Useful Links

  by  shareski 

• What Would Shakespeare Tweet? We Imagine 12 Literary Legends on Twitter | Bookish.com Another twist on a “tried and true” use of twitter. However it is hard to pick the short quote that epitomizes the authors.

• 24 Essential Mind Mapping and Brainstorming Tools “The tools above are among the the best to create mind maps online or on your desktop. However, there are many iOS and Android mind mapping apps that may interest you:”

• 12 Effective Ways To Use Google Drive In Education – Edudemic – Edudemic Many teachers take notes, compose papers, construct spreadsheets, and build presentations. Some fo this in real-time on the web whilst collaborating with others. This post offers ideas about how the free tool Google Drive can offer some very powerful options to help save time and be better organized. Offers a visually interesting infographic as well.

• Coggle  Coggle is an easy to use, collaborative mind-mapping service. To create a Coggle mindmap you need to sign-in with your Google account and click the “+” icon to start your mindmap. After entering the main idea of your mind map you can add branches by clicking the “+” icons that appear next to everything you type. To re-arrange elements just click on them and drag them around your screen. You can invite others to view and edit your mind maps. You can also just invite others to view by sending them an email through Coggle. All Coggle mind maps can be downloaded as PDFs or PNG image files.

• Slatebox :: Visualize Everything A tool that allows you to collaborative as you create mind maps and organizational charts. It offers a variety of templates and intuitive tools for designing and editing mind maps and charts. To create a mind map you simply select a template and using the visual editor place text and images into the boxes. These boxes can be re-sized and rearranged using a drag and drop editor. If you need more text boxes, you can simply add more.

• Infographic: Why librarians are crucial in the digital age [Educause 2013] | Education Dive Infographic released at Educause 2013 by Jones eGlobal Library, a provider of online library solutions, draws on a variety of research from sources such as Pew and the College Board. In an increasingly digitized age, the role of campus libraries is becoming more complex and more important. A infographic tries to paint a clearer picture of the important role librarians play in their institutions.

• After the Parade | THE NEXT BILLION SECONDS ALIA futures Summit. Librarians & culture of shared knowledge.Mark Pesce shares his keynote address on his blog.

• The Inquiry Process, Step By Step | MindShift Useful chart that offers a visual guide to the process.

• The Art of Read Every Day Lead a Better Life “The Art of Read Every Day We asked 13 outstanding children’s book illustrators to create their artistic interpretations of our literacy campaign message: Read Every Day. Lead a Better Life. The result is a spectacular collection of art, and each piece is accompanied by free supplemental resources that meet the Common Core State Standards. Here is how you can use these resources with young readers (grades K-2 or 3-5).”

• The Mel Blanc Show – Single Episodes : Old Time Radio Researchers Group : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive Mel Blanc’s success on The Jack Benny Program led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, It ran from September 3, 1946 to June 24, 1947. Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as a wide range of comical support characters. There were a number of other regular characters. The voice is familiar for 50 years, he was the voice of an array popular cartoon characters including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Foghorn Leghorn, The Tasmanian Devil, Pepe LePew, Marvin the Martian, the RoadRunner (“Meep, meep!”), Barney Rubble, and Woody Woodpecker.

• How To Make A Movie Poster: A Template For Students Always looking for ways to offer students a way to show what they have learned by easily create something to share. Link to a simple template. Could I adapt it to book trailers too?

• 25 Smart #SocialMedia Tips for #EdLeaders Some simple tips that anyone could use.

• Using Google Spreadsheets for SLO’s – Apps User Group There are many tools that can be used to help with the Student Learning Objectives process. This post discusses how to use Google spreadsheets to assist with the collection of data, sharing the information, and collaborating with others. There is also a link to the template the author created.

Changing Education From The Ground Up – Sir Ken Robinson

I have always loved listening to Sir Ken Robinson talk about education. I love that he puts ideas out there and is not afraid to challenge educators or the education authorities.

This was an interesting speech. He is always a very engaging speaker, and offers some humorous insights, throughout but it seemed a bit milder than some of his earlier talks (or maybe that was me). However it is still worth listening to. The video, created in conjunction with the RSA, is 24 minutes long. One part that struck me was “you cannot improve education by alienating the profession that carries it out. It would be like trying improve medicine by vilifying doctors. You can’t do that!” Hence education needs to improve from the ground up not by politicians making edicts but by encouraging those who are teaching. Our education departments here in Australia need to listen to this as well.

