Useful sites (weekly)

• Vanilla – Free Forum Hosting With Vanilla Forums you will have a simple, powerful discussion forum for your community up and running within minutes.
• Pacific trash vortex animation showing drift of ocean pollution | Greenpeace International 
• quietube | Video without the distractions | Youtube, iPlayer, Viddler, Vimeo and more Watch You Tube, BBC, etc. videos without ads, comments etc. Just drag the button to your browsers bookmark bar. 
• Teachers Network: How to Use the Internet in Your Classroom The Virtual Field Trip is a field trip that students and teachers take via the Internet. A great benefit of this activity is that it utilizes technology tools to help students visualize and understand subject matter through exploration and active learning. It’s also a great way to “travel” without leaving your classroom! Look for sites with QuickTime VR, which allows you to view panoramic views of your virtual field trip location.
• Well Told Tales | A place for pulpy stories … and storytellers Free short story podcasts (like audiobooks, but shorter), check out WellToldTales.com
• Free eBooks at Planet eBook – Classic Novels and Literature You’re Free to Share Classic literature as free eBooks to download in PDF format
• BookGlutton Read books online, annotate and/or discuss them with others. You can sign up for an account and make some decisions about what you’d like to read and who you’d like to read it with. You can either choose a book from our public domain collection, or choose a group that’s reading something you like. Then you just jump into the reader. 
• Free e-books Australian portal site with links to e-book collections from around the world  
• Read Easily – Ebooks Online Library The site is aimed at the visually impaired, this web site allows you to change the fonts and colours to make the books more legible.
• The Hound of the Baskervilles – Download Free eBook The classic story from Planet ebook
• 10 Stunning Examples of jQuery Animations Some good examples of Animation using jQuery 
• Edublogs.tv   Cyberbullying-Talent Show 
• YouTube – Bayeux Tapestry An animated version of the Bayeux Tapestry. Starts about halfway through the original work at the appearence of Halley’s Comet and concludes at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
• Twitter Usage In America 2010 – User Statistics And Behaviors – Edison Research Great research to help you explain Twitter
• Web Privacy: In Praise of Oversharing — Printout — TIME A Time article. A lesson in the virtues of “publicness” – why we share, and what we receive. What we do online is something quite different: we curate our private lives for public exposure. We don’t serve up a raw feed of our existence. We edit out certain bits, and highlight others. We fiddle with the privacy controls at Facebook. We define the circles of exposure. 
• 100 Inspiring Ways to Use Social Media In the Classroom | Online Universities A variety of uses for social media, linked to real examples by educators in the classroom.
• Curriculum Framework The Curriculum Framework specifies what is to be taught for each subject in the curriculum. In Pennsylvania, Curriculum Frameworks include Big Ideas, Concepts, Competencies, and Essential Questions aligned to Standards and Assessment Anchors and, where appropriate, Eligible Content.
• For Writers Susan Stephenson (The Book Chook) on all apects of writing 
• Map of the Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico – Interactive Map – NYTimes.com The interactive map shows the extent of the oil spill from April 22 to May 23, including a comparison of various estimates of oil flow.
• Ten Steps to Better Student Engagement | Edutopia Project-learning teaching strategies that can also improve your everyday classroom experience. 
• Recorded Books K-12 Blog A good source for e-books will allow to display your images with some commentary

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

More on E-books – 10 options

Today I have been looking at more e-books. The sites I looked at were mostly offering text downloads and many offered free options. This is not a complete or definitive list but they are the ones I like, were easy to access and I especially liked those that could add something extra eg annotating and commentating and some offer more for a reading group discussion/study. Our students all have laptop computers and I would confidently say they also all have a smaller mobile device - most often in the form of  iPods or iPhones. I am not saying they all like to read off their devices but it is becoming a much more common occurrence. There are also  those who are not great readers of hard copy books who do prefer the electronic format. I have recently been given a kindle to use and it is really very easy to read from and a convenient size for carrying around. There is so much becoming available and our school library must look at how best we can connect our students to reading and literature. E-books are one answer.

