SLAV Connects is a blog by the School Libraries Association of Victoria (SLAV), formerly named Bright Ideas when a collaboration between SLAV and the State Library of Victoria (SLV). Its aim is to share news from the Association and to encourage teacher librarians, librarians, school library staff, educators and all interested persons to actively engage with the school libraries, to share tools and experiences; to network on a global scale; and to embrace dynamic teaching and learning opportunities.
The Ed Tech Book Club ning is an excellent way to connect with other educators reading non-fiction that focuses on technological change in schools.
From the ning’s main page comes the following information:
I believe the true catalyst to change in education is collaboration and communication between educators. Those in the trenches know what is needed in schools more than politicians and many policy makers.
We hope that you will take time to join us through various book conversations! We will focus on non-fiction books with Educational Technology, Educational Leadership, and Educational Practices as their foundation. Our ultimate goal is to create lifelong learners in the field of education and help serve as the catalyst to change!
Further uses include narrated postcards for Geography, commenting on photos for History, quick book reviews, commenting on art works – the uses are endless!
Fotobabbles can be embedded into blogs, wikis and other websites and shortly there will be the option of creating slideshows.
Students can use their own photos or those from copyright free or Creative Commons websites and then record a narration. Fotobabbles may be kept private, just remember to ensure the privacy box is ticked and click ‘save’. As with most social media sites, there is a way of reporting objectionable content, but there is no way of ensuring students don’t find any, unless you investigate first and supervise use.
Using Fotobabble in class could be a good introduction to Creative Commons and the moral and legal use of images.
ReadCloud is a fascinating free site that may be useful for teacher librarians and English literature teachers.
ReadCloud offers free eBooks to either read online or to download and read later. All books are those out of copyright, so expect classics like Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations and War and Peace.
ReadCloud also offers online reading groups, and enables teachers to manage groups of readers, who can be added by invitation and kept private. Groups can add comments and make reading interactive and therefore more engaging and collaborative. There is also the opportunity to change the font of the text, search a dictionary and search the internet. This makes ReadCloud ideal for student use, however it could also be used for staff book clubs and private book groups.
This is a Facebook app that should appeal to young adult readers. Developed by the UK’s Channel 4, the Bookstash Facebook app says, “Create and expand your stash of books, review them with stickers, and tag them with keywords you choose!”
Bookstash is a good way to get students into reading and may be a springboard to developing your own reading promotional website/social networking site.
Fancy Goods is the blog of the Australian Bookseller and Publisher magazine.
The website explains:
Fancy Goods is about all things book-related. You’ll find book reviews, information about what titles are selling or being mentioned in the press, news from the world of books, and our thoughts on books, bookselling, publishing, reading, writing … and anything else that takes our fancy.
inkpop is a recent innovation by HarperCollins Publishers. Providing an online community for aspiring authors, members can vote for their favourite stories, which will then be read by the HarperCollins Editorial Board.
inkpop is an online community that connects rising stars in teen lit with talent-spotting readers and publishing professionals. Our social networking forum spotlights aspiring authors and the readers who provide the positive springboard for feedback. inkpop members play a critical role in deciding who will land a publishing contract with HarperCollins. Whose work will you help rise to the top?
inkpop invites unpublished, published, and self-published authors to create their own personal inkpop page and post their books, short stories, essays, and poetry for public viewing. There is no word-count minimum for short stories, essays, and poetry, but authors must upload books that are at least 10,000 words in order for them to be read and critiqued by the inkpop community.
Visitors can comment on submissions and choose their top five favorites. inkpop counts the number of times a project appears to be among the five favorites of community members and uses that information to rank the projects. inkpop also recognizes the visitors who consistently recommend the best projects and uses that info to rank the most influential Trendsetters, who play a critical role in selecting top authors.
In short, talent development is a collaborative process at inkpop. Readers are talent scouts and critics who become community leaders in their search for standout projects. In turn, writers get to load up on valuable feedback from a target audience and make their projects the very best they can be.
Please note that users must be over 13 years of age and currently, English is the only language that submissions are accepted in. As per any resource used with students, please check the site out for yourself as the content is constantly changing.
inkpop sounds like a supportive community for aspiring authors. It is great to see publishers creating such resources for would-be authors.
ustice and SurvivalChrissie Michaels* is a teacher of English, Drama and Humanities at a Gippsland school. She is also an author of YA fiction. She has been using book trailers in class to enhance teaching and learning. She explains more:
Why did you begin using book trailers as part of your teaching?