Sir Ken Robinson addresses the fundamental economic, cultural, social and personal purposes of education. He argues that education should be personalised to every student’s talent, passion, and learning styles, and that creativity should be embedded in the culture of every single school.

Russian Roulette: a prequel to Alex Rider series

A surprising novel as I did not expect another book that related to the Alex rider series but this is a welcome addition. I have only just finished and I have boys eagerly awaiting it.

I love the proliferation of good series for young adults, specially for boys. Many of our boys are not really adventurous (or great readers) and when they find a book they like, they would rather re-read it than take a chance on a new book that they might not like. Series make it much easier for me. If I can help them find a series they like they (and I) are very relieved. A few books they feel they have a connection to. After they have read a series,  we go to the “if you liked…., you might like……” approach.

My idea is to get them into the habit of reading and reading books that they enjoy. It is slow but with little steps we aim to increase their positive reading experiences.

Russian Roulette by Anthony Horowitz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was surprised to find this book. I enjoyed the Alex Rider series and thought like many others that it was finished which was the cause of much sadness for many of my students.
In a way it is a prequel to the Alex Rider series. It was fascinating to discover how the Alex Rider’s biggest enemy, the Scorpia assassin Yassen Gregorovich, came to be the man we encountered in the Stormbreaker. It was fascinating to see this character as a boy. We learn how brutally Yassen’s (born Yasha) family and childhood was ripped away. We see how he is forced into one difficult situation after another. He has to make many decisions that eventually lead him to be that character in the Alex Rider series. It is interesting to compare Alex and Yasha as boys. The characters are very similar but their circumstances drive them in completely opposite directions. It does however make the reader see Yassen in a different light and we fell some empathy this contract killer. In Russian Roulette the connection between Yassen and the Rider family is explained and why Yassen does not kill Alex when he had the chance at the end of Stormbreaker.
This was a good book and a must-read for all the Alex Rider fans.
Website: http://www.alexrider.com/Home

View all my reviews

Useful Links

  by  Krissy.Venosdale 

• Why English is hard to learn – Humor Train Great image showing how absurd the English language can seem to those who are trying to learn it

• The Best Dystopian Novels About Banned Books | Bookish.com “Dystopian novels are among the most frequently challenged and banned books. These cautionary tales usually take place in a society where the written word is regarded as threatening to social and political order. Here, we highlight the books banned within some of the most famous dystopian stories.

• 6 Alternatives To Bloom’s Taxonomy For Teachers – This post offers some alternatives to the traditional and established Bloom’s Taxonomy. “Bloom’s taxonomy does a brilliant job of offering “verbs” in categories that impose a helpful cognitive framework for planning learning experiences” There are other ways to approach learning. Some of the ideas here include things such as self-knowledge that UbD places at the pinnacle of understanding, or the idea of moving from incompetence to competence that the SOLO taxonomy offers.

• School Librarians Must Be Assertive Leaders, Technology Experts | SLJ Summit 2013 | School Library Journal

• Find Similar or Opposite words at WordHippo Word Hippo offers more than a dozen tools for students. Students can use when trying to find definitions, synonyms, antonyms, and translations for words. It also provides students with verb conjugation assistance, pronunciation assistance, and assistance with prefixes and suffixes. Word Hippo offers more than a dozen tools for students.

• 10 Good Search Engines for Teachers and Students ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning “Google search engine is definitely one of the most popular search engines out there and most of our students use it as their first choice.” There are also plenty of alternative search engines to Google. Some of these might be worth investigating. There are 10 listed in this post that can offer more specific searches and therefore render better search results.

• A Map of Internet Freedom Around the World “It’s easy to slip into the comfortable idea that the internet is unrestricted in the USA. It’s not that way everywhere though, and Freedom House has mapped out the current state of affairs across the globe. Freedom House’s Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media comes out once a year, and the 2013 edition shows that there’s still a lot of censored, “un-free” internet out there. You can see in the graph of countries whose scores have declined, the United States has taken a hit thanks to all that NSA stuff, but it still gets to remain classified as “free.”

• Free Technology for Teachers: Teacher Librarians at the Heart of Student Learning Video about the importance of teacher librarians in the learning process.

Useful Links

• Edublogs Releases A New Android App This new app means that Edublogs can be used by almost all of your students. This service offers a good option for classroom blogging and can be on BYOD devices as well as our class tablets.