The Book Glutton video: This video offers a short overview about how BookGlutton works: how to find and read books, how to use the community features and how to set up your own profile. It was updated for 2010

• BookGlutton Read books online then annotate and/or discuss them with others. You can sign up for an account and make some decisions about what you’d like to read and who you’d like to read it with. You can either choose a book from our public domain collection, or choose a group that’s reading something you like. Then you just jump into the reader.
• DailyLit This is a free service that brings books (also free) (particularly classic books in the public domain) as excerpts, into your inbox in convenient small messages that can take less than 5 minutes to read. This is not just an option for your computer, it also works perfectly well on whatever PDA you may have. Sometimes there’s a small charge for the e-book (usually a modern book) but there are plenty in the free category.
• Google Books Google are working on an agreement that will offer access to 3 categories of books. 1. Out-of-copyright books: This agreement doesn’t affect how out-of-copyright book are offered. Book Search users can read, download and print these titles. 2. In-copyright but out-of-print books Out-of-print books aren’t actively being published or sold so it can be hard to find copies held in a library or used bookstore. When this agreement is approved, every out-of-print book that they digitize will become available online for preview and purchase, unless its author or publisher chooses to “turn off” that title. 3. In-copyright and in-print books: In-print books that publishers are still actively selling. This agreement expands the online marketplace for in-print books by letting authors and publishers turn on the “preview” and “purchase” models that make their titles more easily available through Book Search.
• International Children’s Digital Library The ICDL Foundation’s goal is to build a collection of books that represents outstanding historical and contemporary books from throughout the world. Ultimately, the Foundation aspires to have every culture and language represented so that every child can know and appreciate the riches of children’s literature from the world community. The simplest way to use the ICDL is to just read a book. Pick one of the featured books from the home page or search for books using one of the search mechanisms. The reader can then read – for free and anonymously. You can also create an account to keep a bookshelf of books you like and set various personal preferences.
• Internet Archive Text Archive Download free books and texts. The Internet Archive Text Archive contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children’s books, historical texts and academic books. This collection is open to the community for the contribution of any type of text, many licensed using Creative Commons licenses.
• Planet eBook Classic literature in PDF format.. Free eBooks to download
• Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, the founder of P/G, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.
• Project Gutenberg Australia   This site produces books in electronic form and makes them freely available to the public in accordance with Australian copyright law, usually in plain text. Hosts a number of specialised Australian collections, including a Library of Australiana, Australia’s Greatest Books., Australian Explorers & Australian History.
• Read Easily Uses Project Gutenberg and is aimed at the visually impaired, this web site allows you to change the fonts and colours to make the books more legible.
• World Public Library Use the eBook Finder to find the PDF eBook you are looking for and download free books and texts. The World Public Library Association Collection shelves more than 750,000 PDF eBooks in more than 100 languages. The mission of the World Public Library’s Acquisition Department is to add new eBooks 24/7 to the shelves. The Internet Archive Text Archive contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children’s books, historical texts and academic books. This collection is open to the community for the contribution of any type of text, many licensed using Creative Commons licenses.

 World Public Library video

Audio book options

Uploaded from Flickr by Colleen AF Venable

Audio books are becoming more important/useful in many ways. It does not have to be sight-impaired students that benefit from audio books. We have students who have trouble with reading for a variety of reasons but who are perfectly capable of understanding and assimilating the spoken word. Many students enjoy listening to a book being read or there are those who have long journeys to get to school or who have training runs. Many use their portable device (be it iPod or others) already to break up the boredom so why not still listen to a podcast of a book reading.  It is a way of using otherwise “down-time” as reading time.

There was an interesting article in the Age Greenguide last Thursday about Bolinda Audio Books. Entitled “Telling stories to the world” the history of this company was outlined in terms of their development into a thriving audiobook company.

I remember buying a number of the Large Print titles for a vision impaired student from the earlier version of the company. In some respects it does not seem all that long ago but I must admit that I have become a much bigger fan as they have developed the audio book business, especially when I drive out into the country areas and I am faced with 3-6 hour drives.

Bolinda has become a large audio book publisher with a great  line up of authors and titles, especially Australian, and they are also beginning to offer simultaneous releases of audio books. This has been a boon to me as I want to “read” the new titles as I introduce them into our library. I am always trying to keep on top of the current literature and this is a great way for me to “read” a number of titles. I have also tried a few audiobooks for my iPod and it is very easy it is to download/use their MP3CD’s.

I have yet to investigate Bolinda digital which is a fairly recently decided to offer an option that will enable libraries to offer eAudiobooks to its library customers from its Library’s website. This will enable users to download time-limited version of the novel. How and if I can make use of this in a school library is yet to be seen, but I am interested.

There are also options for free books as well. If a teacher decides to study a book that is in the public domain, they can access the text from the ManyBooks.net site. ManyBooks has public domain books already formatted for various handheld devices.

Another advantage is that if you download a book for an iPod, for instance, Manybooks can provide it in iPod notes format. The text is divided into various files and each file is linked to the file that comes before it and the file that follows it. This is done because there is a limit to the number of characters allowed in one iPod notes file but no limit to the number of “notes” files than can be uploaded to an iPod. The user can then  access the text and audio of a book at the same time from the same device whenever they want to. I do not like reading from small screens but the iPad will change this.

