Adobe® BrowserLab Adobe BrowserLab is a browser compatibility service that provides designers exact renderings of their pages on leading browsers. Results are fast, with powerful tools to spot issues. You can learn more at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/browserlab/
Demos | Publications Demos publishes a wide variety of pamphlets, reports, collections and papers. Everything we publish can be downloaded for free. You can find out about buying printed copies, subscriptions and copyright here .
Strait Kcab – Free Font ”Download free Strait Kcab font from SearchFreeFonts.com. Available in True Type format for Windows and Mac. Preview Strait Kcab font by typing your own text, zoom in on characters, write comments, or add to favorites for later download.”
Shareable: Cory Doctorow on the Shareable Future of Book Publishing In this PublishingPoint interview, Cory describes a new shareable book project he’s launching in which he serves as author, publisher, distributor and bookseller–and involves dozens of collaborators. “He also shares his thoughts about the ways in which traditional roles in publishing are becoming blurred,” says PublishingPoint. “And he touches on strategies that have made the popular on-line community Boing-Boing (where he serves as co-editor) so successful, including how he and his co-editors started Boing-Boing at almost no cost.” It’s a fascinating overview of state-of-the-art cultural production in the age of sharing. tag
Spike Magazine: Book Reviews, Interviews, Music, Art, Self Publishing, Travel and More SpikeMagazine.com is a website about books, culture and ideas. Spike has been online in various forms since 1996. Thanks to a small army of contributors over the last 11 years, Spike has hundreds of book reviews, interviews, music reviews and features with writers, artists and musicians.
15 Free Guides That Really Teach You USEFUL Stuff Initially available only for subscribers of the site, there are now multiple manuals released every month, for everyone to enjoy. After releasing 15 manuals and nearly half a million downloads we thought it was about time to look back and review what has been published so far. Enjoy! No sign up need, downloads are free, no strings attached.
The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a comprehensive user manual by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that’s notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you’ll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that’s evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes.
kuler Create custom color palettes for great presentations
Publish Digital Magazines and More Online for Free | YUDU Yudu is a free library of digital content to read and explore. Find eBooks, magazines, and other documents as well as photos, music and podcasts and bookmarks and add them to your own library.
Inkmesh – Find Ebooks Inkmesh is an ebook search engine that collects data from multiple websites to make it easier to find new and interesting ebooks. Choose your format and at the price that suits.
After my Inkys shortlist post I had a comment about Simmone Howell suggested that I take a look at her novel, even though I work in a school populated by teenage boys. My comment about how powerful covers can be I think is relevant. Not one of our regular book suppliers brought this book in for us to have a look at. I suspect they looked at the cover with the heart and that had a great bearing on their decision. I also did not give it any thought and did not notice it on the book shelves.
Since then I have looked at some reviews including the one from Magpies Magazine below
Riley Rose thinks of the Spirit Ranch Holiday Camp as more a concentration camp than a chance for spiritual revival. What she believes is nobody’s business. Clever and observant, with a reckless courage and disregard for consequences, Riley creates a stir that changes the outlook of several fellow campers.
However, it isn’t all one way because after many incidents when Riley has a chance to escape with her crazy best friend Chloe and gorgeous hunk Ben Seb who have come to rescue her, she chooses to stay with fellow camper Dylan and face the music.
The two are in trouble because they have stolen a car and runaway into the desert to a salt lake supposedly with healing powers. Dylan is in a wheelchair after an accident no one will talk about. Although Riley has no apparent disability she is still broken-hearted after the death of her mother and expresses her feelings through angry recklessness. Anger brings them together and each give way enough to find a relative peace, and hope for the future. An unusual romance tale with a complicated and likeable heroine.
Having made the Inkys shortlist and after reading various reviews I thinks I have been remiss and will now read the book. I know some boys who would be interested in reading something that is like the above review. Afterall if they can read Twilight …..
The interesting little one-handed book trailer for her novel is by Simmone Howell.
The Inkys short list was decided a few weeks ago. These are all great books. The highlighted ones are those we have at our school and, although a couple of stories I liked have not made the cut, I am quite satisfied with those that have (I should say - Of those I have read, I am happy with their inclusion).
Golden Inky (for Australian titles)
Broken Glass(Adrian Stirling) This is a dark story of life in a fairly remote country town, with a confronting conclusion that makes this novel more suitable for older or more mature readers. It has a grim scenario involving violence and intimidation. I found Broken Glass a good read but it is also very confronting at times and I find similarities with the book Wake in fright as it shows a less savory view of Australian male friendships.
