New tables for our library

We saw these advertised in a weekend newspaper magazine a few months ago. They were not too expensive so we thought we would buy a couple for the library. With our new chairs we thought it might make the area more interesting. Available from  Form.Function.Style: design online they are called a “bookworm cardboard stool”. although they are cardboard but are very strong and you  can sit on them although we have not made this known to the boys.

Yesterday they finally arrived. The came flat and it took about 2/3 minutes to put them up. They have been a real talking point

Useful sites (weekly)

  by  kefiore1 

• Skype in SchoolsThe Skype In Schools Livebinder: This is a great resource from Kelly Hines that has tons of information on getting started with Skype, various projects you can take part in and ideas on how to get connected   

• Subtangent – words and numbers starters | The Whiteboard Blog    

• Study Search Australia – Get better results > Home This search engine site has separate search engines for primary and secondary.    

• Boolify Project: An Educational Boolean Web Search Tool This is a simple looking search engine that can be fun to play with. It uses the jig saw principle to help you narrow your search.    

• Free High Resolution Textures – Lost and Taken – 17 More Old Book Cover Textures A design blog that focuses on giving away free, high-resolution textures from old book covers. They could be used for texture or backgrounds  

• Liam’s Pictures from Old Books High-resolution free images scanned Images, engravings and pictures from more than 180 different old or rare books, with extracts   

• Steampunk Wallpaper » Fullscreen: Burnt paper and 3d gears    

• Altered Bits: Free Vintage Photos, Free Medical and Anatomy Photos, Free Background Images, Free Paper Textures, Free Images, Free Backgrounds, Free Altered Art Templates (Artist Trading Card Envelope, Altars)  

• Antique Images: Free Background: Antique Decorative Paper Background    

• Download Free Repeat Patterns  A site where you can view and download high-quality, free, seamless patterns that can then be used for personal and commercial work.   

• 50 Free Rusted Metal Texture Backgrounds | Webdesigner Depot Offers a reange of urban textures (eg. rusty metal pictures) for use with site backgrounds, etc.  

• Wiki Formatting Offers practical step-by-step guides for personalizing your wiki   

•  Is the Future eBooks or Apps? « Educational Publishing   

• FiveBooks | The BrowserFive Books is a blog in which an expert in the field recommends five books on that subject. It is not just fiction.    

• Books as Virtual Goods | aerbook™    

• World Map of Social Networks | Vincos Blog A map of the world, showing the most popular social networks by country, according to Alexa & Google Trends for Websites traffic data* (June 2010).  

• 10 ways for teachers to save time… « What Ed Said Blog post “Teachers never have enough time. We have curriculum to cover, skills to teach, reports to write and meetings to attend. The demands are endless, both in and outside the classroom. Listed are 10 ways to save time”    

• The Cutest Blog on the Block – Free Blog Backgrounds, layouts and more! Free blog designs – backgrounds, layouts and tips and tricks for bloggers 

• New York’s New School Takes on the Topic of E-books | Publishing Perspectives 

• Be The Curator of Your Favorite Topic! | Scoop.it  Scoop.it is a tool that allows you to organize your ideas, thoughts and documents. You will be able to share and find with ease, saving anything and everything that’s important to you, be it the contents of a webpage, an email or scanned document Beta version at moment   

• Course: Teenagers, Legal Risks and Social Networking Sites This is a useful report about awareness of social networking risks that identified gaps in understanding of legal risks among young people and parents.. The report and its accompanying Educational Resource is the culmination of an 18 month project which collected survey and interview data from 17 school communities across Victoria totalling over 1000 school students (years 7-10), 200 school teachers and 49 parents. The authors also conducted a comprehensive review of the literature, SNS Terms of Service (ToS), and the Australian and International regulatory environment.   

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

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 schools. “When people talk about how hard it is to change our public schools, they’re usually referring to curriculum reform or employment contracts. But there’s another area where change is difficult: design. When a proposed school building doesn’t look exactly like what folks think a school should look like, officials freeze. ‘

• What should we do with tools to make them great? « Online Sapiens Some great ideas put together in this post

• Designing the Classroom of the Future | always learningConsidering that education may look very different in a reasonably short amount of time, that we’re going 1:1 in the next year, continuing to expand our online course offerings, and that the school is not too afraid of taking risks, I want to make sure we don’t just design a great classroom for today. I’m just not quite sure how to bring our classroom design into the present, while still being forward-thinking enough to take us into the future at the same time.

• Designing the Classroom of the Future | always learning 

• About the series | A 21st Century Education Film Series These films look specifically at the ways that the latest digital and mobile technologies can potentially transform the ways that young people communicate, collaborate, and learn. “The twelve first-person films that make up this series explore three related themes, each in its own way at the center of current debate about what works, and what’s needed, to help students succeed during school and in life.” 

