Useful links

  by  gcouros 

• Kids Who Read Beat Summer Slide – First Book BlogFirst Book Blog Graph supporting argument is useful for reading promotion. “Studies show that kids from low-income families who have access to books over the summer not only beat the summer slide, but make even greater gains than kids from wealthy and middle-class families.”

• Mobile Devices for Learning: What You Need to Know | Edutopia Learn how cellphones, e-book readers, and tablets are getting kids engaged with learning, focused on working smarter, and ready for the future. Download PDF

• Listly List – Surprisingly Educational Apps The free apps listed can be used for educational purposes in the classroom – across content areas and year levels. Each app is featured in a “Surprisingly Educational” episode with integration ideas.

• Kim Garst: 4 Reasons Why Social Media Should be Taught in Our School Systems Succinct arguments. Teaching social media is preparing our children for the future. Employers today have been surveyed and the result is that most planned on using social media to recruit and hire new employees. Schools are supposed to be places where we teach our children the knowledge and the skills they will need to compete and succeed in their adult lives. The good use of social media IS one of those skills.

• “Teens and the Future of Libraries: Sharing Best Practices” Webinar Archives and My Questions for Thinking | The Unquiet Librarian ”The roles of librarians are being remixed and re-interpreted by these challenges, issues, and lines of questions; in addition, the work we do will be more organic and strategic if we have the humility to truly listen to those we serve and engage in conversations.”

• Network Learning: Working Smarter | Harold Jarche Harold Jarche highlights the potential acceleration of learning with emerging social media tools. Informal learning is nothing new but in the digitally-connected workplace it is becoming more important. Social network learning provides an unprecedented platform for personal knowledge management through a continuous process of seeking, sensing and sharing. Making sense of information in a timely manner is becoming a key part of work. Harold discusses the workplace evolution and reflects that more attention needs to be paid to how we can support and encourage informal learning in the workplace. Good use of some graphics also help explain his arguments. It dovetails quite well into curation discussions.

• Is Content Curation in Your Skill Set? It Should Be. by David Kelly : Learning Solutions Magazine A good piece by the curation guru, David Kelly. The term curation has become a hot topic in many online discussions but this does not mean that it is clearly understood. David Kelly tries to explain in simple terms what “curation” is, how it can be useful in the workplace and what can be done to improve competency. There are many aspects very valid to the educational world.

• Content Curation for Social Media | Social Media Today Written from a business point of view but interesting take on content curation with  a few curation tools discussed that are different from the ones discussed in my education learning networks.

Itch: a science-themed action adventure. Books 1 and 2

The last week has been very busy working with English teachers to match the more reluctant boys in their classes with books they might enjoy. It can be hard work sometimes but so rewarding when you have some success. We also had parent/teacher interviews over two days/nights. The English teachers stressed that the boys should be reading in a number of interviews so I had a chance to talk to the boys and their parents about what might be of interest to them. It was also interesting to see that many parents after looking at the books on display (many were military fiction and biographies/autobiographies out for ANZAC Day) had their boys borrow a book for them to read.

I was very happy to talk about books and reading when I didn’t have an interview of my own. One of the books I enjoyed last year was Itch by Simon Mayo. I read a review in a blog from the UK and bought it via my Kindle to read. The book was later released as a paperback that we now have in the library.

The main character, who has the marvelous name of Itchinham Lofte, is fairly ordinary 14-year-old who loves science and has one obsession, his collection of elements. His obsession puts him and his friends in a lot of danger.

There is plenty of intrigue and action with a bad guy, in the form of a mad scientist and a ruthless corporation with dubious morals laying claim to the new element Itch has in his hands. Is the element dangerous and did it cause the death of the mysterious traveler “Cake”? Itch needs to know more but who can he trust with his secret?

An action adventure with a science theme made this book a little unusual. The pace was brisk and the ending a good one. So, after believing you have poisoned your whole class with arsenic gas then going on the run from a your mad science teacher and to top it off almost dying of radiation poisoning, what adventures could there be to write about? There were a few big questions unanswered at the end of the book so there are enough things open for a follow-up story.

The book trailer for the novel was also great. Watch it below.

Now the second in the series has been published. I have yet to read it. I will have to finish off some other books this weekend before I get a copy to read. I will probable get the kindle version before getting a hardcopy as well for the library. We have boys who like the digital format, boys that will read the story whatever the format and others who prefer the traditional book.

There is again a good book trailer to whet the appetite.