Jarvis 24(David Metzenthen) This the story of 15yr old Marc Jarvis, who is from the very comfortable Melbourne suburb of Camberwell. He, like many of his contemporaries, spends a lot of time dreaming about girls and his future. Work experience brings him into contact with Electra, a verygifted runner, from another very different world and his life will never be the quite the same. It is a gently told story that touches the emotions as well sees the humour in life.
Where the Streets had a Name(Randa Abdel-Fattah) The Middle East is still a rare setting for YA literature. This is an interesting, intelligent and thought-provoking novel that is told through the stories about the protagonists and various people they meet. The reader learns about a human side of the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem and the Middle East ‘conflict’, one which has often been reported about in our daily media. It is interesting that the author has managed to be funny, despite such heavy content. This story is one of family love, survival and hope.
Worldshaker (Richard Harland) We only recently purchased Worldshakerand it forms part of the collection of steampunk fiction that we are building. I have only skim read it as yet but it looks good. The Worldshaker is a juggernaut, an enormous city that moves around the world, through sea and over land, crushing all in its path under giant rollers. It and the juggernauts of other nations were created after the Industrial Revolution, and exist in a world that has turned out very differently to the one we know. The story starts with an exciting incident and then, after many twists and turns, it builds inevitably towards a violent conclusion.
Everything Beautiful (Simmone Howell)
Silver Inky (International titles)
Exposure (Mal Peet) An interesting and good adaptation of Othello, set in the world of today’s football (soccer). It could make a good companion novel for a study of Othello.
Paper Towns (John Green) The College fiction blog has a good discussion about John Green and his writing (with links) here
The Hunger Games(Suzanne Collins) (My favourite) Dystopian societies seem to have become the next major after vampires. This was a gripping story. In this dystopian world teens, between the ages of 12-18, are all possible candidates for what are called the Hunger Games, a contest to the death. It is a bleak world with enough of a reflection of our current reality to see how this might have come about. However the power of humanity also shines through some of the chacaters
Skim(Mariko and Jillian Tamaki)
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian(Sherman Alexie)
These are great books and I want to encourage all our students to vote.
To vote you go here and there are very simple rules: Voters must be aged under 20 and they can only vote once. They can live anywhere in the world. Voting closes on Nov 20th.
For library staff: Don’t forget to go to shelftalkers for help in getting your students started.
Waller on the relationship between Google and public libraries In a research paper, Vivienne Waller from Swinburne has examined the relationship between Google and public libraries. It’s very well researched and written, and will provide anyone with plenty to think about. The challenge now is to get the right people to read it – especially the “everything’s there on the Web” crowd.
Smarthistory: a multimedia web-book about art and art history This is a free multi-media web-resource/book designed as a dynamic enhancement for the traditional art history textbook. The authors decided to create a multi-media survey of art history web-book. They created audios and videos about works of art found in standard art history survey texts, organized the files stylistically and chronologically, and added text and still images.
History Games and Animations This site offers a list of resources to find tools that will help you teach your students about everything historical from ancient times to the present day.
ANYDAY Today-in-History PAGE of SCOPE SYSTEMS. Put in any day in the year and find out what major events happened on it through this helpful tool. This could be a good way to begin a class – by finding out what happened on today’s date that is significant.
Clickable Mummy Kids are very often interested in mummies and using this interactive site they can learn about the process of mummification.
Calaméo – Publish and share documents Upload all major file formats and convert them into online publications. Can be used to: -Create digital books, e-zines, etc. -Students can become “published” authors -Alternative strategy for reports and presentations -Develop and share tutorials, study guides, etc. -Embed projects into a class site, blog or wiki -Connect with others that share your interests
Interactivate: Activities Interactive games. Maths – 2 player, individual, class activites. Teacher or pupils can pick level and which types of questions are asked in quiz. Time limit to challenge pupils. Element of competition.
Inclusive Science & Special Educational Needs Resources ”A drawing resource for producing neat, accurate diagrams of experimental apparatus. Students who struggle to draw neat diagrams for assessments can be encouraged to use this resource to produce high quality results independently. Teachers may wish to use it to draw diagrams that can be used on worksheets.”
