a social media environment.

School Library Association of Victoria

Category Archives: Web 2.0 tools