Useful links – Some of my March sites

  by  jane hewitt 

• 50 Education Technology Tools Every Teacher Should Know About | Fluency21 – Committed Sardine Blog  A list of some of the tech tools, including some that are becoming increasingly popular and widely used in classrooms.
• More New Androids Than Babies, And Other Surprising Mobile Facts [Infographic] – ReadWrite Another interesting infographic about how important our mobile technology has become to our lives.
• Off-Beat Hamlet | Folger SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY From the Floger Shakespeare Library – looked through YouTube and found some wacky Hamlet humor.
• The 20 Best Education Apps And Web Tools Of The Year – Edudemic Article is an excerpt from the December issue of Edudemic Magazine. It lists the best apps (from educators around the world) resources for 2012.
• Creating Infographics with your Students A good guide for creating infographics with students. Slides by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano that provide you with some tips on how to use them with your students .
• Larrikin Post | Who Owns Your Social Media Posts? Who owns your social media posts? Former Australian Copyright Council employee, lawyer Ian McDonald considers the copyright issues
• Learners Should Be Developing Their Own Essential Questions | User Generated Education Learning to compose a good question is a skill students should possess. Those at the Right Question Institute proposed process for students to learn to formulate their own questions.  This can be a good start to having students learn to compose questions. The post lists the QFT six key steps.
• The Technology Source Archives – Seven Principles of Effective Teaching: A Practical Lens for Evaluating Online Courses ”The “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education,” originally published in the AAHE Bulletin (Chickering & Gamson, 1987), are a popular framework for evaluating teaching in traditional, face-to-face courses. The principles are based on 50 years of higher education research (Chickering & Reisser, 1993). A faculty inventory (Johnson Foundation, “Faculty,” 1989) and an institutional inventory (Johnson Foundation, “Institutional,” 1989) based on these principles have helped faculty members and higher-education institutions examine and improve their teaching practices. We, a team of five evaluators from Indiana University’s Center for Research on Learning and Technology (CRLT), recently used these principles to evaluate four online courses in a professional school at a large Midwestern university.”
• The 8 Elements Project-Based Learning Must Have | Edudemic To be classed as project-based learning the listed 8 items are considered ‘essential elements’ of a classroom task.
• 6 Steps to Successfully Integrate Minecraft in Your Classroom | EdReach
• TeachThoughtYour Quick-Guide To Using QR Codes In Education
• Comics in The Classrooms- Great Tools and Tips ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning
• CILIP | Presentations Here are links to number of interesting presentations from the “E-books in Libraries: A Global Question of Survival?” seminar that took place in London on February 2013. The event was co-sponsored by IFLA MLAS (Management of Library Associations Committee) and CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) and featured presentations by experts about the ebook situation in libraries around the world.
• 10 Ways To Use Technology To Teach Writing There are a many technology tools and methods that are available for teaching writing. The 10 are listed here can make the process easier and more enjoyable for both teachers and students.

Alice Pung visits our school

I was fortunate to be able to listen to Alice Pung again today. She was the visiting author for our year 11 students and spoke on the theme of Identity and Conflict: Challenges of life and writing about being Asian in Australia.

Alice was an excellent speaker. She captured the attention of our boys immediately by telling them some stories about her experiences speaking to some other groups. It was  from the perspective of  the first Asian person to have talked to these groups. She spoke very understandingly of their behaviours. As she spoke her, wit and humour took command of her audience. Alice is softly spoken and kind to her audiences. She may challenge their ideas and thoughts about identity and what it is to be “Australian” but her manner is such that they listen and take on board her comments.

Alice has written two books so far and, in between writing them, she edited an anthology, containing the stories of other Australians with an Asian background, entitled Growing Up Asian in Australia. It is from this book that she took her first story.

All our year 11 English and English as an Additional Language (formerly ESL) students are studying Growing Up Asian in Australia in English this year. It is not common for these two groups to study the same book and I think that this one offers a lot of options for the two groups to share experiences.

There is the editor’s original introduction to the book, an interesting review by Jay B. Panicker, a Singapore born Creative Writing student, QUT  and an Insight article by Rosemary O’Shea.

Unfortunately I did not get to hear the last 20 minutes of Alice’s talk. I had a previous engagement with a class of year 7 students who were going to tell me about their reading so far this year but I am sure the boys gave Alice a hearty thanks for her insights.

This is the third time I have heard Alice talk about her writing and identity.

The first time was in 2006 at the Penguin Publishers launch of her first book, Unpolished Gem. This is a novel about growing up in a first generation Asian Australian (Chinese-Cambodian) family in Braybrook, a western suburb in Melbourne. It is a very affectionate look back at her childhood and her immigrant family life. It was not all light and she, and her family, had a fair share of difficulties. She is able to rise above these to produce a story that showed a keen sense of humour, a sharp wit and a good understanding of satire as she records her family’s integration into Australian life. This is a novel that some of our International students have studied at my school in the years since it was written. Many of our students are Chinese and they can identify with some of the things she writes about. There are teacher notes written by Pam Macintyre to assist with studying the book.

The second time I had the opportunity to hear Alice was in 2011 at a School Library Association of Victoria conference. She had just written her second book, Her Father’s Daughter. There are some more links here. This is again biographical, but it takes the reader beyond the comfortable life she has experienced in Australia with her parents to the life her father lead to survive the killing fields of Cambodia. There is a good video interview conducted in 2011 giving the background to writing this book on BlipTv .

You can listen to a 2011 interview with Alice in an ABC Radio National Book Show program orread a 2011 interview with Alice on the Black Inc. blog discussing Her Father’s Daughter. There is also an Age article, Memories of relative unease Aug 20^th 2011.  

Writers Talk video:

CBCA Young readers shortlist 2013 – with links

The discussions have just begun about the 2013 CBCA Book of the Year shortlisted books.

