Learning Gems

I’ve written before about this fantastic project. With the release of Inanimate Alice Episode 4 ‘Hometown’ I am even more convinced that this type of multimedia story is the future of e-reading.

iStori.es

The new episode comes with its own education pack and news of an authoring tool, iStori.es, which is previewed by Alice in this episode. It looks like a fantastic tool to encourage multimedia storytelling, something that students seem to prefer to the more traditional method. I will probably look at ordering it for my school next year.

Learning Opportunities

The learning potential of these stories is enormous…not only do they encourage reluctant readers, they also open the door for so many learning opportunities. Activities that immediately spring to mind after my first reading of episode 4 are:

• Students could use Google Earth to map and highlight features in their own neighborhoods. (Alice explains her new life via a map with clickable points that help to advance the story.) A focus on historical buildings and/or geographical features would instantly lead this activity into History and Geography units.
• Students could easily use their own photographs to put together a photostory of their own, complete with music and words. This would, hopefully, lead to all sorts of discussion points about how music and visuals help to create atmosphere and advance a story.
• General ‘Exploration’ activities: Hints that all is not well in Alice’s current life; possible futures for the family; the importance of Brad; evidence of Alice’s ‘teenagehood’…

Teacher feedback

As an English teacher and Teacher-Librarian I love educational resources which take a ‘new’ approach and which I know will also engage students. I am always looking for something exciting and different so Inanimate Alice is perfect for me. (If it involves technology and reading it’s always a winner!) I passed the resource onto several other teachers, both primary and secondary, and they loved it too. The primary teachers were very impressed and raved about the education pack in particular.

As a relative newcomer to the blogging scene I have thrived on the many lists compiled by other educators and various tech-obsessed enthusiasts happy to share their knowledge and expertise. I appreciate the energy, time and passion that must go into the compilation of such lists, particularly as they have had such an impact on my own learning. I finally feel ready to compile my own small list of useful online stuff

The Learning Gems list is all about me!

This list is all about me and my context…the things that I’ve found most useful as I’ve fossicked about in cyberspace, (I don’t surf!). First and foremost I am an educator, so I get excited about tools and resources with the potential to transform teaching and learning. I am also at a P-12 school so I love discovering things that can be used across a range of levels and subject areas. Key discoveries:

Edublogs: I know there are other blog sites but edublogs fits my context perfectly. It is quick, simple and newbie-friendly. Latest updates have made it even easier to comprehend. I can start blogs for colleagues and students quickly and simply. Furthermore, The Edublogger, Sue Waters, is a tech genius whose blog posts are Learning Gems in themselves!

Another plus is that I’ve discovered edublogs are less likely to be blocked by school filters.

ClassTools: Some great tools here. I used this site to make some fun ‘library’ games and then added them to my library blog. The younger students love them and they’re learning about the library at the same time! They also learned an important lesson very quickly… the questions need to be answered correctly to master the games.

OZ/NZ Educators group at Diigo: I discover so much via my membership of this group. Recent discoveries include: mutapic, a great little online picture generator, and 100 Helpful Tools for Every Kind of Learner, a blog post from College@Home that lists tools for all learning styles. I discovered bubbl.us via this post, a great mind mapping /brainstorming tool that I used recently to help a colleague evaluate a student project.

The Learning Gems list highlights things that can be used in a real classroom with real students next week, if necessary.

When I find something useful and exciting I want to use it immediately. I have real students inside my head: a visual learner, an artist, a reluctant reader, a gifted student… etc, so I get excited about stuff with a real and immediate usefulness in my school. Some that fit here are:

Games that promote keyboarding skills:

Keyboard/keyboarding practice a wiki with links to activities that develop keyboarding and; The Key Master, a great game from addicting games that encourages fast, accurate keyboarding.

Such sites will be useful for Mr Grade 4, “It takes too long to type the address”. Somewhere along the way we need to make sure students have the keyboarding skills they need to work quickly and effectively.

Befunky: This tool turns photographs into cartoons…thought I might use the cartoonizer function to write a fun ‘how to research’ guide for my library.

Literature Map: I’ve found that secondary students tend to latch on to a particular author and then demand similar stuff when reading material runs low. This site is a life saver when students ask for such material.

BBC games: A great starting point for literacy and numeracy games.  Why don’t we have something this great in Australia? The bitesize games are incredible. Great for revision. Love questionaut, very quirky! Had some students with special needs check this site out and they loved it!

My list is never ending! When I started my exploration I couldn’t believe the range of material available out there and it just keeps getting better and cheaper! (ie: free!) There is no way I can put all this into one blog post.