• 4 New Ways to Use Google Docs Forms with Students – Getting Smart by Susan Oxnevad – free technology, GAFE, google docs, multimedia, video | Getting Smart These are some simple ways to get more out of Google Docs. Forms are offer an efficient tool that can be used in a variety of ways to support learning.

• Teach Kids To Be Their Own Internet Filters | MindShift A good piece about the importance of teaching good digital literacy/information literacy skills to young people. Helping them to be proactive and responsible for their digital lives/learning is better than being reactive to breaches of protocol or banning technologies.

• A Useful Social Media Cheat Sheet – Edudemic “The infographic by Flowtown may be designed for small business owners but it’s worthwhile for any teacher, student, parent, or other Edudemic reader looking for the quick bites of the social networks.”

• 5 Strategies For Creating A Genius Mindset In Students Some simple steps to help cultivate intelligence in students are listed. The post emphasises that mindset is a huge factor. Going on the research from top cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience labs, it has been demonstrated that fundamental aspects of intelligence, and even intelligence itself, can be altered through training. Five classroom strategies for improving student achievement across the broad group are set out.

• Librarians on the Fly: Library Check In Forms – Creating Pages within Google Forms The way one school librarian keeps track of when teachers and students come into the library – class visits and student visits. She used Google to create one form that both teachers and students could use to avoid two different spreadsheets.

• Librarians on the Fly: Broadcast your Google Hangout on YouTube “How is this different from Skype and Face Time?  For one, the sheer number of participants allows it to be more conducive to conferencing than the other two.  Of course the best part is the broadcasting you can do.  Imagine having an author visit with schools across your district and being able to broadcast it for parents or others.  As I brainstormed ways Google Hangouts can be used, these things popped into my head: Authors, graduations, professional development and even tutorials with students that would give them the capability to come back and review the whole session on your YouTube channel.  I saw these examples on twitter today….”

• Librarians on the Fly: Instagram in Education Infographic The author has created an infographic with ideas about how you could use Instagram in an educational environment. This is a way of using the tools that students are using.   it could be as simple as “posting on prompts that teachers assign.”

• Designing a School Makerspace | Edutopia “A makerspace is not solely a science lab, woodwork room, computer lab or art room, but it may contain elements found in all of these familiar spaces. Therefore, it must be designed to accommodate a wide range of activities, tools and materials. Diversity and cross-pollination of activities are critical to the design, making and exploration process, and they are what set makerspaces apart from single-use spaces.” A good introduction about how to set up makerspaces in schools. The framework for initial discussions and the sorts of questions that need to be answered before a school goes down this path are very pertinent and will help avoid many problems.

• New Padagogy Wheel Helps You Integrate Technology Using SAMR Model – Edudemic – Edudemic Padagogy Wheel had been updated. Now at version 2.0, it features another band around the edge focusing on the SAMR Model and on helping teachers (and admins) effectively integrate education technology

• 7 tips for making your principal your ally – Home – Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog “You need an administrator who actively supports you and your program. Your principal needs you as well – as a cheer-leader and co-conspirator for change efforts. As a staff development resource for new programs. As an educator who can positively affect the learning environment of the whole school. As a researcher for best practices information. How exactly does your principal rely on you? Are you important enough to be listened to? Principals and librarians need to be firm allies in helping their schools change in positive ways.” Some simple, concrete ways to help strengthen the alliance.

Boys and learning – 6 strategies for the classroom

I work in a boy’s school so educating boys is something I have been passionate about for many years. Many of those in education are concerned about the lack of engagement that boys have in their education.

When I first started teaching I worked in a girl’s school and followed up with a co-educational school in the country. Here we had concerns about girl’s education. Many girls left school without finishing year 12 and less went into further education. We were especially concerned with the way girls dropped out of maths and science in years 9-10. We had several programs running to try to change some of these trends. Boys did better in education until the 1980’s when thing began to change and the statistical data showed the turn around. Since the end of the 1980’s boys have been out-performed in the K-12 classroom by girls. The data shows that boys still score a little higher in science and maths, whilst girls do better in language and humanities areas but overall boys are being outstripped by girls.

This is the case in Australia and the following infographic about educating boys (based on US data) was interesting in that there were some marked similarities.

The infographic started out with population data – visual representations of birth rates and kindergarten enrollment. The first interesting thing was that data showed that almost twice as many male students as female students repeat kindergarten, and approaching triple the number of male students diagnosed with a learning disability compared to female students.

The number of girls graduating from secondary school seems to correlate with Australian statistics.

