Boys and reading

The Guys Read site has had a revamp (Thanks to Tristan Bancks on the Boys, Blokes, Books and Bytes site.) It has a completely new look and feel and it has a lot of cool boys’ book “stuff”.

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!
• Stats and Facts on Boys and Reading. Odd details and ideas.

If you have not been here it is worth having a look and better still take your boys there.

Useful Links (weekly)

• #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.

• Book Parodies: See The Funniest And Send In Your Own 

• Math Games Games for all levels of mathematics.

• NZ Interface Magazine | If you can’t use technology get out of teaching! Article by David Warlick 

• Special Reports – eSN Special Report: 21st-Century Teacher Education Responding to a key need, schools of education are ramping up efforts to prepare future teachers to integrate technology into their instruction

• Special Reports – Learning without limits How the rise of online instruction is changing the nature of schooling; from eSchool News April 3, 2009

• 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 

• Educypedia, The educational encyclopedia is the most complete Encyclopedia in the world with access to the very best Web Resources for Education. The best free resources on the web!!! The aim of this site is to provide a resource of technical and scientific information. There is a huge amount of links for math, science and even history, etc. Includes interactives & animations. , It was designed to help educators search for internet material appropriate for their classrooms, autocad, educypedia, computer hardware, datacommunication, microprocessors, motherboards, audio, electricity, biology, botany, chemistry, climate, geographic, geology, mechanics, mathematics, space, worldwars.

• Stephen Michael King Australian Illustrator’s website

• 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.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Fast Flip : Google’s news and magazine reader

• This recently (Sept) released tool from Google Labs offers another way to glean news from the internet.  Fast Flip aggregates 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.

fastflip

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Music and the novel

“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 novel is 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.

Mortal Engines and Leviathan

Below is not a book trailer but Kenneth Branagh reading an extract from the novel, Mortal Engines. It would be a good way to introduce new students to the book (and the others from the series).

A few posts ago I wrote about opening lines. How about the first line in Mortal Engines? “It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.”

This is a great YA novel and one that quite a lot of our students have enjoyed. Like the newly published Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, this is a steampunk novel and it could be enjoyed by both younger and older readers.

It is a world where cities are built on axles or treads, the number of tiers the city has determines its place on the food chain, and London, even though it has been skulking in the wastelands, is high up there. One of the first cities to take to the treads, it has determined, like a shark, to keep moving, and to keep moving it needs to chase down prey — smaller cities and towns — and consume them. (Part of a  review by Cindy Lynn Speer on the SF Site)

And the Leviathan Trailer, created entirely from Keith Thompson’s art from the book. I am looking forward to reading this novel after buying it just the other day.