Useful links

   by  KeriMelhorn 

• YA Books and More: The Importance of Libraries and What We Do “The author went to Youtube looking for the top five videos about and for libraries and this is what they found.  The three criteria were: 1. Had to be about school libraries 2. Definitely no cheesiness!  It has to have importance attached to it 3. Well done format. ” And there were 4.

• 8 Strategies To Help Students Ask Great Questions Good questions are great learning tools. The 8 strategies discussed here offer useful ideas for classroom teachers.

• The Library Designed Like a Bookstore | Book Recommendations and Reviews | BOOK RIOT “The city of Almere, The Netherlands commissioned Concrete Architectural Associates to design their new public library. The result was a space that looks and feels like a high-end store but provides all the services of a modern library. The 16,000+ shelf-feet of books are arranged by lifestyle categories that would be at home in a bookstore (travel, health, etc), and all books are displayed cover out. This combination, Concrete says, fosters browsing and discovery, rather than the more conventional library system of finding a particular book’s cataloging number and then searching for it specifically in stack-like shelving. Seating is also built into the shelving areas, much like I remember from my favorite Borders, along with study and work areas. A cafe sits next to the computer workstations, and the children’s area has big, movable foam pieces for seating and play”

• Worlds of Learning | Serendipitous Making Laura Fleming has written a great post about her experience with makerspaces in school libraries. She embraced the idea of accidental discovery with curious students being given some interesting gadgets and let students come up with their own applications.

• Genre Survey spring 2015 | Piktochart Infographic Editor Genre Survey spring 2015 | Piktochart Infographic Editor The results from over 600 respondents to a survey about genrefication.

• Two Wolves – Official Book Trailer – YouTube

• Digital Literacy Explained by Common Craft (VIDEO) “Literacy comes in many forms. As the adoption of computers, mobile devices and the Internet has grown, digital literacy has become more important than ever. This video will help your audience understand the potential of digital literacy in our societies.”

• Copyright and Creative Commons Explained by Common Craft (VIDEO) “This video helps to explain the basics of copyright law and creative commons licensing and the role each can play in helping creators protect and share their work.  “

• May 2015: Literacies for the digital age: Civic and global literacy – DEN Blog Network “In this post Kathy Schrock provides the reader with some ideas on how to infuse civic and global skills into the curriculum.”

• WW1 – The Definitive Collection – Video Archives – British Pathé WW1 – The Definitive Collection. To commemorate the centenary of the First World War, British Pathé has launched this definitive collection of films from that conflict. British Pathé holds one of the finest and most comprehensive WW1 archives in the world. If you are unable to find what you are looking for, you can explore the entire archive using the search bar at the top of the page.

• World War One’s forgotten Anzacs: The Indigenous Army – BBC News Anzac Day, 25 April, is probably Australia’s most important national occasion. It marks the anniversary of the first campaign that led to major casualties for Australian and New Zealand forces during World War One, and commemorates all the conflicts that followed. This year marks the centenary of that first bloody battle on the shores of Gallipoli and will be remembered across the country and in Turkey with special ceremonies and exhibitions. In the third feature in our series on Gallipoli, Saffron Howden for BBC News tells some of the stories of Indigenous Australian soldiers. line For nearly a century, a tin trunk in a bedroom in remote country New South Wales (NSW) held the official documents and medal testifying to Richard Norman Kirby’s exceptional wartime feats. The Australian soldier was celebrated quietly by his family – his portrait had pride of place in the lounge room of the family home – but the rest of the country knew.

• Causes and Consequences of World War I “Causes and Consequences of World War I”

• BBC – History – World Wars: Animated Map: The Fall of France (Dunkirk)

• Dipsticks: Efficient Ways to Check for Understanding | Edutopia A interesting post about the place and value of formative assessment. It includes a long, printable list of assessment strategies will help identify new ways to check for understanding and verify what students have learned.

• Writing Strategies for Students With ADHD | Edutopia “Addressing the challenges unique to students with ADHD will help these students find ways to handle their condition effectively and even use it to their advantage. Their unique perspective can be channeled into creative writing, finding new solutions to problems, and most of all, finding, reaching, and even exceeding their goals and fulfilling their full potential.”

• FAIR | Freedom of Access to Information and Resources | Freedom of Access to Information and Resources

• How Public Libraries Balance Thorny Issues Raised by 3D Printers | MindShift “In an age where digital and technical literacy is stressed alongside traditional reading and writing, libraries are planning for the unexpected.”

• The Best Pinterest Ideas for Teachers We’ve HeardYou can find inspirational ideas on the Pinterest site. Listed in this post are a few good Pinterest ideas for teachers: best apps, websites, virtual fieldtrips and classroom ideas.

