Using Picture Books in Lit circles

One of my colleagues and I decided to use picture books as the genre for our first literature circle book for a year 7 English class.
We used picture books to encourage the students to look beyond what was written in their text. They were encouraged to think critically about all the graphic components and reflect on how they add to the text. The tasks were also developed to encourage the boys to develop their inference skills and respond to the works they were reading on a level that they had not been required to do with their earlier texts.

The boys were asked to choose one of 6 picture books.  Their choice was the basis for the formation of the group they would work with for three weeks. 
The boys read the picture books and were given a number of short tasks to complete; some on an individual basis but then sharing their thoughts/ideas with the rest of their group. All these short tasks were then used to create the basis of a glog for each group.

Today they put their ideas together and prepared to create their glog. The will include text, images and multimedia components. They have also been given a rubric to indicate how their glogs will be assessed. I have put the rubric and details into my Reading wiki.

The work that the groups have done so far has on the whole been excellent and I am hoping to have some great glogs that I can use in the library. I also used part of a lesson to explain the basics of Creative Commons to the class as they began a search for appropriate images and explained that sound and music is available under CC licenses too. The students took this information on baord and I was pleased to see that they were busy finding CC images for their glogs.

I have included a list of the short tasks that were undertaken by the students below.

• Analysis of the cover: Comment on the picture on the cover – what it tells the reader about the book; the colours used; the style and colour of the lettering used; what questions the cover raises in the mind of the reader; what other information is given on the cover
•  ‍Scanning skills: Spend 5 minutes browsing through the book and then spend 5 minutes writing what you think the book will be about based on what you see and read.
•  ‍The introduction: In 50 words outline how the author introduces the book and catches the attention of the reader.
•  ‍Sharing ideas with the group: Come to an agreement about what works best on the cover. (and anything you don’t think works). As a group create an alternative cover and “Blurb” for your book
•  ‍Summarising Skills: Make a 100 word summary of the pages which you read for today in your own words. Remember that a summary needs to include the main ideas/information of the text in a logical order. Share your ideas with your group. Do they agree or do they have alternative points?
•  ‍Creating Questions: Write 5 questions which could be used to test the reader’s comprehension of the text which you read for today. Remember that questions need to include the main information in the text and they need to test whether the reader has understood the text. All questions need to be open-ended to allow for discussion. Share these questions with your group and take note of their answers.
•  ‍Illustrating skills: Draw a picture which illustrates the section of the book which you read for today. The drawing must show what is in the text and how well you have understood the meaning of the text.
•  ‍Character description: Pick a character from your book and write either a “missing person” or “wanted” poster for this person. Include in your poster information that you have discovered from the book.

Useful sites (weekly)

• Is Your School Ready for Google’s Chromebooks for Education? | MindShift This blog post suggests five possible issues with the adoption of Chromebooks in schools. These cover technical, financial and social issues and thay all need to be considered before signing on to Google’s new Chromebooks for Education program. Schools must determine whether their Internet-use policies are compatible with the devices, which are meant to be used off-campus as well. Other considerations include bandwidth capabilities, funding concerns and teacher knowledge of technology and Web-based resources.    

• Will Chromebooks for Education Be a Good Deal for Schools? Another article examining some of the pros and cons of Chromebooks for Education. Will it be able to compete with the iPad?

• How Technology Purchases and Policies Failed My Students-The Tempered Radical 

• The New 3 E’s of Education | edtechdigest.com Enabled, engaged and empowered. Overview of the Speak Up National Research Project. Each year polls K-12 students, parents and educators on the role of technology for learning in and out of school and is the largest collection of authentic, unfiltered stakeholder voice on digital learning.   

• The Broke and the Bookish: Top Ten Biggest Jerks In Literature A post that rates some of the male characters in lit. “The biggest jerks..all those jerky guys in books..those who truly WERE asshats and those who just acted like one but could be quite loveable! “ 

•  Cool Cat Teacher Blog: 7 Golden Rules of Twitter  Very simple but effective guide to Twitter  

• Free Puzzlemaker | Discovery Education Puzzlemaker is a puzzle generation tool for teachers, students and parents. Create and print customized word search, criss-cross, math puzzles, and more-using your own word lists. You can’t save the puzzles and link to them – but you could screenshot them (or save the png file it creates) and insert as an image. Alternatively print them out as worksheets.   

• Languages Online Download these free programs and create your own interactive games and activities. Follow the simple steps to add your own text, pictures or voice recordings. Suitable for all languages  

• Super Teacher Tools SuperTeacherTools.com is dedicated to providing technology tools for teaching that are quick and easy to download, learn, and start using in your classroom. In the site, you will find a variety of review games, classroom management software, and other miscellaneous tools for educators.  