The Steampunk Workshop | Technology and Romance – Sustainable Rebellion Steampunk is a sub-genre of fantasy and speculative fiction that came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The site of Jake von Slatt. and it has some great posts and offers all sorts of interesting ideas and projects. Working in a school populated by teenage boys, it is a great site to get their attention. There are links to many things”steampunk”, from links to literature and reviews, projects, technical links , ephemera (that includes all manner of things that have caught the author’s attention) and even music.,
Tom Barrett has been sharing his class ideas and tips about using various tools in GoogleDocs presentations for quite a while and I have been collecting them in my bookmarks. He has now put all of them together in his blog. The presentations are in easy to use in their Google docs format and he invites others to share ideas. They are worth looking at/using and, if you have some tips that have not been mentioned, think about contributing.
The latest one I found was Ten Interesting Ways* to Use Audio in your Classroom. We have been doing some work with audio and I recently listened to a discussion on music in the novel, so I am interested in exploring this area some more.
The other presentations are listed below but don’t be surprised if the numbers have changed.
Since first hearing about Scott Westerfeld’sLeviathan about 6 months before it was published I have been looking up more information about the “steampunk” concept, trying to get a better understanding of the literature that has been classed as “steampunk”. The Steampunk librarian’s blog is an interesting site to read that gives you many links to all things “steampunk” as is the blog Steampunks links. Recently the later site highlighted art by James Ng. I really liked his artwork but it has information about many other visually interesting sites as well .
Another site I really like is The Steampunk Workshop. It has some great posts and offers all sorts of interesting ideas and projects. Working in a school populated by teenage boys, it is a great site to get their attention. There are links to many things”steampunk”, from links to literature and reviews,projects, technical links , ephemera (that includes all manner of things that have caught the author’s attention) and even music.
The projects the author, Jake Von Slatt, takes on, ranging from the Steampunk keyboard to the Victorian camper to the Victorian PC, are amazing. I am not sure how he thinks up his ideas but as this photo is from a post about creating a “steampunk” PC it is all quite fascinating.
This is a comprehensive site that also features many other people’s works and anything else the author discovers. It is a good site to keep tabs on to get solid overview of whatever is happening in the steampunk community.
If you have not been to the site before, their mission is stated as being “Our mission is to motivate boys to read by connecting them with materials they will want to read, in ways they like to read.”
They have a number of points about encouraging boys to read but the second one (and one that I have been arguing for) is
2. Expand our definition of reading. Include boy-friendly nonfiction, humor, comics, graphic novels, action-adventure, magazines, websites, audiobooks, and newspapers in school reading. Let boys know that all these materials count as reading.
I also really endorse their third point as well and that is the one about giving our boys some choice, they thrive on it! I also believe that role modelling reading, especially male role models have a great effect on boys. I can’t do the male bit but I try to read and discuss the books , and whether I like them or not and why.
Talking with some boys yesterday they asked me about reading. For instance, had I read the Twilight books? I answered yes but…. I find them interesting but not the greatest reads although they are somehow compelling when you are reading them. So what did I like to read, blood, guts and gore like a few of them? I talked about some of the historical books (they did have some blood and gore in them), science fiction and books set during in wartime (yes bg&g there) and crime/detective and mystery stories (often a murder or two) so we all had to agree that my reading did involve often involve blood, guts and gore. I hadn’t quite thought of it in that way before but they seemed quite satisfied that I read stuff like them!
From the Guys Read site boys can get tips for great reads, rate their favourite books and there are plenty of links to other fun sites.
Some of the ideas for engaging boys include:
Great Book Suggestions. “This is the place to come if you’re looking for something to get a guy reading. We’ve collected recommendations from teachers, librarians, booksellers, publishers, parents, and guys themselves.”
The Author page is good for finding the author’s homepage or about books they have written
If you prefer to listen to a book being read, try Guys listen.
The readers of the Guys Read site are asked how they rate the books found in the site. The results are given here on the Guys Read Top 20. To vote you, visit any book page and vote in the “What Do You Think?” section. You can vote as often as you like and the votes tell us which books the readers think guys should be reading!
#howitworks Interesting web 2 application. Online presentation creation and sharing tool. Add video and audio to your uploaded presentation, share your PowerPoint (PPT), OpenOffice (ODP), and Keynote presentations!
Essay Map This site provides information for students to write essays. There are templates that will help students outline essays and walk them through the important pieces in an essay. It is structured as an interactive graphic organizer that includes introductions, supporting paragraphs and conclusion
Kerpoof Studio Creative activity studio that allows you to make cards, stories, movies, doodles, pictures etc. Looks easy and fun and similar to Scratch.
