Good sounds – royalty free to schools

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Judy O'Connell

Last term some of our students were working on movie trailers with a colleague. A perfect opportunity to introduce ideas about open source, creative commons, or royalty free image and music for use by schools. There are a number of strategies that teachers should be familiar with – time to make a nice list!

I was pleased to get a ‘heads up’ from Barry Starlin about Soundzabound. Just in time for our next batch of movie work.

Here’s what the site tells us:

Soundzabound Royalty Free Music supersedes Fair Use in that we fully license the music with unlimited rights for education and sign off that you are protected. Fair Use has limitations in use and states the you are liable should there be a claim. Soundzabound also provides the solutions for:

Education Approved Content in a searchable database
Artist branding rights not covered under Fair Use
User statistic reports
Web-based interface formatted for all your production purposes

What this tells me is that it is safe to let students jump onto the site and grab what they need to enliven their productions. Soundzabound shows how their sites works, and the multitude of contexts that sound bites can be used in.

This is where the site comes into its own. The movie trailers our students made could not be put onto the web safely – fair use didn’t cover publication of the end products on Youtube. Had the students used files from Soundzaboud we could have shared their magical creations.

My next move, when the school term starts, is to make available a school list of resources for such productions. Should have done it ages ago – but the time is now right.

Here are some sources I have already collected. There will be others I know, so if you have a favourite site, list or collection, and have time please let me know.

Creative Commons and Music

Content used to be king

Posted on May 12, 2009 by Judy O'Connell

There was a time when books, newspapers, magazines and journals were the prime source of content and information. It was always your move! navigating the authority maze, enjoying slow reading of (limited) information sources in order to gain a knowledge base that matched a particular curriculum outline.

This was when content was king and the teacher was the sage on the stage.

Now communication is the new curriculum, and content is but grist to the mill that churns new knowledge. Why? I came across a few good reads this week that set me thinking and wondering about the changes that we must support in our teaching and in our library services.

Think about this:

The era of Teacher Librarians ‘taking a class’ in order to show kids how to search, get basic skills, or navigate resources is over. This is a teachers job!! Teach the teacher by all means (that’s professional development) but don’t waste time doing repeat performances for a teacher who hasn’t caught up with how to integrate information resources into the curriculum. How can they claim to be good teachers if they can’t model how to use information effectively? How to use new search tools? How to navigate databases? These ARE NOT specialist skills any more – they are core skills for learning!

The era of collaborating, communicating and integrating resources flexibly and online is here to stay. Every form of interactive and social media tools should be deployed by school libraries to support learning, teaching and communicating with and between students. Are teachers ready for this? Are your own library staff ready for this?

So what is the situation with content?

Dave Pollard wrote about The Future of Media: Something More than Worthless News. Agreed, the reason he wrote the post is quite different to mine – but in a lateral kind of way, what he wrote has huge relevance to information professionals. Media is changing, and the way media can work for or against learning is deeply concerning. Dave writes

Few people care to take the time needed either to do great investigative work, or to think creatively and profoundly about what all the mountains of facts really mean.

There’s the rub – mountains of fact. Authority and relevance are as nothing when we are confronted with mountains of information to sift and verify. The alternative is to grab ‘something’ and miss the opportunity to engage in real metacognitive knowledge activities.

The diagram Dave offers provides a strong framework for information professionals. How do we deal with new and urgent information need? What value do we place on media scrutiny?

Of course we can’t answer these questions effectively without taking into consideration the shifting dimensions of interoperability and semantic search. We are datamineing on the one hand, and creating data on the other.

Now what’s the implications of this? Semantic search depends on our tags! and our tags depend on our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in data sets. It all depends on how things are defined and linked! Duplicate and meaningless content is created by poor search engine optimization and keyword cannibalisation. This means that the info junk pile continues to grow. The Search Engine Journal provides a good set of graphics (with explanations) that spell out these problems .

Here’s a simple image that demonstrates a good interlinking strategy. Then go and examine the canonical solution – looks like the stuff of good information professionals to me!

Of course, alongside the need for good search engine optimization is the growth in search functionality and growth in search engine options. Google has some new features that have been tested in the past months. Google wants to expose some advanced search options that allow you to refine the results without opening a new page. The options are available in a sidebar that’s collapsed by default, but it can be expanded by clicking on “Show options”.

You’ll be able to restrict the results to forums, videos, reviews and recent pages. There’s an option that lets you customize the snippets by making them longer or by showing thumbnails, much like Cuil. Google wants to make the process of refining queries more fun and exploratory by adding a “wonder wheel” of suggestions.

Maybe I’ll just stop thinking and wander right off and do some Semantic Web Shopping!

What? more issues to consider? not my move anymore? ….. massive change is pushing us into a 21st century information maze.

Change is coming (image by Maria Reyes-McDavis)

Ada Lovelace

Posted on March 25, 2009 by Judy O'Connell

I have no time to write a blog post..but I must register my contribution to Ada Lovelace Day – something new in my repertoire!