The proportion of male and female students remained fairly constant throughout primary and in the initial years of secondary schooling, with the number of male students exceeding female students by about two percentage points, up until Year 11. In Year 11 there were slightly more females than males, and in Year 12 females exceeded males by 3.2 percentage points.  (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2012)

More women than men also participate in higher education in the US which is also the case in Australia.

The other part of the infographic I particularly liked was at the end, with the advice about what schools can do to educate boys.

The 6 strategies for engaging boys in the classroom that are recommended are not ground-breaking and I have certainly seen them used in school. The library staff have also worked with teachers in the classroom to use the strategies. No doubt many could add to the strategies with example of their own but they are worth reiterating:

• Design lessons that end in the creation of a product.  I would add make it authentic and shared with more than the student and the teacher. One simple example: In the library we love to run the book trailers that our students create for their English teachers about the books they have been reading. It works to publicize the books in the library and the boys like seeing their work on our big screen.
• Structure lessons as competitive games. 
  
• Require motor activity. (We have all seen the research that talks about the physicality of boys so we need to find ways to harness this and use it in learning situations. It does not have to be a major exertion but just some movement.) One example I have been impressed with at our school: One of the maths teachers regularly starts her year 7 lessons with a small foam ball that the boys throw to each other. As the boy catches the ball she asks a question that he has to answer. She uses it as a way to revise work from the previous lesson as well as reinforce some of the maths rules. They have a chance to answer a question as it goes around the classroom for 10 minutes.
• Allow boys to address unsolved problems and use opened questions.  especially problems that have a real-life application or that they have some affinity with.
• Combine team work and competition. Some simple examples: The literature circles in year 7 have given us some opportunity to try this out. This year we offered a pizza lunch for the class that read the the most books in the Premiers’ Reading Challenge. The boys encouraged the less-able readers and congratulated them as they finished a book. They also offered suggestions about what others might like to read. The Book Spine Poetry competition in book week also worked as groups of year 7’s  combined to create poems.
• Focus on self-direction and  independent discovery. Assist boys to become more self-reliant and questioning. We have a year 8 science project (WASP) that most of the boys love. The library staff get involved in the research component at the beginning of the project.
  

  This program was designed to allow the student the freedom to investigate a scientific topic of their choice. Students had the option of conducting a scientific investigation on a topic of their own choosing or build a working model of an invention. The aim of WASP is to stimulate ongoing interest and participation in science. The program encourages independent enquiry-based project work as well as giving students the opportunity to present their achieve-ments to a panel of judges from the Science faculty.

Source: TopMastersInEducation.com

Shaun Tan’s newest book: Rules of Summer

I have been waiting impatiently for Shaun Tan‘s newest work Rules of Summer (published by Hachette Books.)

An email (from The Little Bookroom) came today reminding me that it is available tomorrow in the bookshops. Of course I did not need to be reminded about availability but it did remind me to forward the email to others on staff and to send out a tweet as well.

Rules of Summer, is a deceptively simple story about two boys, one older and one younger, and the kind of ‘rules’ that might govern any relationship between close friends or siblings. Rules that are often so strange or arbitrary, they seem impossible to understand from the outside. Yet through each exquisite illustration of this nearly wordless narrative, we can enjoy wandering around an emotional landscape that is oddly familiar to us all. (YouTube)

Combining humour and surreal fantasy, Shaun Tan pictures a summer in the lives of two boys. Each spread tells of an event and the lesson learned. By turns, these events become darker and more sinister as the boys push their games further and further. (Hachette)

There are some great supporting videos for the Rules of Summer available on YouTube.

Video 1 was published on 10 June 2013 and Shaun speaks about what Rules of Summer is about and where the ideas came from.

Video 2 was published on 10 Jun 2013. In this video Shaun speaks about how he came up with the theme behind his new book Rules of Summer, available from 8th October 2013.

Video 3  was published on 2 September 2013. Here Shaun explains his drawing process and explores the potential meaning of a particular image from Rules of Summer,

There is more about Rules of Summer on here for extra detail and images.

There is an added bonus this time: There will be a Rules of Summer Exhibition that is open for a brief space of time (3 days)

• The Venue: Bright Space Gallery, 1st Floor, 8 Martin St, St Kilda. Vic 3182
• Dates: Friday 25th October – Sunday 27th October 2013
• Gallery Opening times: 12 – 5pm
• Price: FREE   If you want to book for group/school bookings please email them