We are surrounded by RED

Class 3/4L recently had an extra session in the school library, so we decided to create a digital slideshow, inspired by the powerful cover art of the new picture book, One red shoe, by Karin Gruss & Tobias Krejtschi (Wikins Farago, 2014). The book, set in the war-torn Gaza Strip, features black and white illustrations through, with the dramatic use of spot colour on a US-style, Chuck Taylor All-Stars red canvas shoe, to persuade the readers and viewers with symbolism.


Surrounded by RED

The resulting, jointly-constructed text of this digital slideshow, created during a Circle Time brainstorming session, is quite reminiscent of the colour poems featured in the now-classic book, Hailstones and halibut bones by Mary O’Neill (1961), although the students were not exposed to that particular work. Yet. Red objects featured in the images came mainly from the school library environment, but also a few from my personal digital albums.

Download free Teachers’ notes for One red shoe.

Creating digital stories for PMBW TLs

My workshop: This session will look at how to make book trailers and their use in engaging students in literacy and reading activities. Applications used to make trailers will be looked at and discussed, also how they can be used as a resource in a school library and in classrooms and how they can help promote literacy and reading. Ways to engage students in these resources to augment their learning experiences will be modeled and discussed.

* Brainstorming (using Circle Time) – consider audience, theme, length, 30 images
* Storyboarding (using a book rap template) – small groups
* Will you use photos (“Creative Commons”), drawings, cutouts, puppets, toys, claymation, or actors in dress-up box clothing?
* Upload – to Photo Peach or other Web 2.0 facility – Flickr slideshow, PowerPoint/Keynote, podcast/Youtube, IWB Notebook software?
* Edit, adjust timing to the selected music
* Share with wider community – monitor incoming public comments regularly, or close them off.

* Rap resources (NSW DEC) for making digital stories and book trailers

* Bear and Chook PowerPoints

* Flickr slideshow repositories – and with captions added or Explore Creative Commons

* Commercial book trailers on Youtube, eg:


In the lion book trailerJames Foley

* This year’s CBCA Book Week theme is: “Read across the universe”. A starting point?

Further reading (articles by Ian McLean):

* ‘iInquire… iLearn… iCreate… iShare: Stage 1 students create digital stories’ in Scan 30(2) May 2011, pp 4-5.
Stage 1 students narrate how they inquire, learn, create and share with ICT and Web 2.0 to produce online Photo Peach slideshows at Penrith Public School. View the article online HERE.

* ‘Have blog, will storyboard!’ in info@aslansw Issue #2, May 2010, pp 5-8.
Stage 2 students at Penrith Public School created storyboards and PowerPoint digital stories as resources to support Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students working on the Bear and Chook books rap, which ran during the subsequent term.

* ‘Circle time: maximising opportunities for talking and listening at Penrith Public School’ in Scan 26(4) November 2007, pp 4-7.
Circle Time is a structured framework for social and emotional learning which promotes a positive class ethos. Moving from class teacher back into the school library, I incorporated Circle Time and information skills into a range of collaborative literacy and ICT activities, including book raps.

When I presented the above worksop at a MANTLE conference, earlier this year, members of the audience suggested a few possible captions, in keeping with Book Week’s “Read Across the Universe” theme, and my intention was to get the Stage 3 students, back at school, to complete the brainstorming of the rest of the captions during Book Week. As the events of that week overwhelmed us, I filed away the groups’ A3 planning sheets, but dug them out again this week – and was thrilled with their results. A reminder to those on iPads: the latest version of Flash is required, so you’ll need to use a regular computer to see Photo Peach slideshows.

As promised, here is the finished slideshow:


Read across the universe by 5/6E

and an additional set of bookish/SF images that got the students’ conversations going:


Book Week 2013

By the way, we found “Robot jokes” during a Google search:
boyslife.org/about-scouts/merit-badge-resources/robotics/19223/robot-jokes/

and we were surprised to find that there are interactive “Yoda speech generator” sites (it started out as a joke that there might be one – and there were several!), such as:
www.yodaspeak.co.uk/

Book trailers and other digital stories

This presentation to the teacher-librarians of Granville District, followed by a practical workshop, looks at how teacher-librarians can work with students to create book trailers to enrich learning, maximising the engagement of students in literacy activities. Applications used to make trailers will be looked at and discussed, also how they can be used as a resource in a school library and in classrooms, and how they can help promote reading.