I’m always on the lookout for new ways to make tasks interesting and engaging for my students. This seemed a new and novel way to have them respond to a wide-reading activity; a change from the basic written review or oral presentation. A book trailer requires a different approach: working out how to portray the selected book in such a way that someone else is persuaded to read it. The task sets a multilayered challenge―to create visuals, audio and text.
Recently I was involved in the production of a book trailer for my YA novel In Lonnie’s Shadow. After doing a bit of my own You Tube and publishing-house research, and enlisting some willing helpers, I discovered it wasn’t that hard to put together a short film. A great big cheer for Windows MovieMaker which is the program we used. It’s readily accessible on most PCs. At home we had already been using MovieMaker to put together family DVDs. Making the book trailer was just the next step.
Which trailers did you use?
In the classroom I used the trailer for In Lonnie’s Shadow as a starting point. Being an author/teacher has its pluses! I also showed a simple student trailer from TeacherTube which used the basic MovieMaker elements. This provided enough background for the students to work on their task, which was to create a book trailer to market their chosen wide-reading novel to a new audience of readers (i.e. without giving too much of the plot away). First, students spent a period creating their own ‘test’ sample, using a set of photographs on a range of general interest topics (surfing etc.) and adding some audio/music clips. Teachers do have to remain aware of copyright issues of course. Students inserted text onto these pictures or made separate text frames and played around with transitions and effects.
How did students respond to them?
Since we started they have been really engaged. It’s still early days, but I’ve been delighted with their interest! Of course they picked up on how to use the program within about five minutes flat. Two students already knew how to use MovieMaker. Some could use Vegas (another movie-making program) which is a more complex program (at least for me). I gave those students the option to use it if they wished. Teachers may prefer to use Photo Story 3 as another simple option.
Have they made their own trailers?
Many are well on the way but they are still a work in progress. All have picked a key line of narrative or brief interpretive piece of dialogue from their chosen novel to work with in a new way. I dutifully bring in a video camera and the digital camera for this section of the task. Many still haven’t got their own pictures ready (part of their homework) so I am going back a step for some students where they have to map out a short storyboard. A website with some starting pointers can be found at: http://www.squidoo.com/booktrailers.
We are planning to show the finished clips (1-2mins duration) in a class presentation probably in a fortnight’s time.
If so, what skills did they learn?
I think that being able to weave together a multilayered storyline using the visual, auditory and textual has been a great creative exercise. Of course, students start by reading. They pre-write: plan their response and storyboard those visual images to create a narrative line. The task makes it so important for the students to understand the key imagery and themes for each story they have read and then they have to work out how best to convey these in an original way. They decide on transitions and effects. They seek peer review. They revise and refine.
We are all looking forward to the presentation. Students have been discussing with each other how to best represent imagery, themes and characters. They have teamed up with others to film snippets of dialogue. Hooded students have been chasing each other down corridors (for the sake of the film clip of course!).
Can readers see what the students have developed?
At this stage the students have elected for a once-off viewing of their book trailers for the class only. I guess the next time we may be more adventurous and do something for a wider audience.
Since you mentioned a book trailer for your novel, tell us a little about it…
My new YA novel is called In Lonnie’s Shadow, and is out in May 2010. It is published by Ford Street Publishing.
The novel is about a group of teenagers living in Little Lon, Melbourne in 1891.Lonnie, Pearl, Daisy and Carlo are trying to make a fair go of life, although many things are conspiring to make their life difficult. Sometime it’s hard to know who they can rely on. Secrets are kept and promises made. There’s plenty of action and the characters find themselves facing many hot spots – theft and kidnap, gang warfare and murder – and they have to make some pretty serious choices. The narrative structure draws upon artefacts (some real and some imagined) found in the contemporary archaeological digs of Little Lon. There’s a wonderful collection at Museum Victoria. In fact this is what first inspired me to write the story. So I hope you will read the novel and most of all, enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Check out In Lonnie’s Shadow trailer here or through Vimeo, Blazing Trailers, or go straight to Chrissie’s author website or Ford Street Publishing which has a number of other book trailers readers might like to use in their schools.