Mp3 files can be downloaded and uploaded to handheld devices just like music is uploaded. If we want free books another option is LibriVox. This site hosts free public domain audiobooks that are read by volunteers. The quality of voice varies but it is still a good option.

From Fiction Focus there comes another audio option – in the form of podcasts. Entitled “Listen Up”, this sounds like an interesting idea and I plan to check it out tonight.

Audiobook Community is a US-based ning. The largest of its groups (104 members) is called Sync: YA Listening. During the months of July and August, the group is offering two free audio downloads each week to support the summer reading programs held by many school and public libraries in the US. Administrator Kirsten Cappy is still fine tuning the list, but here’s a glimpse. She is playing with pairing modern and classic books.

We are fortunate to have many options to enable us to give our students a gateways into literature. The above options only scratch the surface.

Useful sites (weekly)

• Google Web Elements Google Web Elements allow you to easily add your favorite Google products onto your own website. 

• Twitter Q&A, Neil Gaiman on “… Painstakingly compiled by @RJFerret, non-italicized copy by @neilhimself (Neil Gaiman), questions in italics, in order of answering, May 18th, 2010.

• 5 tips to improve your presentations | Stratepedia Blog 

• Gapminder: Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view. – Gapminder.org Students can access real data and represent it in a variety of ways with tools at gap minder. There is no charge for the service or access to the data. This is an amazing repository of statistics shown in very cool ways. Great for social sciences

• For Teachers – Gapminder.org Teacher information and facts on how to use google docs to import data into Gapminder to plot it yourself. Statistics teachers may find this very useful.  tag

• Does Windows 7 Make Up for Vista? Lifehacker cites a report that says that customer satisfaction with Microsoft is “at an all time high” mostly because of Windows 7. Would be interested to hear from someone using it. I have to admit that the snapping windows look very cool. 

• Steam punk – RN Book Show – 30 December 2008 Thomas Pynchon, Jules Verne or HG Wells as punk icons, or punk authors for that matter? It sounds bizarre, but steam punk enthusiasts have embraced their work as part of the genre. Steam punk is a sub-genre of science fiction. It usually takes place in a Victorian setting, involving industrial inventions such as steam powered engines.

• Twitter user convicted after ‘menacing’ message – AfterDawn UK citizen Paul Chambers has been convicted this week of sending a ‘menacing’ tweet via Twitter, with the British Court fining him £1000 and slapping him with a criminal record. 

• Teaching Parents Digital Citizenship at Katy ISD — THE Journal This Texas school district has decided that the best way to help their students learn how to use online resources more responsibly is to educate parents as well. Evening technology showcases provide a launch pad.

• faqs-Smartcopying. Smartcopying. The Official Guide to Copyright Issues for Australian Schools and TAFE.

• Seven Things You Need To Stop Doing On Facebook – Security – IT Channel News by CRN 

• David Maybury | Blog David Maybury is a writer and person who lives in Dublin. This is his blog about about writing, children’s books and other bits.

• What Ever Happened to the Book? | the human network Detailed academic discussion of e-books, e-texts, digital texts and reading with its many approaches to reading in light of these.

• adaptive path » blog » Teresa Brazen » Explaining User Experience Design to High Schoolers (and other new audiences) How do user experience designers tell their story, in a relevant, meaningful way, to audiences who have had no exposure to user experience design 

• Wissahickon School District’s eToolBox – Ning Great collection of Ning tutorials/resources

• 4 Tips for Integrating Social Media Into the Classroom Social networks are here to stay, and with or without rules, kids are going to use them. Here are four tips for educators on how to develop a technology policy that seizes on social networking as a learning tool and teaches children how to use it responsibly.

• The Book Zone Reviews of books that may appeal to boys – by an teacher in a UK school.

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

Bring on the Learning Revolution – Sir Ken Robinson (TED)

TED recently released this video of Sir Ken Robinson’s talk from TED in Feb 2010. His latest talk Bring on the Learning Revolution is a follow-up to his very popular TED Talk Schools Kill Creativity given in 2006.

 

more about “Bring on the Learning Revolution – Si…“, posted with vodpod

 

I have listened to teachers in my school talk about punishing students who do not finish their word documents or powerpoints or the kids who just copy and paste in the answers. It never occures to them to look at the assignments and the work they are setting the students.

What did I learn from this TEDtalk?. We must recognize the need to allowfor  a diversity of talents in education (and in society as a whole) and that education often works best when it is an organic and a real-world , authentic process.