Useful Links (weekly)

• Facebook Guide Book – How To, Tips and Instructions by Mashable  Mashable has put together a new Guidebook to Facebook, similar to their Twitter Guidebook, with detailed instructions for how to do nearly everything on the social network including – Facebook 101: The Basics, Managing Your Facebook Wall, Using Facebook for Business, How to become a fan of Mashable, Using Facebook Applications, Facebook 305: Advanced Topics,
• Old Photos & Old Pictures: Historical Photos at V like Vintage “This is a photo library and search engine all in one. V like Vintage bridges the gap between analogue photography and digital technology – and invites all amateur photographers, collectors and anyone interested in history on a fascinating journey through time featuring the countless faces of history. For this purpose, V like Vintage addresses all those who own historic photographs.”

• Hints & Tips For Doing A 365 Day Photo Project @ Dawnstar Australis As 2009 draws to an end and 2010 gets ready to spring into being the question many photographers are asking themselves is: Do I want to do a 365 day photo project? Peter Carey recently provided an article to the Digital Photography School website on the many benefits of doing a photo365 project. Dawn thought she would add to this work by listing some of lessons she has learnt from doing the 365 Before Thirty Project so far.

• Classroom 2.0 LIVE! Classroom 2.0 LIVE is an opportunity to gather with other members of the community in real-time events, complete with audio, chat, desktop sharing, and sometimes even video. For the weekly Saturday show you click on the words ‘Welcome Video Screencast’ to view a short screencast about the website and tutorial on accessing our Elluminate sessions.  

• Teachers Report Assistant – FREE time saving utility for teachers The Teachers Report Assistant is a free source program that aim to make the reporting process easier and cut teachers’ reporting time down. It creates a report card that is easy to follow and easy to make adjustments and correct mistakes. It is only available for Microsoft operating systems.

• How to Setup a Virtual Private Network (VPN) in Windows – Step by Step Guide How to Setup a Virtual Private Network (VPN) in Windows – Step by Step Guide

• Online Book Collections & Libraries: LibraryThing, Shelfari, & Goodreads | In All Reality A post comparing the pros and cons of each of the above

• 7 Things You Should Know About… | EDUCAUSE The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI’s) 7 Things You Should Know About… series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies and related practices. Each brief focuses on a single technology or practice and describes how they might be used.

• in education | exploring our connective educational landscape 

• 10 Must-Read eBooks for Social Media Lovers Christina Warren at Mashable has compiled a list of 10 Must-Read eBooks for Social Media Lovers. Each list entry includes a brief synopsis, cover art, and format details. The World According to Twitter by David Pogue looks interesting.

• 69 Coolest Web Apps Of 2009 @ SmashingApps Those at Smashing Apps have put together a list of the 69 Coolest Web Apps Of 2009.

• About | storyLines Open to contributions, this Australian blog was created to give support to high school literature programs. It features everything from book reviews to critiques on new Web 2.0 technology.

• CaptionTube: Home Create captions for your YouTube videos.The interface is very simple to use and it offers several alternatives for saving and exporting your captions. Captions can be done in owned or third party videos, and if you are not the owner it offers alternatives for publishing your captions in someone else’s creation.

• 9 Ways to Visualize Proportions – A Guide | FlowingData With all the visualization options out there, it can be hard to figure out what graph or chart suits your data best. This is a guide to make your decision easier for one particular type of data: proportions. 

• Home – Trove Trove is focused on Australia and Australians. It supplements what search engines provide with reliable information from Australia’s memory institutions. If you are researching in the fields of the social sciences, literature, local or family history, or need inspiration for your school assignment, then this is the tool for you.

• Web design | Create Free websites Web design with Wix.com Flash website builder. Choose your free web design from thousands of free Flash templates (Websites, Widgets, Newsletters, Banners, Flyers)

• YouTube – SafetyCenterVideos’s Channel 

• Featured Articles USDLA article. Content and technology are continually changing. This article reminds us that learners are also changing. For the past decade, faculty who won awards for teaching expressed concern that they could no longer hold the attention of their students. John Seely Brown, Chief Scientist at Xerox and director of its Palo Alto Research Center, hired 15 year olds to design future work environments and learning environments. He observed that the students did not conform to the traditional image of learners as permissive sponges. It requires us to rethink and redesign education for the Digital Age.