March 24th is Ada Lovelace Day – and since I figure it is just past the 24th in some parts of the world, I am not too late! Ada Lovelace Day is a great chance to honour women who excel in technology environments. For me this is important as I know what a ‘bashing’ we can get for our views and inputs at times 🙂

Ada was clearly a wonderful innovator, and visionary thinker. I am sure there are many many of them in the world, though it’s magic when you know someone personally.

Janet Clarey has a fabulous list in her post Role Models in Educational Technology on Ada Lovelace Day . I found some new people for my PLN.

But wait – what about my special mentions? People who have had a significant impact in my life? I am going to stick to Australian women – next year – the world!

The person I encountered via the intrawebs, and then met in real life, and who inspired me to think big and go virtual was of course our very own Jo Kay (aka Jokay Wollongong). Founder of Jokaydia, she is a design, educational technology and virtual worlds magic woman who we could never do without. Thanks to her we have the wonderful Islands of Jokaydia, which provides us heaven ‘in world’ for all our professional fun and learning needs. Click here to teleport to the jokaydia Landing Point (SLurl).

Not long after I encountered Jo Kay in my learning journey, I also had the good fortune and injection of inspiration from another Australian researcher who specialises in Digital Identity and Virtual Worlds.

For her day job, Angela Thomas (aka Anya Ixchel) is a senior lecturer in English and Arts Education and her research interests include digital cultures, new media literacies, multimodal semiotics and digital narratives. Don’t think she stops there! Check out her books, her research, her developing virtual projects – and if you are lucky catch her for a little virtual shopping or second life experimentation. You really should visit Angela’s Virtual Macbeth project too!

But alongside these wonderful women, I have also come across a host of others that have also greatly inspired me. I would love to share pictures for all of them with you. Not going to happen!

So here are their names and links to their work. They are no less important to me, and I count them all as friends and sources of inspiration. Thank you to you all!

Kathryn Greenhill at Librarians Matter, superb emerging technologies librarian

Frances Manning at HFS Conversations beating the drum at her school

Marita Thomson whose StoryLines I love!

Kerry Johnson, that inspiring new Australian at Neotenous Tech 🙂

Julie Lindsay, that wonderful Australian abroad at E-Learning Journeys

Danielle Miller, CEO of Enlighten Education, creating shiny girls at the ButterFly Effect.

Suzette Boyd, of Scotch College, who has inspired the best every library website I know!

Marketing and design in your library

Posted on March 18, 2009 by Judy O'Connell

I am delighted to be in Cairns at a full day workshop organised by the Catholic Education office for the schools in this area. “Contemporary School Library Design” – the whole day is designed to help schools look at their school libraries and to build or renovate school libraries that meet the needs of 21st century learners.

The first session of the day to set the scene was provided by Kevin Hennah. Kevin is a wonderful inspiration to many in Australia, using design and marketing ideas to repackage school libraries. Many of our teacher librarians are familiar with his work, and have already made transformations to their libraries – with either a lot of money or on a shoe-string budget.

80% of your loans are generated by 20% of your collection. Yes!! Kevin urges us to weed, weed, weed. Don’t pride yourself on the size of your collection – pride yourself on the quality and presention of your collection. No question, part of Kevin’s focus is to remind us of the hugely relevant focus of reading and literacy that our school libraries MUST retain in the age of digital learning.

The trick of great ‘merchandising’ is to cater for kids needs. First impressions count! Remember your visit to Boarders? The presentation of so many ‘front facing’ books is essential, as our kids are so image conscious. We must market ourselves. We must entice. So grab the flavour of this conversation and make your transformations. Kevin always talks about “prime real estate” – don’t put a big table in that space, with a tablecloth and some books. Think Borders and think clever.

School libraries have way too much signage. Return shute? make a list of all the things that frustrate you! Make sure you have lots of front facing books – and put them on the ends of your aisles.

Kevin loves the creative use of slat wall. But remember, to be careful what acrylics you buy and where you place these display units. Image Plastics are developing excellent perspex holders.

What we are aiming for – walking into a school library and thinking “wow”!! First impressions are so important! Retail book stores provide a powerful marketing ideas – take the ‘good stuff’ from retail, and package it into 21st century pedagogy. Use the base line of clean design, and a colour palette that allows you to change in the future.

Remember, don’t display your magazines by displaying them in alphabetical order!

My view for the future? I believe we have to renovate to innovate – to make books and digital engagement our prime focus, to sell our passion for learning by ‘marketing’ to each new audience! Clean, creative, gorgeous!

Kevin’s message is to take the flavour of possibilities – and translate them into your own setting. Make an impression – don’t be generic. Think outside the circle of traditional libraries. Be bold – and don’t let your teachers hold you back. Yes, it’s about change, and pedagogical innovation. Love life, love your library, love change!!

