The Inky Awards – 2011 long list

It is not long before the CBCA winners are announced and so it is also the time for this year’s Inky’s  awards to be considered. Friday saw the announcement of the long lists. The Inkys are international awards for teenage (or YA) novels and are co-ordinated by the Centre for Youth Literature via insideadog. This year we will be [...]

Useful sites (weekly)

Storyboard Depot : The eLearning Coach A collection of storyboard templates  Obsurvey A new survey tool that looks quite impressive at first glance. “Create a survey, collect responses, analyze results no ads, no cost, no limitations.”  Innovative school design is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. – By Ronald E. Bogle – Slate Magazine Creativity in designing [...]

Author interviews and farewell Fiction Focus

It has been a short week for those of us in Melbourne schools with a public holiday to celebrate the running of the Melbourne Cup. The work days this week have been: 1. spent deciding on how best to utilise the Kindles we have bought for the library and 2. looking at authors and writing for some of our [...]

YA literature – Printz award winners and a podcast

Thanks to a post on the Fiction Focus (CMIS) site, I found out about  a collection of book trailers. These have been created for many of the Printz Award winners and Honor Books and go back as far as 2000. They were created by students at the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Women’s University. The Michael [...]

Useful sites (weekly)

DownloadTube Is a One-Click YouTube Conversion and Download Site  Thanks to @Lifehacker “If you’re looking for a simple, one-click, solution for converting and downloading YouTube videos sans software, DownloadTube is a free tool for web-based YouTube file conversion. Copy the URL of the video you want to convert, visit DownloadTube and paste it in, then [...]