Booked Inn

We are really enjoying the ease of finding short video clips via Encarta for Kids CD-ROM, and online at Youtube.

As a followup to last week’s Dreaming story, “How the kangaroos got their tails”, Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students are investigating facts about kangaroos.

A trained(?) boxing kangaroo on TV – not so natural?

Compared to this version, where the opponents seem to finish their bout with no hard feelings:

And this amazing footage of newborn joeys in their mothers’ pouches:

I’m often asked to explain what a wiki is, and I usually liken it to an electronic communal scrapbook.

I’ve seen the following snappy little video a few times now, but I’d forgotten all about it until I was re-investigating the preliminary “how to” pages over on PBworks, in preparation for my sessions on wikis at Saturday’s TESOL conference at the University of Technology Sydney (Broadway).

“Wikis in plain English”

When one displays a Common Craft video on a site, creator Lee LeFever asks for a link back to be provided to the Common Craft web site. Free versions of Common Craft’s videos are for “non-commercial” use. (This means that commercial organisations can’t display the videos without their express permission. For example, if you owned a podcasting company, you could not display “In plain English” series videos internally or externally, without permission.)

Our Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students are about to start studying a Dreaming story, “Mirragan and Guranggatch”. In the Aboriginal story, set in the area around Jenolan Caves, Mirragan is described as “a giant cat”, but the animal that European settlers called a “native cat” is now more commonly called a quoll.

Google image search.

Youtube has several chuditches, quoll-like marsupials, including this clear footage:

Stop Press: 2nd August – Don’t you just love serendipity? I found this today during a visit to Sydney Wildlife World, at Darling Harbour. They had a real spotted quoll, too, in their nocturnal section: