How wonderful that Shaun Tan has won the Oscar for The Lost Thing(Category: Best Short Animated Film). The award was shared with his British co-director Andrew Ruhemann.
There is an article about the award in today’s Sydney Morning Herald and a video available of the acceptance speech. I liked the part in the speech where Shaun commented on “the irony of being noticed for a film about not being noticed.”
This is one homepage that will need an update – from Oscar nominee to winner
Education 2.0 social network for your class – Diipo LLC Diipo.com is a social networking sites that is set up for just teachers and students. Teachers can set up class sites where they can post announcements as well as assignments along with links and attachments for students in that particular class site. Students can be added to class rosters, upload files, post entries like a blog, contribute to other group projects, and more.There is also a Ning-like virtual teacher’s lounge where educators can interact.
AnswerGarden – Plant a Question, Grow Answers Another Camilla Elliot find. AnswerGarden is a minimalistic feedback tool. Use it in the classroom as an educational tool or at work as a creative brainstorming tool. Or you can embed it on your website or blog to use it as a poll or guestbook.
IfItWereMyHome.com From Camilla Elliott. A gateway to understanding life outside your home. Use the country comparison tool to compare living conditions in your own country to those of another. You can also use the visualisation tool to help understand the impact of a disaster. The Pakistan Flood and BP Oil Spill are currently featured. Advertising and comments are a problem for classroom use but still a valuable teaching tool.
Licorize – for the web worker tribe A social bookmarking tool that enables you to collect, share, edit, enhance and present your bookmarks. It prides itself on flexibility and the ability to value add to your bookmarks. Integrates with Twitter and Evernote. Basic account free – need to pay for full features.
Blastgroups – Create a Free Group Website and Email List for any Group A Blast Group is similar to a Ning, but FREE!! Allows the creation, for each of your students, their own page. It can have their own “stream”, plus you can have a main page with a forum, blog, links, calendar etc. The idea is that students will contribute useful links etc, have a place where they can bounce ideas off each other, be aware of deadlines, as well as having their own space to capture their thoughts as we go along. Blast Groups can be private or public
Shaun Tan – interview – Interviews | thevine.com.au Article about Shaun Tan who is going to the 2011 Oscars where his adaptation of his own picture book, The Lost Thing, is nominated for Best Short Animation
SF Signal: The All-Encompassing Machinery: Dystopia in the 21st Century A column about Dystopian fiction today. “It began as a reaction (sometimes a very reactionary one) to unreflexive utopianism, but eventually became more sophisticated, although maintaining a sharp, singular point. In general dystopian works have made people consider the shortcomings of the world around them, and the one that they were helping to make, rather than serving as “pure” entertainment.”
School filters coddle kids, are ineffective – Internet – News ”Internet filters in schools often compromise a teacher’s ability to teach, yet at the same time are easy for tech-savvy students to get around, a parliamentary committee on cyberbullying has heard. The Federal Parliament undertook a cyber-safety committee late last week to investigate community concerns about protecting children from bullying online and the measures that could be used to prevent it, such as Internet filtering.”
Flavorwire » Judging Countries By Their Covers: US vs UK Book Jackets ” They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but can you judge a country by the kind of covers it puts on its books? We’ve always found the cover changes between US and UK editions of the same books pretty interesting – they must be reflective of our different cultures in some way incomprehensible to us”
Social Media & Web 2.0 for Learning ”This presentation and site provides all the resources shared during the ‘Social Media & Web 2.0 for Learning’ workshop (I facilitate), which focuses on several of the most essential learning tools that we can use to facilitate learning and build an effective personal learning environment and network”
Across the Universe by Beth Revis The official website for the book. You can explore this site to see a 3-D diagram of the ship that you can interact with, videos, and more
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
We liked the options that are available to kindle users and the look and feel of the Kindles but it was mainly that for our library (and with how the firewalls are set up in our school) it was simply the easiest option to buy e-books when you have the 3G option.
There are some great places to go where the merits are discussed.
Kerry Smith (Education Services Australia) has been a very interesting voice discussing all things e-book/readers for a whie now. HerSome piece by her include and article in SCIS connections.
After a reading a post from Kerry I began to follow TeleReads, an e-book blog. It often has interesting ideas put up for discussion.
The eduKindle (Kindle for educators) site is also a good place for information and discussion
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We have purchased a few kindles and are trialling them with our senior students this term. There will be enough for each student of our year 11 literature class to borrow one.
One reason we decided to try e-books was that it would be a good way to make sure that we had a lot of the classic titles available to our students. Many of these titles should be available but may only be read once every one or two years at the most. We are short of space in our library and these titles take up a good deal of space and that along with the expense of purchasing a book that yellows etc. (making it unattractive to prospective readers after a while) made the e-book seem like a good idea.
