Free Technology for Teachers: 5 Free Tools for Creating Book Trailer Videos

Thanks to Sue Tapp for sharing this link on Facebook:)

Free Technology for Teachers: 5 Free Tools for Creating Book Trailer Videos.

Australian Curriculum English Literature Recommended Book List

Australian Children’s Literature is recognised around the world as being rather special, and so with the new Australian Curriculum taking shape, it’s timely to set up a list of recommended titles with which to implement the Literature component of the English curriculum. 

I’ve set up a page where, though comments from visitors to this blog, a list of titles recommended for primary levels Foundation to Year 6, can emerge and be easily updated.  While for me,  literary and aesthetic qualities of the book are a pre-condition for inclusion in this list, I am hoping that suggestions will include links to other areas of the curriculum where they are relevant, and will support the three priorities, Aboriginal and Torres Strait histories and cultures; Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia and Sustainability. 

I am especially keen to hear about titles which originate from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across Australia. 

Please visit the page and contribute your suggestions by making a comment.

Thanks to Jo Sherrin from the Northern Territory for the idea!

Australian Curriculum Units (update)

If you have already downloaded the existing Year 1 & 2 Info Lit template, (see the Goodies to Share page) you will need to download Version 2.  I had forgotten to make a section for Aboriginal Perspectives Across the Curriculum.

I am now well into planning a nice little Australian Curriculum unit for Years 1 & 2, called Scary Creatures.  It has a Science focus i.e. what body parts do scary creatures use to attack or to defend themselves.  (That’s what reminded me to add the Aboriginal Perspectives section, because I’m using Shake a Leg by Boori Monty Pryer and Jan Ormerod to show how Aboriginal Communities used dance to teach their children to stay away from dangerous creatures).

I’m tweaking the planned sequence of activities as I teach each lesson and hope to have it available for download here before too long.

At the same time, I’m reviewing the units I taught in term 1 and (where I can) converting them into an Australian Curriculum unit.  They’ll be available before long too.

What are other teachers doing?  Is anyone else playing around with the new curriculum??

Australian Curriculum units – progress at last!

Ok, it’s time to stop being a perfectionist!  I have finally got a template (more or less) the way I want it.  Go to Goodies to Share in the menu – and PLEASE! give me some feedback in Comments about what you like and what you would like improved.

Australian Curriculum: Literature units of work

Just an update so that readers of this blog know what I’m working on. (Let’s not reinvent any wheels! Let’s not duplicate each other’s work!)

This term I am updating my existing Term 1 literature units so that they include relevant elements of the new Australian Curriculum.

So the learning focuses include

• SLAV library skills
• VELS Thinking Processes; Interpersonal Development and Personal Learning
• Australian Curriculum English Literature  (and maybe also Language and Literacy)

Assessment includes

• SLAV library skills
• VELS Thinking Processes; Interpersonal Development and Personal Learning outcomes
• Australian Curriculum English Literature  (and maybe also Language and Literacy) elaborations (which is the silly word they have chosen for outcomes)

The units I am working on are

• Aesop’s Fables (Preps)
• Traditional Tales (fairy tales) (Years 1 & 2)
• Author Study: Hans Christian Andersen (Years 3 & 4)
• Traditional Tales (myths & legends) Years 5 & 6 – Beowulf by Michael Morpurgo

Once I have tweaked the planning templates to my satisfaction you will be able to download them as well, but getting these right is what’s taking the time.   

I hope to have these four units – and the templates – available for download some time during the Easter holidays.

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School | Brain Rules |

 

 Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina looks like a very useful reference for anyone interested in how brains learn. 

Medina is a developmental molecular biologist and he has very generously shared some of the principles in an interactive presentation online.  Open the link below, watch the video and then scroll down to the 12 rules and explore each one, checking out the graphs and videos as you go.  He’s got some challenging criticisms of how schools make learning more difficult but he’s got the science on his side!

via Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School | Brain Rules |.

PS The book is being released in October.

Children’s Books and how to choose them

Serendipity works in amazing ways.  Last night I discovered via Twitter that Dublin has been designated a UNESCO City of Literature, just as Melbourne is.  I blogged about my excitement about this on my ANZ LitLovers blog because I am travelling to Dublin later this year when I’m on Long Service Leave. 

This morning a reader of my blog from Dublin shared a link to the Children’s Books Ireland presence on Facebook, an initiative designed to promote books and reading to children.  And there I found a terrific series about how to choose children’s books, of interest not only to children’s librarians but to parents as well.

Here are the links:

Children’s Books: How to Choose Them, Part 1 – Introduction

Children’s Books: How to Choose Them, Part 2 – Subjective Appeal

Children’s Books: How to Choose Them, Part 3 – Themes

Children’s Books: How to Choose Them, Part 4 – Illustrations

Children’s Books: How to Choose Them, Part 5 – Stories

Children’s Books: How to Choose Them, Part 6 – Humor

Children’s Books: How to Choose Them, Part 7 – Developmental Value

You can subscribe to Aaron Mead’s blog by RSS if you want to follow up with further articles.  Please note that Children’s Books and Reviews is an American online bookstore.  LisaHillSchoolStuff does not endorse their products nor their association with Amazon; LisaHillSchoolStuff supports Australian books and writing and recommends independent bookshops such as Readings and Boomerang Books.  