Balzac’s Paris – A Guided Tour Wander through the heart of Paris in the time of Balzac, as described through some of his works, and as documented in maps and engravings ofThe Vernon Duke Collection Special Collections Department, University of California Library
YouCube by Aaron Meyers This tools allows you to map six YouTube videos to an interactive 3D cube. Once you make your own YouCube, you can save it to the database and share it.
toptentools – home Top Ten Free Technology Tools For Young Learners from Kathy Cassidy
data.australia.gov.au – beta data.australia.gov.au is the home of Australian government public information datasets.
This recently (Sept) released tool from Google Labs offers another way to glean news from the internet. Fast Flipaggregates news stories from many popular sources and presents them in a format that is very easy for the user to navigate.
On the Official Google blog, it is explained that Fast Flip is an experiment where people can combine traditional print reading with online article reading to achieve a new and enhanced reading experience. Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers.
From the homepage you can chose to have information sorted and presented to you by the level of popularity, topic, and source. To navigate through the articles all you have to do is click on the arrows on the page.
It is simple to do a search, in this case tsunami. You can view the resultant pages before opening them up. The searches I undertook were very quick in finding results. It is very clean and neat
At the moment Fast Flip has about 40 newspapers and magazines on board, including the NY Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, Business Week, as well as a number that I have never heard of. The content is all English language material at the moment but (non-US source) BBC News has come onboard already and Google promises to work on gathering content in languages other than English. Click on all sources allows you to see links to those sources currently available.
If you like to read you news off the internet this may be an interesting tool to use.
There are a few points that I summised from reading the Google blog announcement and searching around Fast Flip :
Browsing is often what people do in physical libraries, people have always browsed for and through information. Today browsing is an information experience in itself and technology is providing us with the chance to dip into a much larger pool of information than ever before. Those of us in school libraries need to acknowledge browsing as an important skill and we need to teach our students how to do this well so they can navigate their way through the “sea of information out there”.
It is interesting that there was a mobile version of Fast Flip available at the launch, albeit that the app is currently available only for iPhones and Android devices. Mobile apps are becoming increasingly important in today’s world and picks up on the idea of people reading their news when commuting or otherwise on the run. If a big company like Google sees that m-devices are critical to success, we who working libraries need to look at our services and what and how we provide them.
It is also interesting, especially in light of Rupert Murdoch’s recent statements, that here print isn’t really part of the equation anymore. This rapid online browsing experience is all about the web content.
I know many of my colleagues are grappling with aspects of these three points and what it means to the services we provide/offer to our communities
To have a further look at how it works click on the screencast from Demo Girl below.
“Music is a powerful influence, affecting us emotionally, physically, mentally ……”
In this program, aired on The Radio National’s Book Show on 14th October, the role of music in the novelis discussed in a 15 minute conversation. The guest presenter was Dr Alan Dilnot. He is the Senior Lecturer in English at Monash University, specialising in 19 Century fiction and he was speaking with Fiona Croall.
Many writers employ music in their novels as a way of communicating emotions beyond words, or to encourage consistency in character, tone, and language. Music in fiction can create the mood of a time, like John Updike’s Rabbit Run, set in the late 1950s, or it can influence the structure of a novel like James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Music has also played a major role in British literature, with Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot and Ian McEwan among the writers who have used music in their work.
It was another interesting Book Show discussion, one that made me start to think about something I had previously overlooked. I must go back to some of these novels and look at hem with new eyes..
I also downloaded 2 other programs this week:
The Australian Long Story (12min). (Guest: Mandy Sayer, Editor of The Australian Long Story (Penguin). Author of eight books including Mood Indigo and Velocity. Mandy also holds a Doctorate in the short story and is currently a Scholar in Writing at the University of Technology in Sydney.) In this program they try to define what a long story is - as opposed to a “short story” and a “novella”. Also discussed is a new collection of Australian long stories (Penguin) from some of Australia’s well known authors. I have been talking about writing with some of our students lately. There are quite a few who regularly write stories and some are very keen on becoming authors in the future and I hope to play this discussion to them when we get together next.
Children’s picture books.(12min) (Guest: Neal Porter, American publisher and editorial director, Roaring Brooks Press)
Nine years ago, Neil decided to focus exclusively on children’s books and set up his own publishing house for high-quality literature for young readers of all ages. Many of the authors and illustrators in his stable are Australian, including Margaret Wild, Ron Brooks, Gregory Rogers and Stephen Michael King. In this discussion he explained why he regards the Australian picture books so highly.
I have found many of the short discussion so interesting and the few that I have used with students have been great discussion starters.
Rhondda
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