The kookaburra who stole the moon: retold by Class 1/2Sa

* BRAINSTORMING (using Circle Time) – consider audience, theme, length, 30 images
* STORYBOARDING (using a book rap template) – small groups
* WILL YOU USE PHOTOS (“Creative Commons”), drawings, cutouts, puppets, toys, claymation, or actors in dress-up box clothing?
* UPLOADING – to Photo Peach or other Web 2.0 facility – Flickr slideshow, PowerPoint/Keynote, podcast/Youtube, IWB Notebook software?
* EDITING, and adjusting timing to the selected music
* SHARING with the wider community – monitor incoming public comments regularly, or close them off.

* RAP RESOURCES (NSW DEC) for making digital stories and book trailers

* Bear and Chook POWERPOINTS

* FLICKR slideshow repositories – and with CAPTIONS added or EXPLORE Creative Commons

* Commercial BOOK TRAILERS on Youtube, eg:


In the lion book trailerJames Foley

* This year’s CBCA Book Week theme was: “Read across the universe”. A starting point?

* The kookaburra who stole the moon on FLICKR, and also on PHOTO PEACH.

Kooka10

Further reading (articles by Ian McLean):

* ‘iInquire… iLearn… iCreate… iShare: Stage 1 students create digital stories’ in Scan 30(2) May 2011, pp 4-5.
Stage 1 students narrate how they inquire, learn, create and share with ICT and Web 2.0 to produce online Photo Peach slideshows at Penrith Public School. View the article online HERE. The Photo Peach slideshow featured in this article is recently restored, and now located at photopeach.com/album/18cw2b6.

* ‘Have blog, will storyboard!’ in info@aslansw Issue #2, May 2010, pp 5-8.
Stage 2 students at Penrith Public School created storyboards and PowerPoint digital stories as resources to support Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students working on the Bear and Chook books rap, which ran during the subsequent term.

* ‘Circle time: maximising opportunities for talking and listening at Penrith Public School’ in Scan 26(4) November 2007, pp 4-7.
Circle Time is a structured framework for social and emotional learning which promotes a positive class ethos. Moving from class teacher back into the school library, I incorporated Circle Time and information skills into a range of collaborative literacy and ICT activities, including book raps.

The Travelling Fearless Project

Fearless at the gate

My fifth day each week (timetabled in chunks across the rest of my four TL days) is to work with students on PSP (Priority Schools Program) literacy and numeracy projects. This term, it’s Kindergarten’s turn, and we’ve been part of the “Travelling Fearless Project”, in which Fearless, the misnamed, cowardly, British bulldog puppy from the Colin Thompson & Sarah Davis picture book, is visiting various schools, coordinated by Cath Keane at School Libraries & Information Literacy.

My Kindergarten literacy students (five representatives from three classes, working as a small group, four times per week) brainstormed this slideshow (content, poses for photos and captions) on Fearless’s visit to our school, making good use of our IWB and exploring every nook and cranny of the new library. Photo Peach is so easy, it’s almost foolproof:

View the students’ slideshow HERE! (Update: A sequel is now online HERE!)

I hope to provide annotations, and the results of our pre- and post-tests, on a parallel page to our wiki work soon: Select the third option on the menu. Enjoy!

Entering the literary garden of delights!

Frog Prince & golden ball
Student comment: “I saw the Frog Prince and his golden ball in a bowl, but I think that is the same bowl Chook used last year when he was being an astronaut!”

Today, the students at my school had their first experiences in our newly built school library. I’ve spent three weeks unpacking the book stock (from long-term storage) and decorating with new and nostalgic elements. The students were full of questions, but I used Circle Time to maximise and equalise all the the talking and listening. It was a great day. The looks on their faces, as they explored (hands free) all the new nooks and crannies made all the planning and hard work worth while.