• Assorted Infotoons – a set on Flickr 

• Creating Resources / Resources & CPD / YHGfL – YHGfL 

• Cyberbullying / eSafety / YHGfL – YHGfL 

• How To Use An Apostrophe – The Oatmeal A simple (and comic) guide on when and when not to use an apostrophe.

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

Learning about the past

Some many original documents are becoming available for public reading. I have always talked about primary documents to students but in the past trying to get example has been difficult. The students have also always really responded well to history when they can relate to it. Often it is information that can be compared with their lives today that fascinates them the most.

Now there is another interesting source of information about the past. The British National Archives has published the digitised form of the 1911 Census. There is a fee but you can search for information about the almost all the people in England and Wales. 

 The 1911 census for England and Wales was taken on the night of Sunday 2 April, 1911. The count included all individual households, plus institutions such as prisons, workhouses, naval vessels and merchant vessels, and it also attempted to make an approximate count of the homeless.

It offers a fascinating insight into the people of the time and the way they saw themselves.  Citizens of the time were assured that the information they supplied would be kept confidential but would they mind that is made available almost 100 years after the fact? This would also be a useful tool if you are researching your family tree.

One interesting note is mentioned in the “about section”: it was about the suffragettes. I have always found the stories about these women fascinating and their determination to change the voting laws also extended to the census.

• Frustrated with the government’s refusal to grant women the vote, a large number of women boycotted the 1911 census by refusing to be counted.
• There were two forms of protest. In the first, the women (or their husband) refused to fill in the form, often recording their protest to the enumerator. In the second, women evaded the census by staying away from their home for the whole night.
• In both cases, any details relating to individual women in the households will be missing from the census.
• For the family historian the active refusal to fill in the form (accompanied by a protest statement) at least registers the presence of a woman/women in the household, whereas the women who evaded the count are simply untraceable via the census.
• The exact number of women who boycotted the census is not known, though some people have estimated that it may be as many as several thousand.

Our own National Archives of Australia also provides a wealth of information about our own country. This resource is constantly being updated and new material is added regularly.

On-line resources include:

• Education pages - find out how to book your visit, access teachers’ notes and information regarding our exhibitions, obtain teachers’ kits and more.
• Mapping our ANZACs
• Vrroom - a virtual reading room designed specifically for students and teachers learning to use archival records. A partnership with The Le@rning Federation has seen the addition of education value statements to a range of records. The Learning Federation is itself a great resource.
• Australasian Digital Recordkeeping InitiativeDeveloped and hosted by the National Archives of Australia, the Australasian Digital Record-keeping Initiative website is a collaboration between all ten national, state and territory public record institutions in Australia and New Zealand.
• Documenting a Democracy website - discover 110 key documents that are the foundation of our democracy.
• Australia’s Prime Ministers website – understand Australia’s national leadership and political history.
• Uncommon Lives website - provides stories about famous and not-so-famous Australians as revealed in the National Archives’ records. Our latest addition, Muslim Journeys, tells tales of adventure, adversity and opportunity in an unfamiliar land.

The other source of information I have used this year is the State Library of Victoria. I have discussed this wonderful resource before and it is, at the moment, providing our students with useful material on Ned Kelly.

Students of all ages have a wealth of information at their finger tips. Unlike students of the past, where trying to find information was the big hurdle, our students almost too much information. We need to make sure we teach them how to find the most relevant, the most suitable sources. Once they have that information they then have to be able to take that information and read/interpret/apply/create, etc., all the higher order thinking skills that they need to be part of the modern world.  

This is the harder part of education today. Making sure that the tasks we set our students encourage them to go beyond the simple find and repeat (passive) type of tasks to active learning, to being responsible for their own learning and, my aim, also to help them see that learning is enjoyable/interesting.  

This later discussion is enough to write a thesis on so, instead, have a look at these sites and learn about our past and all the ordinary/great/ unusual people and events that shaped the lives we live today.