Another thing I liked was that if we don’t have a book that a student is very keen to read, I will be able to check of an eook version and order it and have it available within minutes. Last year I had a few cases where a student wanted one of the classics and I send off an order that took 3-4 weeks to finally arrive. One boy was very keen to read it and had already purchased his own copy before the library could offer it to him.
Based on very early feedback e-books seemed to offer other advantages.
Students who are influenced by the size (number of pages) of the books now can now choose stories based on the content/style of the story and will read through them because the content is of interest.
Boys who have eyesight problems can simple change the size of the font rather than have a “large print” book.
Our boys don’t like to stand out as “different” so the e-book helps with this We also have boys for whom English is a second language (ESL). These boys, and some others who have learning difficulties, can listen to audio whist they are reading. This will help them improve their reading skills and develop a better understanding about pronunciation.
The dictionary option is also great for the boys so they can easily and in an instant check on the definition of an unfamiliar word.
The boys in the literature class are happy to give us more feedback after they have spent more time using them. They plan to use a number of the feature availbl;e to them to respond to their books. I will post about their comments later in the term
Processing:
We catalogued each Kindle separately.
Each of the e-readers was given a name, kindle#1, kindle#2 and so on, and then each was given a College barcode identity. The kindles could then be processed as any other library book/resource.
We have a library system that allows us to catalogue using a “table of contents” (TOC) option. In the past we have been put in author, title and subjects for the contents of a book that contains a collection of stories or speeches for instance. These are all added into separate fields and students can then search the catalogue via title, author or subject of each of the stories as well as the collective title. Any new e-book title downloaded from Amazon is added to the applicable Kindle device’s TOC.
Each new book title has “(kindle)” added to the end of the book title to make it really obvious to the searcher that it is an e-book version.
So far things seem to be working as we would like.
Everyone who has been using hte e-reader has become very enamoured of it. However beware……
Embeddable Forums by Tal.ki Tal.ki lets you embed a forum on your website. No account registration needed and your forum will be integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other services so members can skip registration.
Nabble – Free forum & other embeddable apps Nabble provides useful embeddable applications for your website including forums, user groups, message boards, mailing lists, photo galleries, newspapers, blogs, etc.
DropIt: Sort Your Files With A Drop! DropIt lets you move, copy or compress your files and folders to specified destinations, based on file-names and/or file-types. Drop a group of assorted files and/or folders on the floating DropIt image and it sorts them and sends them off to the folders you assigned.
GumNotes.com: Overview GumNotes lets you annotate websites, documents and emails. Set timed reminders and share notes with colleagues and friends. View and edit your notes on your IPhone, PC, Android or Internet.
British Library to offer free ebook downloads – Times Online More than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library’s collection are to be made available for free downloads by the public from this spring. Owners of the Amazon Kindle, an ebook reader device, will be able to view well known works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as works by thousands of less famous authors
2011 Horizon Report | EDUCAUSE Since 2004, the Horizon Report has been an invaluable tool for identifying the emerging technologies and trends that will impact education. However, the Report is much more than an annual printed booklet: it can provide a tested roadmap on which to base tactical and strategic institutional planning and decision-making. Six areas of emerging technology identified as those that will impact higher ed in next 1-5 years are ebooks, mobiles, augmented reality, games, gesture-based computing, learning analytics.
NASA Earth Observatory : Home The Earth Observatory’s mission is to “share with the public the images, stories, and discoveries about climate and the environment that emerge from NASA research, including its satellite missions, in-the-field research, and climate models.” Offers an image of the day to provide topical aerial photography–floods, eclipses, etc.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
The World’s Most Blocked Websites OpenDNS, one of the most popular DNS services on the Internet, is frequently used by parents and organizations to block websites that they think are inappropriate for children or may hamper productivity at the workplace. OpenDNS, which claims to handle DNS requests for 1% of Internet users worldwide, has released a report detailing a list of top 10 websites that are most frequently blocked by home users and business users.
National Literacy Trust The National Literacy Trust is an independent charity that transforms lives through literacy. Initiatives encourage literacy across the board, through reading and writing initiatives, including talking to your baby, sharing picture books together and reading for pleasure as a adult.
Welcome to M86VuSafe.com A free website that lets educators search for relevant video content from YouTube and other sources, add video clips from these sources to an online library, and then share these clips with their students—without the inappropriate ads, comments, or outside links that might accompany them.
Yodio – Add voice to photos A free audio recording site. You do not need to register your phone with the site to create ateacher account for the students to record into. Could be used to create digital storybooks for one example
iPads in Education – Exploring the use of iPads and Tablet computers in education. ”Tablet computing and personal electronic devices such as iPads promise to have a dramatic impact on education. This Ning network was created to explore new and innovative ways iPads and other portable devices could be used in schools and colleges.”
Rhondda