• Image Forensics : Error Level Analysis Error level analysis seeks to prove that whether or not an image has been altered. It takes the image and shows differing error levels throughout it, strongly suggesting some form of digital manipulation. Areas to note are the lips and shirt, as well as the eyes. All are at significantly different error levels than their surroundings. Presumably, colours have been altered and areas brightened.

• The Reading Pile: November 8 « Good Comics for Kids 

• Borrowing ebooks beyond a library’s walls | Simon Barron | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk Article in the Guardian by Simon Barron. It discusses the arguments put by the publishers about borrowing ebooks beyond a library’s walls and opinions baout why they wont work.

• Christie ‘exorcised’ herself of Poirot – News, Books – The Independent

• Interviews, Writers, Quotes, Fiction, Poetry – Paris Review Author interviews ranging through the decades, from the 50′s to the present from The Paris Review.

• National Novel Writing Month NaNoWriMo is an annual (November) novel writing project that brings together professional and amateur writers from all over the world.” Write a novel in a month with the nanowrimo website’s encouragment and structure.

• Supernatural stories. – Catalog ListingA list from the CMIS Resource Bank with 150 titles for a search of ‘Supernatural stories’.

• Ghosts – Fiction. – Catalog Listing A list of 86 titles from CMIS Resource Bank when a ‘Ghosts – Fiction’ search is made

• Neil Gaiman’s MouseCircus.com | Artists: Artist and Illustrator Biographies The official Neil Gaiman website for younger readers

• Finding your Character’s Voice « Ripping Ozzie Reads The VISION list has been discussing how writers find their character’s voice, so Ripping Ozzie Reads writers were asked for their insights

• welcome to seanwilliams.com  The official site Australian speculative fiction writer Sean Williams. 

• ipads changing our relationship with text « 

• The new era of workplace learning The new era of workplace learning – Jane Hart This is the second of a two-part article that looks at the emerging trends in learning tools and workplace learning. In this part, Jane Hart, a Social Business Consultant from the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies – http://www.C4LPT – and a member of the Internet Time Alliance, looks at the future of workplace learning and the implications for Learning & Development. 

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

Book covers – a history

I recently found the Cover Archive by Alexander S. Budnitz.

I am always fascinated by the covers chosen for books and how why they change with new reprints and editions. The styles over the years also changed with the societal changes. There are some lovely early covers and some of the 1960′s and 70′s covers now appear to be just plain awful/garish to me.

This is a great site that displays the changing styles in book covers from the early 1920′s up to the present day, and it shows not only how they developed but also how many of those from a particular period were so similar in style.

This archive is about graphic design. I’ve attempted to label each cover with a date and, where possible, a designer (or design firm). The designs are the publisher’s property, and are here as an educational tool and as things to be enjoyed.

There were many covers were not familiar to me, even into later ones but that is to be expected because these were covers for the US editions and until recently we had little access to them as our editions were from the “Commonwealth” publishers. It is well worth having a look at the site that is constantly being updated.

Use the drop-down navigation above to browse covers by year, by select designers, and by other more ‘synthetic’ categories. Only the ‘Time Flies’ chronological section is fully updated. There are well over 1,000 covers in the archive. I keep adding to the collection, but can only ever represent a fraction of what’s out there.

Using the drop down list, the covers from 1900-1949:

Readability – Decluttering the webpages

Sometimes you just want to read an article. The information is important or interesting to you but, if like me at the end of the day you are tired, it can be a chore to reading something that has been cluttered up with advertisements and widgets. It is distracting and annoying that there is increasingly more clutter on web pages, especially as commercial interests compete more and more with the actual core content of a page, and the reason you are on the page becomes peripheral to the useless stuff. I understand the reasons for the commercial stuff but I’m not interested at the end of the day. 

So I have been trying out some solutions that intend to make the web more enjoyable again by stripping sites of all the clutter and formatting the text for easy reading.  

The first one is arc90 lab’s ‘Readability‘ browser bookmarklet.  It is easy to install and easy to use. When you are on the webpage you simply click the ‘Readability’ button stored on your bookmarks toolbar. The web page is transformed with all the clutter of ads gone and you are left with the core content. I use Diigo to write notes and highlight some of the digital documents I read and this can still occur on the “new” pages. 

It does have some problems as it can sometimes removes relevant images from the core content and it does not seem to allow videos. It also doesn’t work on some webpages (it doesn’t convert) nor work well on blogs which may have several articles on their main page. When this happens it picks one article only.

You can also customise ‘Readability’  as you have some choice of the style, font size and margins you prefer to read from.  

  

 

more about “arc90 lab : experiments : Readability“, posted with vodpod