Thanks once again to the Head of the LRC at Lowther Hall AGS, Glenys Lowden (@glenyslowden) for sharing her forays into the Web 2.0 world. Glenys’s Ning has been developed for year 8s:
The Ning ‘Bookish at Lowther’ aims to provide a place where we can upload information and have discussions about books. The focus is on Year 8 students who will request permission to join the Ning and once given will have their own page. They can change the presentation of their page and all pages are accessible to members of the Ning. As this involves a social network it seemed like a good opportunity to give a presentation to Year 8 on Social Networking. I used prezi.com to make the presentation. You will find it by searching prezi.com for ‘Year 8 Social Networking’. Once the Year 8 students have signed up we are going to be using the space to upload Book Trailers. This is an assessment task for each Year 8 class. They have been given a list of criteria etc and process to undertake. This is all a trial this term and I will use this experience to further develop the Ning next year.
You will note that Glenys has embedded other Web 2.0 tools such as Shelfari, YouTube and animoto into the Ning’s homepage.
The Year 8 students are sure to love such a vibrant way of presenting and discussing books. Thanks again Glenys for sharing another job well done!
KidLitosphere Central: the society of bloggers in children’s and young adult literature is a place for anyone interested in children’s and young adult literature to meet and share their enthusiasm. The website explains it all beautifully:
KidLitosphere Central strives to provide a passage to the wonderful variety of resources available from the society of bloggers in children’s and young adult literature.
Some of the best books being published today are children’s and young adult titles, well-written and engaging books that capture the imagination. Many of us can enjoy them as adults, but more importantly, can pass along our appreciation for books to the next generation by helping parents, teachers, librarians and others to find wonderful books, promote lifelong reading, and present literacy ideas.
The “KidLitosphere” is a community of reviewers, librarians, teachers, authors, illustrators, publishers, parents, and other book enthusiasts who blog about children’s and young adult literature. In writing about books for children and teens, we’ve connected with others who share our love of books. With this website, we hope to spread the wealth of our reading and writing experience more broadly.
What started as individuals blogging independently about children’s and young adult books became a collective of like-minded people. While maintaining our own sites and unique perspectives, shared activities made us a thriving community. Now — with weekly celebrations of poetry and nonfiction, an online literary journal, a shared database of book reviews, discussion groups, contests, social networks, an annual conference, and our own book awards — we’ve become a society.
This thing that Melissa Wiley dubbed the “KidLitosphere” has become a valuable resource that celebrates fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, authors and illustrators, writing and reading. Bloggers cover everything from picture books to young adult titles, writing process to publishing success, personal news to national events.
KidLitosphere Central strives to provide an avenue to good books and useful literary resources; to support authors and publishers by connecting them with readers and book reviewers; and to continue the growth of the society of bloggers in children’s and young adult literature.
Welcome to our world.
Some of the information hasn’t been updated in a while, but the real gem of the site is the link to members. Here you’ll find links to all of the blogs written by members and categorised into:
There is no need to register as all links are freely available. If you wish to add your blog to the KidLitosphere Central community, drop them a link at KidLitosphere@gmail.com
A really useful site for anyone interested in books for children or young adults.
Paula Kelly, the Reader Development and Onsite Learning Manager (inc. Centre for Youth Literature) Learning Services at the State Library of Victoria highlights the following points from the new report:
that young people area reading – perhaps more than ever!
why it is vital to promote reading and the positive outcomes it affects
what the barriers are to reading and how to overcome them
trends in young people’s reading environments and challenges in addressing these
how it is we all can put, and keep, books in the hands of young people
The State Library and the Centre for Youth Literature are also to be congratulated on the following achievements:
a doubling of the youth audience in partnership with others in the Centre for Youth Literature program delivery
the distribution of almost 100,000th free picture books for Victorian 2 year olds in the Young Readers Program
the development of an online primary age audience partnership with SuperClubs Plus Australia
(for which an Arts Victoria Leadership Award was presented)
the launch of another adult Summer Read program in partnership with the Public Libraries of Victoria
Well done to everyone involved. The 2001 report Young Australians Reading was a vital and much quoted report. The 2009 Keeping Young Australians Reading is also a must-read for anyone interested in young adult education. Anyone on the ground in school or public libraries know exactly what is happening in their own institution, but it is imperative that we see the bigger picture of the culture of reading Australia-wide. It is also very useful to be able to access up-to-date statistics to add evidence to any budget or grant applications.