Archeological dig
Our historic school milk bottles are now enshrined in a shadow box.

The quote from a framing store, to have the bottles placed into a customised shadow box was $200 but I did it for about $40, thanks to parts bought from Spotlight. The inside text reads: Penrith Public School’s library stands on the site of a portable library building, and before that a previous portable building. In 2010, workmen excavating the foundations found these “school milk” bottles buried deep in the rubble. One is embossed “1/3 PINT PASTEURISED MILK”. See the original blog entry of our archeological find HERE.

48 more photos of display elements ready for today’s opening are HERE.

Digital fables

Taking a break from stocktaking for a moment, I wanted to share some digital stories my Early Stage 1 bloggers made over the last few days. These Kinder students, plus a K-2 Language Support class, have continued coming to the library for their regular PSP literacy sessions – what to do now the book rap is over?! – and we’ve been able to extend their Term 4 class learning about fables. They have enjoyed incorporating ideas from Stage 2’s digital stories, which were support material during the recent Bear and Chook books rap.

As you will see from the two Powerpoints, first we read many versions of each Aesop’s fable, then spent time in the playground with mud-map storyboards, the library toy collection, some hastily-made props, and my trusty iPhone. After I uploaded the photos into Keynote (Mac) templates at home, I converted them to Powerpoint format and brought them back to school on a memory stick. The students then viewed their photos again on the IWB, and then we jointly constructed new text during Circle Time (talking & listening). Then some editing after feedback from other audiences – and uploaded to our school blog site.

The ant & the grasshopper

The hare & the tortoise.

If time allows, we may try to do The lion & the mouse next week. (Update! We did it – click on the title!)

This is my third consecutive year working with Early Stage 1 students on fables. The students who created our first batch on a wiki in 2007 (at penrithpslibrary.pbworks.com still talk about them!


Aesop: biography of a great thinker

Bears and chooks iiiiiiiin spaaaaaaaaaaaace!

#184

Bear and Chook’s space adventure: fun with Kindergarten book rappers in the school library today, as part of the Bear and Chook books rap. During Circle Time, the students created three new adventures for Bear and Chook and we uploaded the photos as a Flickr slideshow:

Please click here!

They (and I) hope you enjoy this digital story. You can request to read the captions while the slideshow plays.

How do current school libraries impact on student learning?

Dr Ross J Todd observes, over at School Libraries 21C that, in many schools, outcomes and impacts are often “assumed some how to be lurking in there”. When a new syllabus comes in, educators often try to bend existing units of work to fit the new document, rather than to use the new outcomes to plan new, statistically-valid, pre- and post- tests that will enable staff to prove that learning has occurred. I’m guilty of that myself, trying to stretch old print-based resources to fit new units when library budgets are too tight.

Unless a school has cause to collect measurable data of the students’ achieved outcomes – eg. schools defending expeditures in Priority Schools Programs; teacher librarians undertaking post-graduate study (and requiring valid results for their assignments); etc – that all-important post-test, and results analysis, often get lost in the shuffle in the end-of-term mayhem, and that often happens four times a year, of course.

In a previous school, long before outcomes appeared in every KLA syllabus, we had our first taste of the power of collaboratively-planning valid, measurable, pre- and post- tests, when we re-examined our school-based science and technology units, spent a considerable amount of money on relevant resources that truly supported what we were hoping to achieve, and ensured that every S&T unit maximised the capacity for Talking & Listening (in English).

Schools need to plan for constant revisiting of syllabuses and evaluation strategies. I was going to say especially in schools with a high turnover of staff but, no, every school needs to do this in a structured, cyclic way.

Certainly, I’ve noticed renewed opportunities for the teacher-librarian to be more involved in collaboratively-planning valid, measurable, pre- and post- tests as a result of my voluntary role as an editor of several teaching colleagues’ half-yearly student reports. When educators have to clearly articulate just where on the learning continuum each student is, and for each key learning area, the traditional, waffly comments of yesteryear just don’t wash. I can see where certain gaps are exposed, and then I try my best to lend assistance.

