Useful Links (weekly)

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 [...]

Having a look at Everything beautiful

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 [...]

Inky Awards Shortlist

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 [...]

Useful Links (weekly)

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 [...]

Interesting ways to use…. by Tom Barrett

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 [...]

Steampunk links

Since first hearing about Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan 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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]