• ContentGenerator.net – create your own Educational Flash games Content generator’s templates allow anyone to generate their own e-Learning quizzes, games and applications through our custom software – no coding required. Some content has to be paid for, but quite a lot is free as long as you register for the site.    

• Download Youtube Videos in HD! Download Youtube, Megavideo, Dailymotion, Facebook, Myspace, Vimeo, Metacafe, Spike, Break, Current Videos & more! Allows you to save a video clip onto your hard drive if you don’t have a good internet connection and then play it from your hard-drive to your class.  

• JellyCam – Stop Motion JellyCam is a free program for creating stop motion movies. Using JellyCam you can create stop motion movies using images from your computer or images that you capture via your webcam.    

• Record & Share your PowerPoint presentations | Present.me This is a great tool for teachers. It allows you to record your presentation slides and present it as well. As the website suggests, the effectiveness of presentations falls by 55% when the audiences do not see the face of the presenter. This is good for presenting information that you would like the students to re-visit. It is an excellent tool for those school thinking about flip classes, where the lecture component of the class can be completed at home so the practical component, the experiments, the collaborative work-shopping of concepts can be done in class.      

• Survey reveals disconnect in online safety education | Curriculum | eSchoolNews.com A new report suggests that many schools are not adequately preparing students to be safe in today’s digitally connected age, and it cites basic online safety and ethics as two areas in which students need more education. The report, “State of K-12 Cyberethics, Cybersafety, and Cybersecurity Curriculum in the United States,” was published by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and sponsored by Microsoft.   

• Curation Is The New Creation – Social Media Notes 

• Home — Channel An easy and convenient way of sharing a browsing session with friends without using IMs, Skype, or similar tools is the Channel.me service. This online service lets you and your friends (or a work group) explore a webpage together. It also has a Chrome extension, which when launched, opens the page for you in a separate browsing session and provides you a link to share with anyone you want to collaborate with.   

• WeatherSpark | Interactive Weather Charts Weather Spark is a new site that offers weather data from more than 4,000 weather stations around the world. Not only is their data from more than 4,000 stations, there is also data going back more than fifty years. All of this data can be used to create comparisons of current weather conditions around the world, comparisons of current and past weather conditions, and to view global climate trends.    

• What Exactly is Game-based Learning? « Game-Based Learning Talk ”Game-based learning (GBL) is a seemingly simple concept – learning through the use of games. But wait, let’s look a little closer. Most people see the term “game-based learning” and think of students playing some sort of educational computer game. But, there’s more to GBL than just that. Let’s take a look at GBL in terms of the game and pedagogical considerations:”    

• 6 Ways Social Media Helps Your Presentation Resonate Brian Solis Post by Nancy Duarte. “Social media has forced presentations to become an interactive conversation. Presenters who embrace audience participation are connecting their audiences to their ideas in a more meaningful way. Using social media as a connection tool goes beyond just looking at the twitter feed to assess if you were boring or not. There are six ways to utilize social media while planning your presentation that will ensure an authentic connection and relevant conversation occur.”    

• 30+ Places To Find Creative Commons Media » SitePoint  Some good resources online for audio, video, images and more for finding just the right Creative Commons licensed item for use in a school project   

• Five Tools For Self-Publishing Your eBook – eBookNewser  

• Ten Surprising Truths about Video Games and Learning | MindShift An extended interview with James Gee. The video is from the PBS Documentary Digital Media – New Learners Of The 21st Century.   

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

Imageoid: adding simple effects to images

In a week I will be working with some year 7 students as the create a glog that reflects the picture book they have been reading. 6 groups have been engrossed in reading not just the text but the pictures too, as they piece together the stories that the authors and illustrators are telling.

To this end I have been investigating tools that the students might use to help them create interesting visual hooks.

One tool I have enjoyed playing around with was Imageoid. This is a nice site for uploading an image and the adding a preset effect. It is also a  free service and is very simple to use.

To use Imageoid you follow the directions to :

1. upload your image from your computer (NB: images should be less than 0.6 MB or no more than 600KB) This tool can also resize your image but I preferred to use Corel photopaint to do this first before uploading my images.
2. choose any of the 24 effects you want to apply to the image (you can also combine effects). Some of the effects include grayscale, sepia, inverting, mosaic, emboss, shapes and borders. 
3. click “reset” to start again if you don’t like what you have created.
4. To transfer the image to your computer you click on download and then right-click on the image that pops up and “save as”

Below you can see the before and after of one of my images. Imageoid. is still in beta and they have indicated that there are more effects on the way.