Statements about students’ achievement, at our school, now have to be written in terms of outcomes. The new online reports, as daunting as they are, do seem to be assisting with providing a strong focus on value-added results. Of course, the new reports have brought in an additional problem: many outcomes sound too much like eduspeak, and that can really make some parents feel even more out of the loop.

And, of course, sometimes the best ideas for how something could have been evaluated come too late. (Hurray for cyclic programs, which can be improved each time the units are revisited.)

Similarly, a few years ago, I volunteered my services as an editor of the Annual School Report, and we noticed that the library had, previously, not really rated a mention in the ASR. The last few years have seen added paragraphs about the interrelationship of this school library with other important, high-profile school programs and events: Holiday Reading Is Rad, reading picnics, visiting storytellers, participation in annual community artshows, book reviews in the local newspaper, Circle Time, Premier’s Reading challenge, book raps, and a wiki.

This year, I hope to add OASIS Library borrowing statistics, too, and this is another easily-obtained set of data.

How to ensure that higher order thinking, and pre- and post-tests, are vital elements of the teaching program?

Well, I’m a great advocate of the online book raps and event raps run by the School Libraries and Information Literacy Unit (NSW DET). Programming and planning (including evaluation strategies) are provided. At the conclusion of each rap, we have solid data of learning progress, and the students’ jointly-constructed responses to the rap points remain online, for parents to visit via home or local library computers.

While the maximum benefit from book raps would, ideally, include teachers and the teacher librarian working collaboratively on the rap points, we have also used a highly effective “withdrawal of rappers” strategy, that requires the students reporting back to their classmates. We timetable what is achievable, and that can vary. Because book rapping takes place in the school library – and the new interactive whiteboard arrived this term, and is also in the library – the profile of the library is constantly being flagged (and raised).

Our school wiki (which I instigated, and made a point of branding as the Penrith PS Library Wiki (see “Scan” vol 28 no 1, 2009, pp 30-37) has several pages dedicated to outcomes-based annotations of the students’ progress, much of it in the students’ own words – pre-, during and post- tests, as gathered through whole-school Talking & Listening programs, such as Circle Time (see “Scan” vol 26 no 4, 2007, pp 4-7).

IWBs and ICT – a pre-test survey

Earlier this term, our school’s first interactive whiteboard (IWB) arrived, and the Year 4 and Year 5 students in a composite class did a “pre-test” survey in Circle Time with me.

Our survey was called: Does the use of Interactive Whiteboards assist with student engagement in their education and therefore improve students’ literacy and ICT skills?

Do you have the Internet at home?
Yes: 21
No: 1
Don’t know: 0

What does an IWB do?
• Like the Internet, plays videos, like a TV
• It helps you learn
• Lets you read a book to the whole class (eg. “Pete the sheep” simultaneous reading day) – looks bigger
• Like a plasma TV with bigger speakers
• A computer from the future, touch screen, can save work
• Like a normal computer only bigger
• Can search for stuff
• Can show stuff again, and save work
• Like the Internet only bigger, can do more things
• Like a computer, can touch the screen to change things
• Don’t know/Pass: x 11.

How is it better than an ordinary whiteboard??
• Can save stuff, use Internet, write things, use screen keyboard
• Like a computer, play games, do stories
• Don’t use Texta – use finger to write and draw
• Play games x 2
• Internet
• Already has information in it (eg. Notebook 10)
• Can save
• Can click to rub out x 2
• Like a computer and whiteboard combined
• Play music
• Can type or write with finger/IWB pen
• Look at everything on it
• Get pictures (eg. Google Images), save, rub out – not gone forever
• Can go back weeks later to revise
• Don’t know/Pass: x 6.

Why are we using an IWB to write, publish and read our Identity Rap blog posts?

Year 4 (who did the “Olympic Rap” on the library computers in 2008):
• Screen is bigger, easier to see
• Computer monitor too small
• Not bunched up, and no more arguing over chairs (ie. sitting around small monitor screen)
• Much bigger screen, can sit at tables and chairs
• Bigger screen, can write more things
• No people are stuck up behind others
• Can’t see small screen properly
• Don’t know/Pass: x 3.

Year 5 (who are doing the “Identity Rap” on the IWB in 2009):
• On small screen, you can’t see well x 2
• Easier to read writing
• Screen is much bigger
• Don’t know/Pass: x 1.

What will Year 5 have learned when they have finished the rap?
• Learn about our environment x 2
• About human body x 3
• Teamwork is really easy with an IWB
• Learn about other people’s identities
• How living things work
• Learn about where people come from (eg. Schools doing the rap with us)
• Transport – how cars move
• What the topic is, learn more about it x 2
• Learn about the solar system
• Cooperate with each other
• Know more things than the first time
• Don’t know/Pass: x 8.

What else could we do with an IWB?
• Use it as a TV, watch movies on DVD
• Make it read books
• Play games x 2
• Play music x 2
• Listen to heavy metal music x 2
• Learn rules for playing sports
• Read stories
• Look at different websites
• Draw
• Search the Internet
• Browse the Internet
• Learn about first aid
• Learn about speech writing
• Use Google Earth
• Search for things with Google
• Write stuff
• The school could buy things they need on eBay
• Don’t know/Pass: x 0.

We are going to do this survey again at the end of the Identity Rap.

Finally more fables

This time last year, I was conducting an exciting online project with a group of Kindergarten (Early Stage One) students during which we constructed a wiki, and used it to jointly-construct four core values fables.

This year, I’m repeating the unit with a new cohort. While last year’s project included an annotation page in which I recorded the progress of our learning, this time I’m also preserving notes from our Circle Time brainstorms and hot seat activities.

For example, in Week 3 – Favourite animals suggested for possible use in fables were: cats (allergic?), giraffe (who has his own special space), fox (sneaky), dolphin (helping people to water ski – going “Forward with Pride” – our school motto), sharks (sharp teeth, show off, brushes her teeth), panda (nice, look like bears, on TV; all black?), poodles (pink! – like to lick people), dog (that lets me go anywhere), kangaroo (with a joey inside her pouch – and a little bed), rhinoceros (go riding on it), dinosaurs (in a police uniform and a ballerina’s tutu), a lion (pride).

Week 4 – Circle time: shark has gills; lions go forward with their pride (of lions) and can run faster than a car; kangaroos and emus can’t walk backwards, always go forward (with pride); giraffe likes eating toast for breakfast; magical fox turned the poodle pink, turns into a dragon, always buys strawberry (pink) ice cream.

Week 5 – Investigate more of Aesop’s fables; Who was Aesop?; discuss morals in fables. Circle time: “Forward with pride” – our school motto. Makes us think of forward, four (number), 4 (numeral), fore (golf – “Look out in front!”), going for wood (forward), we would go for wood. Woodpeckers and beavers like wood. Fences, branches, sticks, treehouses, cubby houses, tables and chairs are made of wood. Fire needs wood. Trees need bark. Pride of lions. Things that make us proud: playing on my bike; Mum buying me stuff; parties; using my own money to buy a Slushy at 7-11; my doctor was proud of me at the hospital when I got stitches and he gave me a toy; winning at my DS game; my teacher is proud when I read well; winning lollies, stickers and Good Ones at school.

Week 6 – “Recent visitors” to the wiki include locales of: Soul-t’ukpyolsi, Hlavni Mesto Praha, and the exotic French location, Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur. Circle time: Bringing the pink poodle and the shark (favourite characters) into the same fable as the giraffe. Note that a giraffe now also appears in the “Kangaroo and Emu” fable, according to artwork. Inspiration from French locale discovered from “Recent visitors”. Perhaps also need to investigate the art of feng shui? The colour red? Eiffel Tower?

See the four drafts of our, as yet, unfinished school motto fables at the new wiki page. If you’re finding this blog entry at some time in the future, the fables may not resemble their early versions by much.