Here is my post about the shortlisted books for the younger readers. We have 3 of the 6 in our secondary school library. It is interesting to see that Pennies for Hitler was on both the Older and Younger Readers lists but made it to the Younger Readers’ shortlist. Of the three books we have in our library, two are about young people surviving the Holocaust and the third is about refugees as well. The runaway winner in our library is After by Morris Gleitzman. His books are very popular but the series of books about the plight of Felix has captured the imaginations of many of our boys.

2013 Younger Readers Shortlist

• French, Jackie Pennies for Hitler (Angus & Robertson, HarperCollins)
  • This is  a companion novel to Hitler’s Daughter but is not a sequel. The two books easily work as stand alone stories but each offer different perspectives on WWII. In Pennies for Hitler, set in 1939 Germany it is dangerous for anyone to have any Jewish ancestry. Life for 11-year old Georg is good, offering a lot of promise under the Führer. Everything changes when Georg’s father, an English university professor, is killed by a group of pro-Nazi students. His crime is that he is suspected to have a Jewish heritage. Georg’s German mother, fearing for her son’s safety, arranges for him to be smuggled into England. After an uncomfortable and frightening journey Georg reaches England and stays with his father’s sister, his Aunt Miriam. Her wartime work means that Georg spends a lot of time alone. He spends his time listening to the radio, reading newspapers and trying to improve his English accent. When the London bombing becomes too prolific Aunt Miriam, like many others at that time, decides to send Georg to safety in Australia. He is put into foster care and is taken by a kindly elderly couple living in country NSW. When things go wrong here as well Georg has an important decision to make.  This is a well written book with  a lot of historical accuracy. It is about war, and peace, and seeing things from different perspectives, developing empathy for others and tolerance.
  • Read a review from ReadPlus,  one from SMH and another from Children’s Books Daily. There are also teachers’ notes in PDF form from HarperCollins.
• French, Simon Other Brother (Walker Books Australia) Not in our library
  • Read the ReadPlus review and another on the AussieReviews site as well as one by Bec Kavanagh.
  • The is an activity sheet and another PDF detailing some classroom ideas you can download from the Walker site.
• Gleitzman, Morris After (Viking Books, Penguin Group (Australia))
  • I enjoy reading Morris Gleitzman’s books. His stories for young people involve many important human foibles and experiences but he maintains such a good balance and is never too intellectual or patronising to his readers. The third book in the series, Now, portrayed Felix as a grown man. In this novel Morris Gleitzman returns to the 1945 and the Gabriek’s farm where Felix is hiding in a whole after the brutal death of Zelda. He is not there for long. Soon Felix is facing some of his greatest challenges as the war draws to a close. The invading Nazis become an even greater danger and then he encounters the Polish partisans who appear to be just as dangerous to him as the Germans. Although he still has maintained some of his natural naivety he is determined to survive.  Felix is now a teenager and has developed skills that make him useful.  He has some medical skills the partisans can use, and as in the earlier books he still has compassion for others and a courage that wins him friends. Some of the final chapters are very sad especially when, as the war in Europe coming to an end, Felix goes looking for his parents in the death camps. What he finds is terrible.

    Morris Gleitzman also doesn’t shy away from the grey areas of war. Most people are not simply good or evil or clever or stupid. He does however explain what happened during this time very honestly and realistically. The violence, the damage and anger are all portrayed on the pages but throughout the story there is also courage, compassion and hope. It was a fitting way to finish the story of Felix.

  • You can read a review from ReadPlus or a student review from the Penguin blog.
• Hartnett, Sonya Children of the King (Viking Books, Penguin Group (Australia))
  • Sonya Hartnett is a consummate writer, whose stories often leave me feeling uncomfortable, but are always well told. In this book she combines stories from two eras. The first is set in wartime Britain, the second stems from the time of Richard III and the mystery of the missing “Princes in the Tower”. Two children, Cecily and Jeremy, are sent away from the London bombings to live in the country, with their mother and Uncle Peregrine. Whilst there Cecily and another evacuee, May discover two little boys hiding in a nearby derelict castle. Who they are and why are they there? The characters of all the children are well written and they all have interesting and different parts to play in the story. The themes of class, growth/emotional development are woven into the story that is not simply a wartime story nor a ghost story nor just a mystery story or a coming-of-age story. Sonya Hartnett has woven many strands into her latest book.
  • You can read the transcript of a Q&A about this book on the interviews page on Sonya Hartnett’s site.
  • Read a review from ReadAlert (SLV) and another from ReadPlus
• Herrick, Steven Pookie Aleera is Not my Boyfriend (University of Queensland Press) Not in our library.
  • The latest verse novel from Steven Herrick.
  • Read a review on the AussieReviews site and another by Joy Lawn for The Australian
  • Download the teachers’ notes PDF from the publishers site.
• Millard, Glenda & illustrated by Stephen Michael King The Tender Moments of Saffron Silk (HarperCollins)
  • Not in our library. Part of the Kingdom of Silk series: #6.
  • You can read more about the book here from the Children’s Books Daily.
  • Download the teachers’ notes PDF from the publishers site.