 

 

Useful sites (weekly)

  by  ransomtech 

 

• What Do Kids Say Is The Biggest Obstacle To Technology At School? iPads. Interactive Whiteboards. Netbooks. Video games. Although educational technologies are being implemented more and more in classrooms across the country, we don’t often stop and ask students – or their parents – what they think their technology needs are. But the newly-released Speak Up 2010 survey has done just that. t

• Booklist Online – Top 10 Graphic Novels for Youth: 2011, by Ian Chipman (FEATURE)  

• Infographic: Does Facebook Make You a Better Student? | News & Opinion | PCMag.com While the results don’t definitively answer the graphic’s question—”Is social media ruining students?”—some conclusions are apparent: First, sites like Facebook can be a powerful study tool. From simply staying current with class news to working collectively on projects, Facebook and Twitter can do a lot to keep students informed about topics they care about. There are also risks that can occur to students.   

• Education Week Teacher: The Courage To Blog With Students ”for the teacher, bringing blogging into the classroom can be both thrilling and terrifying at the same time. No doubt about it, making the decision to try student blogging is an act of courage. With that in mind, I’d like to share eight things I’ve learned that can help ensure your brave step is also a wise and successful one for you and your kids.”  

• Return to Main Page | Write4Kids! ”This blog is maintained by the editors of Children’s Book Insider, the Newsletter for Children’s Writers, and was created to help demystify the process of becoming a published children’s author. They provide tips, full-length articles, links to writing resources and industry news and more.”

• Minds in Bloom: strategies and activities to promote creative and critical thinking ”Creative and Critical Thinking Skills are more important than ever. Here is the place for parents, teachers, and home schoolers to find fun, easy-to-implement ideas to get kids thinking in new ways”   

• Free Video Clips – Watch Videos Online at AOL Video A dedicated search engine for video and audio materials. A large selection of video from AOL , AOL partners and third party videos  

• The Children’s Book Comes to Life Electronically – NYTimes.com ”The classic answer from the optimist is that storytelling is in no danger, and pretty much any technology that engages a child with a text is good. Emma Walton Hamilton, the author of “Raising Bookworms,” a how-to guide for parents, said as much in a recent interview. Ms. Hamilton, the author of many children’s books with her mother, Julie Andrews, tells parents to take a relaxed approach that connects reading with pleasure, even if it’s on a computer screen. “While I’m not rushing out to buy Amazon’s Kindle just yet,” she writes, “I do think it’s important for children to develop the muscle of reading online” — with caveats about keeping children safe on the Internet. “   

• APA Style Blog: How to Cite Twitter and Facebook, Part I: General Because posts from online social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, are not yet often fodder for scholarly research, specific reference examples aren’t included in the Publication Manual. Well, whenever you need a reference format for something that’s not explicitly covered in the manual, you can adapt our examples to meet your needs (see p. 193). I’ll show you how, using example posts from President Obama’s Facebook and Twitter pages. (Chelsea Lee. )   

• APA Style Blog: How to Cite Twitter and Facebook, Part II: Reference List Entries and In-Text Citations Some of the issues pertaining to citing particular posts, which require both reference list entries and in-text citations.  

• In the era of ebooks, what is a book worth (I) | TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics ”On the other hand, most fiction is of the read-once-then-shelve-or-toss-away variety. How many of us buy a novel and read it more than once? And if we do read it more than once, how many of us will read it more than twice? As with all else, there are exceptions. I can name a handful of novels that I have read more than once — To Kill a Mockingbird, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, and a few more — over the course of 60 years of reading. Considering how many novels I have read in those 60 years of reading, the handful is a very tiny fraction of books I have read, especially compared to nonfiction. With these thoughts in mind, I wonder what the true value of a book is today, especially considering all the restrictions that are applied to ebooks, the varied pricing of ebooks, and the pricing of ebooks compared to their print versions. I also wonder about the value, by which I mean the price to be paid, of fiction in any form. Why is a new Stephen King novel worth $15 or more in any form?” tag

• Digital book subscriptions, by Jane Litte | TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics Interesting discussion. “Ebooks have come a long way since 2009. Ebook readers are substantially less expensive. There are purportedly 40 million digital readers out in the wild not counting the apps that are downloaded to iThing and Android devices constantly. Amazon and Barnes and Noble are selling more digital books than paper books. Because of piracy concerns, many publishers are locking down their books with DRM and only licensing the books to readers for a unspecified term of use. Subscriptions bring up a couple of issues. First, what would be included in the subscription. Second, how would you access those books? Third, what would be the cost.”   

• What Is a Book? The Definition Continues to Blur: Tech News and Analysis « ”It used to be so easy to define what a book was: a collection of printed pages bound inside a cover (hard or soft) that you could place on a shelf in your library, or in a store. Now, there are e-books, and blogs that turn into books, and long pieces of journalism that are somewhere between magazine articles and short books “   

• Persnickety Snark: Final List – Top 100 YA Novels (2010) Voting took place over five weeks at the end of April and throughout May. 735 people shared their top ten choices of the best YA titles. The participants come from across the globe and many different careers. Students, librarians, teachers, editors and a myriad of other professions took the time to volunteer their thoughts on YA. At least 80% of participants were female. An overwhelming majority of voters identified themselves solely as readers.  

• New world order ahead: The developing world is the setting for science fiction’s best new novels – Features, Books – The Independent    

• How to Start Reading Science Fiction, Part 2: 10 Accessible Science Fiction Books | Kirkus Book Reviews Part 2 This is six-part series is intended to guide new science fiction readers toward books that they may find enjoyable.  

• SF Signal: How to Start Reading Science Fiction, Part 1: What You Need To Know | Kirkus Book Reviews Part 1 This is six-part series is intended to guide new science fiction readers toward books that they may find enjoyable    

• How to Start Reading Science Fiction, Part 3: Award Winners | Kirkus Book Reviews Part 3 This is six-part series is intended to guide new science fiction readers toward books that they may find enjoyable 

• Shaun Tan’s Wild Imagination – NYTimes.com   

• Beautiful web-based timeline software Tiki-Toki is a multimedia timeline creator. The results can be works of art-no joke! It is very easy to use, after registering for an account, students are guided step-by-step through creating an interactive timeline. Students can add text, images (Flickr) and video (YouTube or Vimeo) to a timeline. Images can be uploaded from a student computer or found through a search on Flickr.  

• iLearn Technology » Blog Archive » Tiki-Toki: Create gorgeous multimedia timelines A post about using Tiki-Toki. This is a multimedia timeline creator. The results can be works of art-no joke! It is very easy to use, after registering for an account, students are guided step-by-step through creating an interactive timeline. Students can add text, images (Flickr) and video (YouTube or Vimeo) to a timeline. Images can be uploaded from a student computer or found through a search on Flickr.    

• ICT Learning Innovation Centre  The Games in Learning project website. “It has long been recognised that games hold an important place in learning. Interactive games engage audiences, enabling them to understand concepts and learn information in an entertaining way.”    

• HHMI Virtual Bacterial ID Lab The Virtual Bacterial Identification Lab. The purpose of the lab is to familiarize you with the science and techniques used to identify different types of bacteria based on their DNA sequence. Not long ago, DNA sequencing was a time-consuming, tedious process. With readily available commercial equipment and kits, it is now routine. The techniques used in this lab are applicable in a wide variety of settings, including scientific research and forensic labs.    

• CSI: The Experience – Web Adventures ”The web adventures are designed to teach students the process of forensic investigation and problem solving. There are three cases or levels to the CSI web adventures. Unlike a lot of educational games, the CSI Web Adventures are created with the highest quality graphics and navigational features.”Free tech 4 teachers. Good scientific process and higher-order thinking simulation activity  

• LivingDesign by Asif R Naqvi | A creative and inspiration resource dedicated to design and life, and everything in between ”LivingDesign is a creative and inspiration resource that is dedicated to design and life and everything in-between. This blog is about things that stir and influence creative minds. Things – that could be from any where and in all shapes or sizes.”  

• STEAMED! Another steampunk resource  

• 15 Anti-Spam Plugins for WordPress | Digging into WordPress A list of 15 anti-spam plugins to help you run a more user-friendly, hassle-free comment system.    

• The Innovative Educator: The Contraband of Some Schools is The Disruptive Innovation of Others with BYOT (Bring Your Own Tech) Guest post by Tim Clark @timclark45 on Twitter In New York City students who BYOT have it confiscated by police and placed with other contraband like guns and knives While cities like the one where The Innovative Educator works view student owned devices as contraband, I have found one of the most exciting disruptions to traditional teaching practices to be extending to students the invitation to “Bring Your Own Technology” (BYOT). Last year, Forsyth County Schools in Georgia modified their technology guidelines to do just that! They permitted students to bring their personal technology devices to school to assist in their learning.  

• Which Tablet Is Best for You? – PCWorld   

• 15 Ideas for Using Digital Cameras in Science | Action-Reaction  15 interesting ideas t0 use digital cameras when learning science including stop motion, lab setups, galleries, analysis, picture dictionary, demonstrations and safety.   

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