Useful Links (Weekly)

by heyjudegallery

• Do students understand their ‘digital footprint’ and how it can affect their employability? – eLearning Blog Dont Waste Your Time    A good presentation that is given to tertiary students that end with… ” let us be sensible when we use any online service (Facebook, Twitter, eBay, LinkedIn, etc), think about how we want to be viewed by whoever may find the content (whenever they find it) as it may just come back to bite you”

• Recommended Resources: Digital Citizenship, New Media Literacies, Games and Learning | DMLcentral   ”Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World is nearly 500 pages of workshops and lessons plans dedicated to teaching youth ethics for a digital age. Produced through a unique collaboration of Harvard’s GoodPlay Project and Project New Media Literacies, it is all free online, as one giant download or as separate files”

• Survey Says Library Users Are Your Best Customers From Publishers Weekly “Library Journal released the first issue of a quarterly publication called Patron Profiles. Based on surveys and data collected from library users across the country, the first issue—on libraries and e-book usage—indicates that libraries are a powerful economic engine for the book business.”

• Voices for the Library» Blog Archive » More than just fiction? It’s unbelievable!   ”The web, online reference works and e-books anticipate reflect the library of today. Now amazing stuff can be had virtually as well as in every walk-in library. As ever, the library seeks and provides. E-resources are too unaffordable for most; a library’s info service is without compare; knowledge collections critical and free computers crucial. “

• Free Technology for Teachers: Ten Search Tools and Tactics Teachers and Students Need to Know Richard Byrne has compiled a list of search tools and tactics that every teacher and student should know  

• 2011 ITL Research Findings and Implications This report provides the findings from the 2011 analysis across 7 participating countries. From Innovative Teaching and Learning research site (sponsored by Microsoft Partners in Learning)    

• Buttersafe – Updated Tuesdays and Thursdays » Archive » Traps A simple little cartoon showing how easily some (all?) of us can get caught by scams on the Web. 

• Instant Wild – Live Wildlife Photographs ”Images of wild animals are sent to you directly from small automatic cameras placed in remote locations. When you identify the wild animal by matching the photo with the relevant image in the Field Guide you save conservationist thousands of hours by helping to sort the images by species group. This enables scientists to analyze the data much faster and assess whether the threatened animals are increasing or decreasing.”   

• Cybils: 2011 Nominations: Fiction Picture Books   

• Search by colour This is a demonstration of searching by colour across approximately 18,500 images from the National Library of Australia’s photographic collection. You can pick a colour from the colour chart or fine tune your selection using the colour sliders. As so much of the collection is made up of black and white images, not all colours will bring back results.    

• Steve Hargadon: The Kindle Fire – So Close… A Review with Education in Mind   A very well written review of many of the aspects of the Kindle Fire. He looks at what works well, what is available, what is limited and what is not there.

• Citation Wizard – Bibliography and works cited page generator The Citation Wizard is a free online utility that automatically generates citations according to MLA style speficiations. The site is simple to use: select the medium that best describes the work you would like to cite, type in the requested information, and click on the “view citation” button. Your citation will appear instantly, saving you time and eliminating the hassle of consulting style manuals. In addition to instant citation generation, the latest edition of the Wizard allows you to create an entire bibliography document from scratch! You will be able to begin a document, add entries to it, and save the document to your computer.    

• Children’s Books Forever Free children’s books that have become classics/favourites and you can use with interactive whiteboards, projectors, etc. Permission granted for non-commercial use.  

• SlimeKids – School Library Media Kids Free website for elementary/middle school-age kids with book trailers, educational games and literacy-related resources.    

• Citing Websites: APA Style A very simple but effective tool. Site also affers same type of tool for AMA, APA, Turabian, Chicago and MLA   

• Free Audio Books – Download an audio book in mp3 or iPod format today! Site offers free audiobooks to download tags:   

• This Week In Education Offers overview of news from mainstream sources and social medis and analysis of education policy issues     

• CorkboardMe Even simpler to use than Wallwisher. Paste virtual sticky notes on the virtual corkboard. One useful feature allows you to paste a url address for a link to an image and the image will then show up on the sticky note. You do not need to register    

• Monkey Machine – online drum machine Monkey Machine is a free web-based program that allows students to experiment with drum set sounds and rhythms. Using Monkey Machine students can customize the selection of drums and cymbals in their virtual drum set. Monkey Machine also allows students to customize the tempo in their drum tracks and the frequency with which each drum or cymbal is played. All tracks created using Monkey Machine can be downloaded as MIDI files.  

• WolframTones: An Experiment in a New Kind of Music  This tool is from the same people that brought us the great computational search engine Wolfram Alpha comes Wolfram Tones. Wolfram Tones uses algorithms, music theory, and sound samples to generate new collections of sounds. Visitors to Wolfram Tones can experiment with sounds and rhythms to make their own sounds. Wolfram Tones allows visitors to choose samples from fifteen different genres of music on which to build their own sounds. Once a genre is selected visitors can then alter the rhythms, instrumentation, and pitch mapping of their sounds. When satisfied with their creations, users can download their sounds or have them sent directly to their cell phones.   

• UJAM – Make your music. Be heard. This site is easy o use and helps make your singing sound better. You sing or play an instrument while recording to UJAM. When you’re done recording, use UJAM to alter the sound quality of your voice, turn your voice into other sounds, adjust the tempo of your song, and or remix a song to include your recording. UJAM is essentially an online, light weight version, of Garage Band. Watch the video below to learn more and see UJAM in action.    

• beatlab – make music together Beat Lab is a free service through which you can experiment with thousands of sound and rhythm combinations. Using Beat Lab is easy. Beat Lab provides a grid on which you select the sounds you want to have played. You can specify how often you want each sound played and how quickly you want the sounds played. There are twelve default sounds provided in the Beat Lab grid. You can add more sounds by selecting “add more sounds” and choosing from the huge catalog of sounds. If the sound you want isn’t available in the Beat Lab catalog you can upload your own sounds.  

• Free online Music Creator – Aviary.com’s Roc Using Aviary’s Roc service you can create your own music loops or samples. After you’ve created your music samples you can download them, reuse them in Myna, or embed them into your blog. Below you will find a brief tutorial on how to create sound loops using Aviary Roc.   

• Historic Map Works, Residential Genealogy ™ Historic Map Works is an online gallery of hundreds of historical maps. On Historic Map Works you can browse for maps by continent, country, state, and province. Note: Downloading the map images is not free. But, you can view more than half of the maps as Google Maps overlays using Historic Map Works’s free Historic Earth Basic.   

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

Reading a book

A good video to have on the screen in the library and the year 7 common space. A great way to catch the boys attention  at the start of this school year.

Jewelbeat: royalty-free music

I have been working with a Year 7 class this week on a digital research project. I have also been explaining about responsible use of music and images for their final product. We have looked a few creative commons sites (I have a web page explaining CC and links to useful sites on the intranet) Today I had a look at another good source of free sounds and music for multimedia projects via the CoolCat Teacher blog (Vicki Davis). Her post about Jewel Beat lead me to the site. It hosts hundreds of sounds and music that you can download, reuse, and remix for free. Below are some samples from Jewel Beat.

Artemis Fowl – music and pictures too

We recently obtained a copy of Eoin Colfer’s latest Artemis Fowl novel Artemis Fowl and The Atlantis Complex. We also have a new screen in the library so I thought I would have a look at promo material for it.

There are a few videos that would be good to use. The one below has Eoin Colfer explaining the background to the book.

I went to Eoin Colfer’s blog and here I found the post “Artemis Rocks – Original Music inspired by Artemis Fowl” This post has two music links with the music being inspired by the books. They are really quite catchy and are part of series developed by DisneyBooks. There are also music videos that use images from the graphic novels.

The Artemis Fowl site  has a lot more great videos and music to support the books, to aid discussion about the Artemis Fowl stories, help with the promotion of the stories and books or music/images selected for promos and also interviews with Eoin Colfer, the author, who our readers don’t always agree with, even if  he did write the books!

Here is one of the music video clips.

Music and the novel

“Music is a powerful influence, affecting us emotionally, physically, mentally ……”

In this program, aired on The Radio National’s Book Show on 14th October, the role of music in the novel is discussed in a 15 minute conversation. The guest presenter was Dr Alan Dilnot. He is the Senior Lecturer in English at Monash University, specialising in 19 Century fiction and he was speaking with Fiona Croall.

Many writers employ music in their novels as a way of communicating emotions beyond words, or to encourage consistency in character, tone, and language. Music in fiction can create the mood of a time, like John Updike’s Rabbit Run, set in the late 1950s, or it can influence the structure of a novel like James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Music has also played a major role in British literature, with Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot and Ian McEwan among the writers who have used music in their work.

It was another interesting Book Show discussion, one that made me start to think about something I had previously overlooked. I must go back to some of these novels and look at hem with new eyes..

I also downloaded 2 other programs this week:

• The Australian Long Story (12min). (Guest: Mandy Sayer, Editor of The Australian Long Story (Penguin). Author of eight books including Mood Indigo and Velocity. Mandy also holds a Doctorate in the short story and is currently a Scholar in Writing at the University of Technology in Sydney.)  In this program they try to define what a long story is - as opposed to a “short story” and a “novella”. Also discussed is a new collection of Australian long stories (Penguin) from some of Australia’s well known authors. I have been talking about writing with some of our students lately. There are quite a few who regularly write stories and some are very keen on becoming authors in the future and I hope to play this discussion to them when we get together next. 
•  Children’s picture books.(12min) (Guest: Neal Porter, American publisher and editorial director, Roaring Brooks Press)

Nine years ago, Neil decided to focus exclusively on children’s books and set up his own publishing house for high-quality literature for young readers of all ages. Many of the authors and illustrators in his stable are Australian, including Margaret Wild, Ron Brooks, Gregory Rogers and Stephen Michael King. In this discussion he explained why he regards the Australian picture books so highly.

I have found many of the short discussion so interesting and the few that I have used with students have been great discussion starters.