The Learning Gems list will continue…

First, let me start with something completely irrelevant…

Many years ago I watched a game of AFL football and saw the president of the losing club cry on national television…Now that’s passion! At the time I was working hard to extract a similar response from my English classes (No, I didn’t want them to cry!) I wanted them to care; I wanted them to get so caught up in a task they didn’t want to stop… I wanted passion! I developed a new found respect for that AFL team, Collingwood, (much to my family’s disgust) because I admire that sort of commitment and passion, no matter what its origin.

Passion in Education
Web 2.0 is also creating a lot of passion and excitement at the moment. I saw this first-hand today when I attended the SLAV conference ‘Re-imagining: Web 2.0 applications and implications’. I spent most of my time listening and nodding my head in agreement through each presentation. I did this a lot as I listened to Will Richardson speak of the challenges and opportunities ahead for educators. Put simply, schools must learn to compete with the virtual, world-wide web as it connects people with similar interests and passions daily. The learning opportunities are endless and students need guidance. Web 2.0 is changing the way society operates and connects; educators have to respond to this.

Jenny Luca, Toorak College, virtually described my own Web 2.0 journey (including the bit about spending Saturday nights on the web!). Jenny also reinforced my ideas about how teachers need to connect with Web 2.0 and educate themselves. Essentially…just do it! Start a blog or wiki, sign up for things, build a network with other passionate educators; there are lots of them out there.

Web 2.0: what’s in it for me? Or…What will I do tomorrow in my workplace to move forward with Web 2.0?
Pass on what I have learned to school leaders. Our leaders need to be able to see the potential here and if they don’t then it is my job to try to show them.

Supply a context for using Web 2.0. Suggest ways that Web 2.0 can be used to enhance learning at our school. Some ideas: Begin a VCE English theme wiki to encourage discussion and learning with other students from other schools studying these themes; do some serious ‘selling’ of my Literature Discovery Tour to show teachers what is possible; Begin a Voicethread project to encourage discussion of the CBCA shortlisted title.

Continue to arrange and present professional development sessions: igoogle; google docs; voicethreads; animito; scrapblogs (and my other discoveries) in a simple, short, non-threatening way.

Encourage individual exploration.

Get the students involved. Students love all this stuff; I have a group I call the ‘library legends’ who are currently creating avatars and alternative identities so they can contribute to a library blog.

Attempt to demystify Web 2.0 for parents and teachers. Send details of my blogs home to parents so they can look at them with their children.

Keep Learning. Continue to sign up for things, subscribe to blogs, comment a lot, start a wiki…etc. I’m not sure if it’s possible to be a Web 2.0 expert but I know it’s important for me to become a Web 2.0 explorer, learner and innovator.

_{Collingwood v Brisbane Flickr photograph by Judi Donovan}

My very first post on this blog highlighted the need for teacher-librarians to stop being the invisible quiet achievers in schools.  It is my view that we are too often ‘overlooked’ because other teachers, parents and leaders aren’t always aware of the vital contributions we make during all stages of the learning process.  We provide ideas, advice, troubleshooting, resources, information and enthusiasm (to name a few).  Moreover, these are often based on our unique perspective of the whole school curriculum; a perspective that gives us valuable insights into teaching and learning processes and educational programs within the school.

Teacher-librarians, as lifelong learners, stay up-to-date with emerging trends and are often first to hear about new learning tools, educational shifts and exciting texts.  It is also a vital part of our role to pass this information on to others.  Which brings me to the point of this blog post …

I pass on a lot of material to staff and I’m still trying to work out whether the following incident is a good or bad development.  I started passing around a teacher magazine with a lot of valuable material in it. Before I started at the school this particular magazine was simply fodder for the recycling bins.  No-one ever picked it up or read it!   At first I only passed on copies to teachers I thought might do something with it, (that is, read it!).  Recently I received extra copies and started passing it on to every teacher. 

Well, today someone cut out an interesting article about libraries and ICT from this magazine and pigeonholed me (no name attached) No doubt this person believes they have helped me out by passing on a crucial piece of ’library’ information.  What they don’t know and will probably never know is that I was the person who passed this information on to them in the first place!  Also, the article, which I had read, was about an Australian teacher-librarian, Judy O’Connell, a wonderful blogger whose blog, Hey Jude I also read regularly! (We also recently became friends on Second Life!)

Is this a positive sign?  It means that teachers are finally starting to read and learn from this valuable resource.  Essentially, I achieved my goal.  OR… is it a negative sign?  Teachers continue to be unaware of how these valuable learning gems reach them and I remain invisible (and perhaps another teacher-librarian position disappears somewhere in the world?)