• 6 Ways Google’s Updated Classroom Will Help Teachers | EdTech Magazine

• Is the Paper Towns Movie Like the Book? Thoughts on Adaptations – YouTube “Published on 28 Apr 2015. In this YouTube video John Green discusses the Paper Towns movie adaptation, the idea of faithful adaptations, and the lost art of the movie novelization”

• 5 Tips for Classroom Management with Mobile Devices | Indiana Jen Classroom management is always challenging skill that good educators are constantly working to improve on with every class. Managing a classroom that is using technology requires the same approach and skill set as the non-technology based one. The traditional methods of classroom management easily translate to the technology rich ones with only slight modifications.

• 10 Great Ways of using Microsoft OneNote in Education Podcast with interesting ideas.

• Writing the war: personal stories from WWI | State Library Victoria

• A Comprehensive Guide to Content Curation

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

Such was life – SLV Blog

I have been following the Such Was Life blog from the State Library of Victoria (SLV) for a while now. The blog began in October 2012 and has been showcasing the material in the SLV’s collection. The blog explores items from the Library collections that relate to Australia’s past, and these are many and varied.

From their own description:

Such is life,’ bushranger Ned Kelly is reputed to have said in his final moments. These words are also a great way of defining history, and history (specifically Australian history) is what this blog is all about. Here we’ll explore Australian histories found in the collections of the State Library of Victoria. We’ll highlight both new acquisitions and classic resources, including: books, journals, newspapers, manuscripts, pictures, maps and ephemera

We will showcase resources that are available online, and those sitting in our stacks just waiting to be discovered.

I have found many of the post fascinating as they highlight different aspects of their collection.  This year with the 100 year commemorations of the WWI, our study of the text “all Quiet on the Western Front as well as the Year 12 Australian history course, their WWI post have been very topical.

The list of post about items about WWI include:

• First shot fired There is some debate about where this actually happened but the is are a lot of documents that show that many in Australia believe that it was from Point Nepean as a German ship tried to leave Port Phillip Bay on the 5th Aug 1914
• WWI poetry Poetry spans all aspects of war, from enlistment to conscription, to loss and battle descriptions. Further information to the uses of poetry and to poems themselves.
• Death Ballots: Australia’s World War I conscription referendums Some description of the two referendums and other related materials. great starting point for understanding how Australians felt at the time.
• Greeting from the trenches: World War I postcards Postcards were a popular way to communicate with those at home in WWI. 1916, Corporal Thomas O’Halloran sent dozens of embroidered souvenir postcards from the front lines in France to his family. The Halloran postcard collection online.
• From Ararat to the Dardenelles: World War I through newspapers A reminder about the wealth of information about our history now available to us through the digitised issues of our newspapers. Over 70 Victorian newspapers covering 1914 to 1918 are now freely available on Trove.
• World War I colour patches  Colour patches were worn on Australian soldiers’ uniforms to show which unit they belonged to. In WWI there were many different patches and this post offers links to finding out more about them.
• Commemorating your ANZACS. This was about a grant that recently finished but there was more useful information here about our service man and women. There was also advice about how to find out more about individuals who served in the Australian military.

If you would like to find out more about local servicemen and women, head to our research guide World War I: researching soldiers. It provides a step-by-step guide to finding soldiers’ service records, and discovering what battles and campaigns they were involved in. The guide also gives advice about researching the lives of Australian nurses. Our guide to key family history sources will help you to track down other key biographical details, like birth, marriage and death dates, what other jobs people held, and where people lived in their local community. Finally, our guide to publishing your family history will step you through the process of making your research available online or as a book.

There are links in the posts to primary sources available in in the library, digitised resources that can be viewed, the History section of the Ergo site and links to related material are also useful. It is a great resource and well worth following to remind you about what a fantastic treasure we have in our State Library.

Using the Sharetabs tool

I have been using a very simple little tool lately. I found it by accident on Larry Ferlazzo’s blog post about creating scavenger hunts. It is called ShareTabs – Share your links as tabs. It allows you to add a list of any links you may find when you are searching for information and submit it to get a single link to them all, ready for use. Last year I looked at Rollyofor creating a group of sites that students could search on particular topics, using their internet search skills. This site is for the times you are not concentrating on the searching skills but the skills of understanding/analysis/synthesis.

 Share Tabs could be great way to save time with your classes. Rather than waiting for your students to find appropriate sites to begin their learning activity, you can find the best/most useful sites for your students ahead of time, copy the URL’s into the Sharetabs box and you will get one URLwhere all your links will be displayed. An example a sharetabs page that I created is a page for the poetry of WWI (for the year 10 teachers and students) who are studying the novel “All quiet on the Western Front” next term.

As can be seen it is very visual, displaying a thumbnail of the website link on the preview page, but also has tabs to open the links you specify, ready for classroom use. The students simply navigate between the tabs, at the top of the Sharetabs page, for the sites you have selected.  

This could also be simple and useful for sharing sites with other colleagues. It would make it very easy to share a collection of sites via Email,  Twitter, IM or SMS.