Engaging reading responses from students

It is very close to the end of term. Reports have been written and for two weeks teachers have been trying to engage boys in their responses to reading without marks being an incentive. Yes, there are plenty of arguments about engaging tasks should be the norm and marks only a small part of the learning process in general, and then as a guide.

I have been doing some work with year 7 students in the last week or so. We have been working on some Facebook mock-ups for their literature circle book characters. (Information about what we do is on my wiki here.) There have also been some year 8 students creating some book trailers  as their last response to their crime fiction genre study. (Information here. ) We thought that this was a good time to introduce and discuss the use of Creative Commons images/sound and Fair Use in general. (List of sites we used here) The boys are all interested in the concept and are happy to follow the guidelines about what is fair and reasonable. They are still learning and did not always get it right but they are onside with it and want to do the right thing.

The final products are coming in. There were some great Facebook pages created for their fictional characters. The character profiles and conversations between friends were fantastic to read. I enjoyed the “voices” they used, the pictures they chose and the comments they made. I will put some of the example into the wiki.

In preparation for working with these groups I have been looking at lots of images, hearing lots of sound/music and looking at examples of interesting videos. The boys can be quite adept at discussing what works and what is less succesful in a video.  Some boys did not understand the concept of a book trailer until we talked about them in terms of film trailers and The Gruen Transfer (ABC) was also a good resource as it discussed advertising. There are some good examples of the advertisements they created for different shows by found by simply looking for “Gruen Transfer” on YouTube.

Lastly from mashable there was a post about the following video entitled Starry Night – Vincent van Dominogh. Recreating Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” from just over 7,000 dominos. I know it is not a crime trailer but it was amazing and certainly held attention.

Creating Character Profiles

After reading about this type of activity a few years ago I finally got to introduce it to a class.

Yesterday an English class of year 7 boys worked on this task that required them to consider the characters in their novels. This approach worked very well as an English class activity.  It  focussed our Year 7 boys on the characters in their novels. The boys had been working in literature circle groups for almost a term. Each student had to create a profile for one of the characters in the books they have been reading. Some of the data in the profile was told to them by the author and other aspects they had to infer from events in the story.

This character profile will help them later when the have to create an interview podcast as the final task on the book
This year I also had them create a facebook-like page for their character as well.
I used a template that I saved from Dale Basler’s site. It was created in Publisher.
I then adapted it and created an example using Sherlock Holmes as my character.

On the “facebook page” the boys had to:

• Include basic profile data – age, education, family info, make up networks the character may belong to, education, etc. including an image of or avatar representing the character.
• Add “friends” – other characters from the book and put in how they “fit” into the story.
• Add posts from these friends.
• Put at least 2 stories in “What’s on my mind” about incidents in the book.
• Create or find 3 images representing events, people or places in the story.

This activity worked very well with the boys. They enjoyed doing the task, both those who had facebook accounts and those who did not. Without realising it, the boys did a lot of thinking and inferring and displayed their understanding of the books without realising how much work they had actually done.

Goodbye 2010

My colleague Tania out this video onto our Ning.  I thought it would be a good final post before I leave work this year. The stocktake is done, the orders and invoices are all signed off and the vacant position for a TL in our school library has just been filled. Hello Christmas and school holidays!

Choosing privacy in a digital world

Recently in the US there was the first-ever Choose Privacy Week.  The focus of the week was to inform Americans about their rights to privacy in a digital age. With Facebook recently in the news because of privacy concerns it was a timely campaign. Below is an interesting video made by American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom. Although though it has been created with an American context (with the US consitution making a number of things different from the Australian situation) it still offers a powerful message.
It is also interesting to think that we have come to the situation where the concept of keeping at least some things private is something we have to teach, promote and remind people to think about. 

Why would you not choose to keep some things private?  Many people who live online, myself included, can tend to forget just how much of our personal information is very obtainable (by everyone) and how much more can be gleaned and put together the unscrupulous. Considering I blog, am a member of numerous ning and wiki communities and other social and collaborative networks, I have put a fair chunk of my life online. This video certainly should have an impact on the way people think about their online selves. 

In a previous post I wrote about my take as a teacher of young  people. I regard it as part of my duty to help our students understand that privacy is not really part of the on-line world. Everyone must be responsible about their digital identities. So many of the tools on the web today are intuitive in that they take your past history and try to link it to your current search/request. 

There are still three basic aspects about privacy and cyber-safety that I regard as important to discuss with students about their digital profiles.  These are:

• Always read the terms and conditions you are agreeing to when you are signing up for something, be it Myspace, Facebook, Glogster, Flickr or anything else.
• Value your personal information. Most social networks really only require the bare minimum for registration. Everything else beyond that is purely voluntary and always be aware of what could be used in the future.
• Do not ever share anything that you don’t want others to know about yourself. Do not think that because you only invite some people to something that others will not ever be able to access the information or that in the future some “friends” may turn out not to be so friendly. (This very sentiment is re-iterated by the well-known people in the video)

The technologies today offer all of us many wonderful opportunities. We can make the most of them by being “good” or proficient users and by making sure we understand the strengths and the limitations of these tools. 

 

 

 

  

 

more about “Choose Privacy Week Video“, posted with vodpod

  

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.