http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/services/education/youthlit/readalert/index.php/page/2/

Lots to choose from on YA lit…only a few books at a time so not overwhelming

Best of the Web – new links selected by NYPL librarians (avail by RSS)
URL: http://www.nypl.org/rss/bestoftheweb.xml

anulib.anu.edu.au/epubs/innopacnewbooksrss.html

 – This was especially inspiring as students and staff are alerted to newly cat’d books via RSS, lets do this instead of new books this term posters!!!!!!!! WEEKLY UPDATES for our staff and kids…neatly org’d into faculty/subject content!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

www.slv.vic.gov.au/about/site/feeds

Especially int’d in employment for library staff pages

http://www.unshelved.com/

Library cartoons by RSS, some good enough to print and display or cheer everyone up with.

these are cheaper than real books …in Japan they also have mobilephone books delivered monthly in installments.  I am concerned about vision issues for kids who read whole books in this manner…I know it’s old fashoned and prob a thing of today and not tomorrow etc…but there is nothing like actually holding a physical book and enjoying a good read without the buzz of electricity…I always feel a sense of relief when the comps are all closed down at the end of the day and that electricity heat and buzz clears off. The last thing I want is to have that while I am reading. It is  wonderfully cheap and fast to download books and I have accessed many fulltext books this way, for university assignments…I keep the chapter I am working on up on divided screen so I can pull quotes out as I go. I have a terrible feeling that if I said these ebooks were great that I’d eventually do myself out of a job…hopefully not in this lifetime…

I used audiobooks extensively in hospital for a 4 month stint. I had a marvellous collection on both tape and CD to plow through esp LORD OF THE RINGS…what a challenge that was, as well as Gerald Durrells. Wonderful way for my students to hear the book / play etc read…unadulterated and unchanged..which happens in screen adaptations usually. The availability of these to download from the internet needs to be screened of course to prevent piracy 🙂 Great assistance to special needs / kids who are slow readers/ anyone else!! so they get the gist of the story.

I don’t like this so far and have heard first hand how it sucks people into the vortex of forgetting to communicate with other humans. It is unhealthy, dangerous and I know that the graphics and options are brill. but would suggest keeping this one banned at my school….get them out and communicating face to face…not sitting pastyfaced chatting online…I am all for FACEBOOK where I interface with people I know about SOCIAL ARRANGEMENTS WE WILL MAKE…I know a girl who is 10 yrs younger than me who ended up a massive, unhealthy, mentally ill person who had to be sent to a psych. because she spent about 23 hours a day in front of this thing…and she USED to be my walking and gym buddy…it can happen to anyone if it is overused and unpoliced.

 recently have updated my theme since the superdoopper selection of graphics increases all the time.  am v. impressed with the Akira Isogawa contribution with an oriental theme. the contents haven’t changed for me though… prefer the uncluttered look with Geelong weather, wikipedia access, ebay access, date and time, book of the day and the TO DO gadget is useful (if I remember to use it). Unfortunately I often have time to access my computer at home in the evening!!!! So it’s often a case of reading about what I forgot to do…wouldn’t we all like to have more bum to seat time to check our screens at work!!!!!!!!! Hard to do when there’s teaching to be done, accounts, acquisitions, naughty lunch smugglers sneaking in on rainy days…will endeavour to sneak glances and leave it all up on the screen in lockdown screensaver mode. Such tools as these are great to make us really feel that our computer is our friend and we own what we see and do on it, and can specify how we view what we are getting. It is really creative. I am so into getting my own page up wherever I am. I expect 99.8% of kids already have this downpat at the senior school whereI work…will investigate and show those who don’t have it how BRILLIANT it is to take ownership of your googling a bit further.

So into this esp for ESL and language learning…can  see the benefits of a teacher/lecturer putting podcasts on for students to reinforce the class, help students catch up on missed classes !!! Podcasts are really suitable for revising factual content or listening to passages of language…this would help kids who need to hear the lesson a few times to catch on…oh so many benefits!!! Lets get the infrastructure going to use more of this please!! I like the fact that a podcast is available to all or to a closed audience…

RSS feeds and Feedreaders…found this in drafts..unpub’d…
Googlereader was a complicated and unexciting way to keep informed. I much preferred using Bloglines as it was more userfriendly, colourful and I was able to navigate through start up steps more easily, which would be important for my students too. Overall, I don’t have time to check and delete all the bulletins. Even though some RSS feeds from for eg. The New York Public Library on YA literature were fantastic, I think the traffic in my inbox would lead more to cancel the services. Students undertaking research on an issue may find it useful to subscribe to for eg on specific environmental issues – logging in Australia or something. Altogether there are more academic and efficient ways to build a repetoire of articles on even that.

Totally have no idea where my last post on wikis has disappeared off to…need to check other entries…Rollyo showed up but not wiki post…gee!!!!

As I said before 🙂  use wikipedia a lot for personal/academic/school use and have the sense to also teach about how it is constructed and advise students to check for correctness of info found therein using encyclopaedias etc. Excellent feature is that we can track changes…there is a feature in Wikipedia that shows the evolution of each article. Some other gems are WikiHow; Wikitravel; Wikibooks; Wiktionary…so useful, try them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have read a great casestudy on Wedderburn College about Working with Wikis…they have a main ‘portal wiki’. On this wiki is posted info and teaching and learning ideas for tecahers. From this wiki, links lead to class wikis, indiv student wikis and sub school wikis. Please buy and read “Technology toolkit : Introducing you to Web 2.0 by John Pearce and Gary Bass”. A+++++

This has been an outstanding way to be really specific about where I want to draw info from and I can see that this would be a great way to provide kids with a hotlist of authenticated safe websites from which to draw info on a topic.  i use it to get info and cut through the www rubbish and useless info…ON CAMELLIAS!!!!!    

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camellias; http://www.camellia.org.au/; http://camelliagrove.com.au/

I originally set up del.icio.us account to keep a tab on all my bookmarks so that I could access them from any computer anytime anywhere! This has proved a godsend in terms of organisation in my life. I recommend this for everyone who uses multiple computers. In terms of use for the classroom it would be great to create lists of useful websites and make them avail to support different curriculum areas / research topics…we do this using pathfinders already at senior high level…will investigate further and see if any of fellow staff are doing this yet!!!! I would like to have an interactive setup that staff or students could add websites to that they have found useful on anything from study areas to fiction… It is certainly an exercise in learning how to categorize and group like websites.

Amazingly useful tools here. I have been an avid user of Google maps for ages whether I am looking for a roadmap / satellite image (of my house!!!) , great for international way finding or checking out places I have been to. for those of you who haven’t tried Google Earth this is also wondrous!

Google docs would be great to centralize docs I am working on to be accessed from anywhere – from different systems for different purposes eg spreadsheet from home accounts, word docs for uni and slideshows (powerpoint presentations) for work. It seemed easy enough to upload a file from my desktop into Googledocs.

 Google Book would be a wonderful learning tool with all those fulltext study guides, esp for English literature – important inclusions were sections such as reviews of the book, write a review, contents, popular passages and main book subjects eg.Fiction/ Classics, Fiction/Romance etc. It might be good if the site included a basic blurb / storyline summary for each book. Even just the one from the covers. This could have implications for those who like to add blurbs when cataloguing… it could be much speedier to cut and paste into the catalogue…hmm will think further on this!