What a fun site for younger students! Switcheroo Zoo is a place where children can:
- play animal games
- make a new animal
- solve animal puzzles
- take a guided tour and
- join a zoo quest
Students can also:
- build an online habitat
- read stories and more!
Switcheroo Zoo looks like a fun way to learn about animals and their habitats. Worth checking out.
For Victorian Schools only.
Are any of your students and teachers involved in using interesting and innovative online tools?
Have you been working with students and teachers on copyright, creative commons and Intellectual property?
Are you interested in helping your students to build online resources to share their discoveries with others? If you answer YES to any or all of the questions above then the SLAV Web Elements Engaged project might be for you. We need a number of schools to be involved in the development of online video/audio resources to help share knowledge, skills and links that make use of online technologies and help educate others about copyright and IP.
Being part of the project will provide schools with:
Those involved in the project will also become part of an online community where project resources, ideas and learnings will be shared, discussed and reviewed.
The following are some of the areas we would like to cover as part of the project:
If you are interested in being involved please fill out the following online Expression of Interest Form.
Expressions of Interest close: Monday 13th September 2010
To send any additional information including audio or video clips to show us what you have done, please contact the SLAV office on phone: 9349 5822 or email: slav@netspace.net.au for uploading instructions.
Timeline: Project will run from September 2010 until May 2011.
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.
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!
Earlier this year, The Nerdy Teacher mentioned the tool DropBox on his blog. It sounded so great that I had to try it myself.
DropBox is a free (2GB) download and enables you to share folders and/or documents with selected colleagues or friends. Rather than having to email often cumbersome files, the holder of the DropBox invites friends via email to a specific folder within the DropBox. Friends can then either add or access these files, but only within the specific folder they have been given access to. Large photo albums, powerpoint presentations or documents are quickly and easily transferred.
If you need more storage to meet your needs, there are premium accounts.
The addition of mobile DropBox apps for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Android (Blackberry coming soon) means that you can sync these with your computer. You can also add more than one computer to your account; so you could access DropBox on your home and work computers as well as a mobile device.
The video on the DropBox sites explains it all in two minutes.
I can say that DropBox has been an excellent addition to my toolbox and I have used it at least once a week since March. The DropBox website states that it works on PC, Mac and Linux.
A frequent flyer scheme for young readers, Reading Rewards is a site where students, teachers and parents can keep track of books read and offer incentives for reading and reviewing books.
The site explains more:
How does it work? It’s simple. Kids accumulate ‘RR’ Miles on the site, which they can exchange for fun and sometimes silly things on the site: joke of the day, video of the day (always safe, kid-friendly videos our editors find), mini-games, and more. We even have an RR Store where kids can spend their miles and buy real stuff! Parents or other sponsors can contribute to the store and add their very own rewards for their kids.
How do they accumulate RR Miles? By reading, and telling us what and how much they read! They’ll get bonuses for reviewing their books, and making recommendations to friends.A fun dashboard gives them a quick view of their friends, their status updates, what they’re reading and how much. This actually makes reading really cool!
As an added bonus, parents and/or other sponsors can set up and track their own reading reward programs. For example, 1 outing to the movies for every 600 minutes reading. It’s up to you!Teachers can set up a group for their class, and track reading progress individually or as a group. Setting a group target is a fun class motivator, and our interactive chart let’s everyone see how they’re doing! If you like to use reading logs, you’ll love Reading Rewards. Using our online system with built-in parental validations, you can say good-bye to all those sheets of paper…
Reading Rewards declares that it is:
- A completely safe social network
- The only people kids can interact with on the site are their friends
- Parents have to approve all friend connections
- Parents can see and even edit content published to their kids pages
We know that peer recommendations are all important, so here is a tool that helps students to share which books they liked (and didn’t like).
Certainly worth investigating! Thanks to Richard Byrne from Free Technology for Teachers for passing on this link.
A totally different way to search than Google, Stumpedia is
a personalized social & real-time collaborative discovery tool that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web. Stumpedia does not depend on automated bots, proprietary algorithms, or company insiders to make decisions on the relevance and ranking of search results.
Stumpedia allows you to submit, rank, and personalize your own search results. The relevance of search results are unique to you and are determined by your social graph in the following order: you, your social network friends, friends-of-friends, your followers, and the overall community. A spammer who submits and ranks irrelevant results can be easily identified, blocked, and unfollowed to prevent your search results from being polluted. Users can personalize and customize search results by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. This data is used to determine the relevancy of search results for the people in your social graph and vice versa.
Upon search results being displayed, users are given the option to
specific results. If users click on the appropriate buttons, this then changes the ranking of search results.
Wikipedia defines Stumpedia as
a social project and community effort that relies on human participation and folksonomies to index, organize, and review the world wide web. The aim is to help build Natural Language Processing and the Semantic Web.
Certainly an interesting project and would be useful to show to students just how public opinion can change the way information is presented.
Documenting stories from people in Melbourne’s north, WikiNorthia is a wiki with two main assets.
there is a vast array of resources available for research.
The about page explains the origins of the wiki:
WikiNorthia is an innovative project that will encourage people across five local councils with rich cultural histories and diverse communities to get together and tell their stories providing a snapshot of life in the north of Melbourne now as well as the past. The project is the first of its type in Victoria and in fact Australia.
Students in the regions catered for by WikiNorthia could find an audience for specific pieces of work as well as using the wiki as a research resource. Support materials will be useful for teachers and students.
This is a nifty site that is available to teachers and schools worldwide. The site explains how Museum Box
provides the tools for you to build up an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box. What items, for example, would you put in a box to describe your life; the life of a Victorian Servant or Roman soldier; or to show that slavery was wrong and unnecessary? You can display anything from a text file to a movie. You can also view and comment on the museum boxes submitted by others.
The site also explains how
You can add text, images, video and sound to the side of the cubes. To save your box you will need to register. For teachers there is lesson guidance and instructions for use are available in the Teachers Area and you can Register your school.
Anyone can view the Museum Boxes, but if you wish to make and save your own box, it does require registration, which is approved (in my case) in about five days.
What an engaging way of putting together resources on a historical (or any) topic.
Thanks to Richard Byrne from Free Technology for Teachers for alerting Bright Ideas to Museum Box!
A great tool that converts text to speech is iSpeech.
Personal (non commercial) use is free and is great for visually impaired students. You can either use the demo at the front of the site for quick text to speech, or you can sign up for a free personal account that lets you do much more such as embed text to speech in your website.
iSpeech could also be good for language and literacy learners.
