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School’s out Friday

Rives is a favourite of mine. This is an oldie (2006), but from Rives, it’s always a goodie. I think Mark Zuckerberg might have been listening to this, because Facebook can pretty much do a lot of things he articulated in this poem when he waxed lyrical about Napstar, Friendster and the other ‘ters’ that were the ‘in things’ in 2006. It makes 2006 seem like an age ago when you realise that many of the sites he referenced don’t exist today. Six years is a lifetime for some Internet start-ups. In six years they can live and die, or if they’re lucky, be consumed by the big guns who reward them grandly, but render them faceless as they improve their offering.

Today, I took my own advice and used 12 minutes of class time to show the subject of yesterday’s post to my Yr 10 students. It was really encouraging to see them laughing along as I did, and taking note of Shawn’s recommendations for rewiring our brains to promote happiness within us. I proposed that we follow his advice for 21 days, and I’m going to start here by listing three things I was grateful for today.

1. Having the opportunity to teach students who have open minds and who are willing to try new things to improve their learning.

2. Laughing with my daughter as we shared stories from our day.

3. Having the opportunity to see live theatre performed, penned by Australian master playwright, David Williamson.

I was thinking I could share what I’m feeling grateful about here, but I’m not sure it’s the right vehicle. I’ll play it by ear I think. What I do want to do is adhere to this, and other recommendations from Shawn Achor, for the 21 days. I want to see if I can rewire my thinking, and look for the positives around me more than the negatives. I know what it’s like when you’re working in an energised state, and I think I need that pick me up right now.

You haven’t heard much about it of late, but my back room renovation is nearly complete! New carpet is laid next week, and by the end of Tuesday night, we should be enjoying a vastly improved back room in our house. I may even include a picture next week!

Enjoy your weekend. Mine will include a visit to the picture theatre to see ‘The Hunger Games’. Can’t wait really.  : )

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The Happiness Advantage – need this in your school?

Over the weekend, I wrote a post on the Voices from the Learning Revolution blog called ‘TED in My Classroom‘, with a focus on TED Ed, their latest initiative. I’m still pondering how I might offer something to the project, but I’ll have to mull over it a little more. What they’re looking for is the following:

TED-Ed’s mission is to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world. We do this by pairing extraordinary educators with talented animators to produce a new library of curiosity-igniting videos.

I don’t know if I’m one of the extraordinary educators they’re looking for, but I do think there might be something in my bag of educational tricks that might be worth sharing!

What’s in Shawn Achor’s bag of tricks is well worth your time. He’s a very engaging speaker, talking about what he calls ‘the happiness advantage‘; the effect of positive psychology on our productivity and attitude to life. Here’s some text from the transcript of his talk;

But the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order. If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, what we’ve found is that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You’re 37 percent better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we’re able to work harder, faster and more intelligently.

Just imagine if our focus in schools was on this instead of Naplan tests and My School comparisons? I’d like to see schools value this kind of research and invest time and effort in helping our students understand how their state of mind can effect their performance.

I’m happy and positive after watching this. In my view, 12 minutes well spent in any classroom you teach in. Think about sharing it around.

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School’s out Friday

My number one fan in Texas, Rich Cantrell, sent me the link to this new Improveverywhere video. They call it the spinning beach ball of death, but when I see it appear on my computer, it’s always the colour wheel of death to me. It’s a terrifying sight for those of us Mac users, and usually requires a force quit of an application to get your computer moving again. I’ve always wondered what you do when the colour wheel of death is hovering over your apple symbol in the top left hand corner of your screen. That’s where you can click to shut down your computer. If the colour wheel was hovering there, I always reverted to the ‘press down on the power button until computer shuts down’ method of exit. A student showed me recently that if you hold down ‘option, command, escape’ at the same time, the force quit box opens and you can quit the frozen application. Probably self evident to all of you, but it wasn’t to me. You gotta love it when the kids teach you stuff. : )

Thanks Rich for sending me the link. You saved me a search this week – I’m very grateful.

Time to shut this computer down and spend some time reading ‘The Hunger Games‘. I’ve vowed to read it before the release of the movie next week.