A Teacher’s Prayer

A friend of mine gave me a bookmark with this lovely poem printed on it:

A Teacher’s Prayer

I want to teach my students more than lessons in a book:

I want to teach them deeper things that people overlook -

The value of a rose in bloom, its use and beauty too,

A sense of curiosity to discover what is true;

How to think and how to choose the right above the wrong;

How to live and learn each day and grow up to be strong;

To teach them always how to gain in wisdom and in grace;

So they will someday make the world a brighter, better place;

So let me be a friend and guide to give these minds a start

Upon their way down life ‘s long road, then I’ll have done my part.

By Jill Wolf

 

ICT PD: Digital Portfolios

Here I am Harrisfied PS with Heather Carver again, this time learning about Digital Portfolios.

This is the wiki we’re using…and this is the site for digital portfolios.

We started off by playing with MindMeister to tease out the issues: this is probably a useful thing to do with staff so that concerns are aired and dealt with.

What’s the point of digital portfolios?  Check out the introductory video…

• to have an ongoing digital record of work that can include the student’s use of Web 2.0, graphics, video, podcasts, images etc.  They can use MovieMaker, PhotoStory, blogs, wikis etc
• depending on where it’s saved, a digital portfolio can travel from school to school when students transfer

Heather says there are  four main purposes:

• to demonstrate learning
• to assess learning
• to guide learning
• to reflect upon learning.

To demonstrate learning

• explains and displays what’s been learned in a unit
• constructed while elearning is taking place
• aligned to the criteria for the unit

Reflective portfolios

• Often done as you go along
• what was learned
• how tasks were approached
• what could be improved
• often aligned with personal learning goals
•  contains a variety of file types
• reflective commenatary over a whole year or long period of time

For guidance

• usually done by teacher or support person, gathering info about what to do for a student
• examples of failing to meeting learning or behaviour goals – articles of work, video, audio etcFor assessment

For assessment

• The ePortfolio IS the assessment,
• it proves that the stduent has achieved the goals
• often has an audience other than the student, teacher or parent.

The best vehicle?

• Sometimes an ePortfolio can simply be a folder on a server containing samples of work comprising an archive or aggregate of work done over time.
• Software solutions inlcude PowerPoint, PPT templates, Foliomaker, (school licence needed, a bit more expensive per child) edcube (school licence needed, about $900 p.a.).  Be wary of the time spent on doing these things – can over-ride learning time.
• ONline tools: LMS,(Sharepoint, Moodle – Learning Management system)  Google Apps, Mahara (Heather’s fave), Wikis, Blogs, Websites.  The advantage is that kids can work on them at home.  Beware: the school’s internet bill can be huge. 

 It’s important to secure ePortfolios so that they can’t be deleted, either accidentally or on purpose, by the student or someone else.  If using online tools, strict protocols need to be in place for cyber safety.

All schools should have a copy of Digital Portfolio Resources CD.  Also available on ePotential.

Decision: how much time should be spent on these?  Who does them? How often?  Teachers and students need a set of rules to ensure safety, security and consistency between classes.

Online thinking tools – ultranet workshop 25.9.09

Ok, I’m at an Ultranet workshop run by Heather Carver, and I’m learning how to use online thinking tools. This is the link.      

The first one we’re playing around with is at http://mindmeister.com and it’s a tool a bit like V8 Inspiration mind mapping.  It’s reasonably intuitive, and once your students have an account you can have multiple users working on the same mind map.

 The Intel visual ranking tool is useful for prioritising…it’s a step up from mere listing, and it requires that students give reasons for their ranking.  (There’s a little notes box that opens up for them to do this – double click on the statement and it will open up).  Groups can rank statements together, and then compare results from different groups.  The comparison link is the RHS button at the top.  We tried the Thinking about Thinking tool.  Heather reminded us that if we’re setting up a task like this, it’s important that there not be a right or wrong answer – it needs to be an open-ended task.  There are demos for the different tools to explore at this site.

From Teacher Workspace (register as a user first) you can set up your own ranking task, and then set up teams.  Clicking on Create a Set of New Teams lets you set up a whole lot of groups at once, or you can do it one at a time.  For this trial (ranking what was worst about the Great Depression, which students researched while we read Audrey of the Outback)  I set up the teams using the names (and matching passwords) that we have in the library (and so didn’t specify student names which is optional), but for an assessment task I might name the team members. It’s also possible to create a snap shot of their work.  This looks like a really terrific tool and I think students will enjoy it too.  (For primary students I wouldn’t add 16 items to rank or it might take forever for them to finish.)

The only glitch I found when using this tool was that it published some words in my list incorrectly.  I checked it, and it wasn’t typos – I’ll need to find out what went wrong….

The next tool we looked at was the Showing Evidence Tool.  It’s suitable for Y5 & 6 upward, but is especially useful for secondary students.  The demo we looked at was called Mysterious Malady but I sneaked a quick look at the one for primary schools – which is just the thing for a library lesson: Can a thief be a hero?  For secondary students this is a tool best used with groups so that students have peer support to develop reasons and have to justify their ideas; probably it’s best used with a whole class at primary levels.

There’s a Seeing Reason tool too. It’s a bit like concept mapping but it involves identifying factors in the argument that are positive or negative.  This a demo for the Causing Traffic Jams Seeing Reason task.  Again, the tool allows a teacher to see a snapshot for assessment purposes.

There are so many tools to play with on this Intel site, and they’re all free!