Wrapping up Book Week

A few months ago, I did a presentation to the MANTLE Teacher Librarians’ Conference in Newcastle about creating book trailers and digital stories. As part of the preparation, a series of space and science fiction related digital photos had been newly uploaded to Photo Peach (“Here’s one I prepared earlier…” again) and I was able to demonstrate how images could be easily moved, duplicated or deleted in the editing process.

During the presentation, 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.

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

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.

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/

And this just in: the Tuesday Library Book Club at Wyong High School was inspired by my presentation at MANTLE and spent some time with their teacher librarian, Ms Murray, making claymation figures to create an Animoto audiovisual to celebrate Book Week 2013 and its theme HERE. Wow!

Preparing to celebrate

Happy Chinese New Year!

Our K-2 students are about to start investigating Chinese New Year, as a part of a HSIE unit, “Celebrations”. Libby Gleeson & Armin Greder’s “Big dog” will be a feature picture book, as will Di Wu & Kathy Huang’s “Are you a dragon?”

Year of the Rabbit
Rabbit float on display near Central Station, 2011.

2011 Chinese New Year flagwhite2011 Chinese New Year flag
Rabbit pennants in George St, Sydney, 2011.

Chinese dragon and lanterns
Chinese dragon and lanterns, SCHM.

Zodiac animals
Chinese Zodiac animals, SCHM.

lanterns
Chinese lanterns, SCHM.

Emperor Robbie
Emperor Robbie Rules in 1/2S.

lanterns
Chinese lantern in 1/2S.

2011 Chinese New Year flag
2011 Chinese New Year pennant, George St, Sydney – notice
the numerals 2, 0, 1, 1, making the shape of a rabbit.

My photo (above) inspired a quick and easy craft activity for the students in our 2-6 hearing support unit yesterday:

2011 rabbit

2011 rabbitwhite2011 rabbit
2011 Chinese New Year rabbits by SCHM students.

Relive The Year of the Tiger (2010).

Relive The Year of the Rat (2008).

Relive The Year of the Rooster dragon parade (2005) on Photo Peach.

#203
Images of Dragons! on Flickr.


Dragon parade!

Where the wild chooks are

I just wanted to share a picture of my new Max doll, from the classic picture book, “Where the wild things are” (by Maurice Sendak) – just in time for the release of the new live action movie.

#187

The Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students created three more adventures for Bear and Chook and I uploaded the photos as a another Flickr slideshow:

Please click here!

As before, you can request to read the captions while the slideshow plays, or just watch the pictures. They (and I) hope you enjoy this digital story.

365 photos

A few weeks ago, I happened across two different references to a blogging project that was called “365 Photos“. The concept is to use a digital camera to create one photograph per day, using an almost-impromptu, aim-and-shoot technique. Some days, one finds oneself putting a lot of thought into a photo, or at least the subject matter. Other days, a surprise opportunity just presents itself. And other times, it might reach 11.58 pm before one realises that the day has almost slipped by without a suitable photo opportunity. The family dog is useful for such moments of panic (even if he’s asleep).

I’ve been uploading the resultant shots to my Flickr account, and assembling them as a cumulative “set”. This also means that I can create a slideshow, as I did a few minutes ago, by requesting an automatically-generated URL from Flickr. eg:

Click here

The slideshow presentation will get longer and longer as time goes on, of course. And there is an option to display captions – or not.

Although I’m doing this as a personal blogging exercise, over on my other blog – and it has certainly ensured that I have no shortage of things to talk about on that blog – I’m beginning to realise there are endless ways to adapt this project for use with a class of students. Not to mention the potential for using it to discuss visual literacy!

I found a great online explanation of “365 Photoshere, and the reflections of its first advocate here.

It pays to network

Sometimes I network with other teachers and students without realising it, and it’s fantastic when it pays off.

One of the advantages of collaboratively programming and planning lessons with each Stage group at school is that I can adapt each library activity to suit the various classes, taking into account the need to share available resources, and how best to complement the learning styles of the students and the teaching styles of their teachers.

Essentially, though, the lessons are repeated several times in a week – albeit with variations. By the end of the week, I’ve usually mastered my patter that leads into the activities. I also like to keep every stage informed about what units other stage groups are studying, simply because one never know when networking possibilities will arise. In fact, in my last school, I kept a large noticeboard in the library foyer – updated, week by week, as to which unit of work, key learning area or KLA, and type of text each class was being focused upon during their library lessons. (I’d do it at my current school, if only we had a noticeboard in the right place.)

Last week, no matter whether intending to use the Chinese New Year Parade photos (taken for Early Stage 1 and Stage 1) or the Bridges photos (taken for Stage 2), I recycled the same jokes with each class (ie. “Unfortunately, I didn’t have time on Sunday to get to Antarctica to take some photos for Stage 3…”). I’m so glad I did, because one teacher announced that her brother had just returned from a vacation to Antarctica – and had CDs filled with photographs of… icebergs, Antarctic cabins, icebergs, penguins, more icebergs, humpback whales, and did I mention – icebergs!

What a lucky break! And so, I was able to add a third slide show to my Flickr account, called Antarctica which the Stage 3 students will be able to use this week without worrying about the copyright of other Antarctica photos they may have found on the Internet!

As I said, it pays to network. Or rather, it often pays to be loquacious, because that can lead to very effective networking.