Enjoy whatever comes your way this weekend. Especially you, Rich.  : )

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School’s out Friday

Aahh…Taylor Mali. Wouldn’t you just love to be in a class led by Taylor Mali. His vast vocabulary and ability to craft clever, witty sentences would make for a stimulating learning environment. I’m sure a senior English class would benefit from exposure to this lesson about the pitfalls of poor spelling and inadequate proofreading. Think I might use it with my crew sometime in the near future.

It’s a long weekend here in Victoria. Time to catch up on much needed sleep. Couldn’t be happier!

Enjoy your weekend. I hope it treats you well. : )

 

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Australian Curriculum and the General Capabilities – the role of the Teacher Librarian

I delivered this presentation at Marist College in Canberra on Tuesday. You can see it embedded in my wiki, or click this link to view. (Once again, I’m frustrated that it can’t be embedded in this blog) It’s not an earth shaking presentation, but it does condense some information from the following ACARA documents:

The Shape of the Australian Curriculum Version 3

General Capabilities and the Australian Curriculum

I’ve tried to identify where a Teacher Librarian can make an impact with the integration of the General Capabilities into the learning areas. Hopefully, the presentation is useful. Feel free to use it in your schools to help people come to an understanding of what is expected with the Australian Curriculum.

Thanks to Geraldine McNulty for arranging for me to visit Marist College to talk to Teacher-Librarians from Canberra. A quick visit, but a good one!

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Kony 2012 – you must watch this and pass it on.

There are good people in this world. People who are trying to make a difference.

Watch Kony 2012. Visit Kony2012 and find out why Joseph Kony should be famous.

Brilliantly, this was sent to me from one of my Yr 10 students who made the link between this and what we are studying in class. I bet we’ll be talking about it next time I see them. You will be too if you invest 30 minutes of your day to watch it.

Do so.

 

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School’s out Friday

If you’re a heavy duty computer user, and you’re the owner of a cat, then I’m sure you’ll relate to the behaviour of Simon’s Cat. I’m frequently tapping the keys over the top of a cat that’s decided my lap is prime real estate they are occupying, whether I like it or not!

Yet another week where I haven’t had time (nor energy) to get a mid week post written. It’s a plight those of us who are busy classroom practitioners face. I’d like nothing more than to set time aside in my working life to tap something out, but the reality of busy school days doesn’t allow it. I’ve been launching student blogs, teaching kids about our Overdrive platform, spreading news about EasyBib, creating Libguides to support our Humanities curriculum, teaching my English class etc, etc. All good stuff, and important too. Sometimes you feel like you’re not achieving much, but when you take stock and think about what you’ve been involved in, you realise these are all small steps in helping your school community make big moves towards understanding new ways of accessing and using information.

Open Day at my school tomorrow. That means working on Saturday. No rest for the wicked, as they say. I think that bottle of wine chilling in my fridge will be under threat tomorrow night!

Enjoy whatever comes your way this weekend. Find some sun and soak in it. : )

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School’s out Friday

This is John Green. He of ‘Looking for Alaska‘ fame. He of the number 1 position on the New York Times Bestseller list for Children’s chapter books right now for ‘The Fault in our Stars‘. He of ‘Vlogbrothers‘ fame on YouTube.

OK. Unless you’re a Teacher-Librarian you probably have no idea who John Green is. But if you watch this video, you’ll get a sense of the kind of guy he is. He’s fun. He writes novels that teenagers love. He’s an author who understands how to use social media well to engage a new kind of audience. He’s someone modeling the new ways people need to work now to generate readership and income. Worth taking notice of, and perhaps sharing his story with your students.

His Vlogbrothers work on YouTube is something he started with his brother Hank in 2007. It was a really interesting premise called Brotherhood 2.0.

Brotherhood 2.0 was a project created by John and Hank Green in 2007. It started on January 1st of that year with the premise that the brothers would cease all text-based communication for a year and instead converse by video blogs every weekday. The project was made available to the public via YouTube and on their Brotherhood 2.0 website.[2][3] On July 18, 2007, Hank Green uploaded a video of himself playing and singing his song “Accio Deathly Hallows” in honour of the seventh Harry Potter book. This video was the first Vlogbrothers video to make the front page of YouTube, and the starting point of the brothers’ success as vloggers. The project ended on December 31st, 2007, but due to their popularity the brothers continued making videos even after the final day had passed. Now Hank and John continue to create vlogs, but less frequently (every Tuesday and Friday, as of 2012).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlogbrothers

The video above is from the Vlogbrothers channel. If you like quirky stuff, tune in.

Big weekend ahead. My brother is getting married in my front garden on Sunday. So that means Saturday is dedicated to cleaning. Lucky me!

Enjoy your weekend – make the most of whatever comes your way. : )

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Storify your English classroom

Washington Post Storify
Washington Post Storify (Photo credit: cfpereda)

This year, I’m teaching Year 10 English. In our team discussions early on, we decided to apply some SAMR thinking to modify a task that was normally completed as a paper folio, with pictures pasted in and students adding their comments as handwritten text or something that was computer generated pasted in. Over the past year, I’ve used Storify to help compile tweets and thoughts from conferences I’ve attended.  Storify is a wonderful curation tool being used by journalists, newspaper organisations, noted figures from Social Media circles, and even the British Monarchy and The White House!

Our focus this term is a thematic study about power and greed, perfect as a lead in to out text study of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. We introduced Storify to our students, with the intention of them curating resources of their choosing that they feel link to this theme. Storify is pretty simple to use; you make your stories by accessing tools of the social web that are handily searchable in a sidebar and can be dragged into your story space. It’s best to see it in action, so take a look at this explanatory video.

The students have adopted it quickly and find it intuitive to use. We have asked them to provide explanations for their choices; they do this by adding text after each embedded resource. We have discovered that it doesn’t seem to work well with Internet Explorer (for those with PC’s), and I’ve been recommending they use the Chrome browser as it seems to save properly using this. Because we plan as a team, this means all of our Year 10 students are using Storify. We’re also using a Ning for discussion and as a place to store curriculum related videos, photos and links. From my perspective, that’s pretty good exposure to some very useful platforms. Both help these students gain a deeper understanding of communication tools that can be applied to other subject areas, and maybe even further, into their tertiary studies or working lives.

I can see us using Storify for other purposes throughout the school year. Our students need to study issues in the media, and it’s the perfect vehicle for the curation of an issue. Whenever you use a new application, there’s always the perceived danger that the kids might see it as passe after awhile. To me, an application like Storify is something that could be an essential part of any English classroom, just like the pen and paper or folio of old!

Our students have blogs they use as ePortfolios. I’m hoping the embed code you are provided with will work on their Edublog, otherwise we may try the export to WordPress method available. Edublogs is on a WordPress Multi User platform, so it may just work.

Obviously, Storify could be used in a myriad of classroom settings. Do explore it – I’m sure you will see the benefits. Just today, they released their Storify iPad app, so those of you with iPads in your classrooms will find it to be a fabulous addition as a creation tool. Sign up, play around with it yourself, and see just how easy it is. You’ll be a Storify convert before you know it.

 

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School’s out Friday

Here’s one of the commercials that was aired for the first time during the Super Bowl in America. It’s the new Volkswagon commercial, ‘The Dog Strikes Back‘, and it pays homage to the Darth Vadar commercial they aired last year. Take another look at that one (makes me laugh every time I see that kid jolt at the end!) and see if you think the new commercial holds its own against the newbie.

Now watch this. Your appreciation for ‘The Dog Strikes Back‘, will be heightened, when you see the effort that went into it’s creation. Bolt (the dog) is one truly impressive canine, and I was pleased to see it was his Australian Shepard heritage that was attributed to his impressive intelligence. 😉 And how about the recreation of the Star Wars Cantina! Just how much money is committed to television commercials these days?

My appreciation for my soft pillow is what I’m looking forward to after a hectic working week. I’m off to a work colleague’s party tomorrow night and have to adhere to the 60’s clothing theme she’s prescribed. A visit to Savers tonight found me the unflattering attire I’ll adorn for the occasion, but I’m betting it’s going to be a lot of fun. I hope your weekend finds you having fun too, somewhere along the line.

Enjoy. : )