Creative Commons: What every Educator needs to know

Posted on March 2, 2009 by Judy O'Connell

This slideshow provides the framework for a discussion about how educators can model ‘creative integrity’ and how they can assist students to leverage the Creative Commons as content creators.

Eye catching mashups for the Grammy Awards

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Judy O'Connell

Show this to the art and music department!!

Reported by Fiona in Information Visualisation and Data: a Music Example:

Promotion for this year’s Grammy Awards focuses on some very eye catching visualisations of some of the nominated artists, made up of the names of some of their favourite songs. An amazing mashup between structured data, tag clouds, and the style of ASCII art you might have made a decade or two ago. Click through to the article to view some examples of the ads (no CC/free versions available). The LA Times has more about how they were created –

“A Grammy spokeswoman says each artist was asked to give the Recording Academy 10-20 songs that influenced or affected their life and career. The lyrics and song titles are then featured in the print and television ads.”

Reading Fast Forward

Posted on January 3, 2009 by Judy O'Connell

I read a lot of stuff, then I tweet a lot of stuff! But I also can’t resist blogging things that to me signal an important idea, change, or some experimentation by me or others.

So I tweeted, then blogged about something that is VERY exciting to me. Just over the Christmas hols I’ve been chatting with friends about my iTouch, eBooks, iPhones, Kindles, and the art of reading. I love reading, but I don’t always remember to carry my book around with me. I admit, I am looking forward to the flexibility of reading digitally more and more.

Here is the next thing that will work for me, and perhaps for you! LifeHacker explains:

iPhone/iPod touch only: If recession budgeting meant choosing an iPhone/iPod touch over a Kindle when the dust cleared this holiday season, you’re in luck: Stanza is a free and fantastic ebook reader for your iPhone/iTouch.

The free application comes pre-loaded with several sources for downloading free or public domain books (including the entire Project Gutenberg library), so you can easily download books like The Art of War, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, or Walden in just a few seconds without spending a dime.

However, if you want to get new books, Stanza also comes with a bookstore with which you can purchase popular new titles as well. Prices range from $8 to $15 based on the books I browsed. The reader itself is fully customizable, so if you don’t like the standard black text on white background look, you can just as easily pick something that suits you. Stanza is a free download for the iPhone or iPod touch.

Better still, this is a fantastic way of providing ebooks for students!!

No excuses now..any library or classroom can get into this easy form of distributing quality reading.

Stanza [iTunes App Store]

A Lesson Worthy of an ‘A’

Posted on December 27, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Only teachers who truly love teaching and learning, can possibly lead others to consider living life ‘in possibility’. This is my inspiration for learning and teaching in 2009!

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “A Lesson Worthy of an ‘A’“, posted with vodpod

Powering Practice in 09

Posted on December 16, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

The end of the school year – yes! The end of planning changes – no! Last week an intrepid Powerful Learning Practice team at Joeys gathered to plan for their work in 09. Our day was about developing concrete steps forward, as well as sharing, dreaming, and wondering how to move forward.

Dean Groom came along for the day, and acted as facilitator extraordinaire – an outside voice always makes a difference. Best of all, Ross (Headmaster) came along for the beginning hour or two, and urged us to look for achievable gains..even if small to begin with. So, true to his intention, we have come up with some small but achievable actions to begin to turn the learning focus around.Our focus will be on Year 7 in terms of a whole school project, even though each of us will be doing things in our own classes, we figure that a full school focus will add that extra level change.

First up – we will introduce all Year 7 to their new school and their new life at Joeys via a Ning. Each boy will join the Year 7 Ning, and use it to build up their profiles, network socially within the school, and achieve what is traditionally done in Year 7 in terms of ‘introducing myself’ into a new school environment.

Second – the reason for this first jump into a Ning, familiarisation, and establishing connections is to move to the next phase of the project – digital citizenship. Again, the Ning will model online behaviours, allow for indepth work in the area, and expand the boys understanding of digital citizenship with a broader range of tools, so that the learning landscape becomes embedded in their online world. Amongst the tools chosen for early use will be Glogster – so that students can fashion their classroom projects (some of which will still be relatively analogue depending on the class they are in) and enhance their wikispaces accordingly. Hey, this will be a new take on the inevitable poster/powerpoint activity! I am going to use the new eduGlogster to set up accounts for all the boys in Year 7, and Anthony will set up the Ning.

Finally – we will of course use a variety of tools as the project progresses. But the idea will be to embrace digital citizenship and online learning as a normal part of schooling. Cool.

We are not sure how it will evolve – it’s a work in progress. The main thing is that we are embedding online learning as mainstream for these boys – so regardless of whether they are at school for study or at home for homework, they can connect and continue their learning and thinking. I hope that my work with my Year 7 English class (which I also asked for, so I could ‘do’ rather than ‘mentor’ all the time) will help us to better understand the possibilities for us at our school at our point in the learning journey revolution.

I have to thank my PLP team for being so keen to do this, given the remarkable constraints that the workload in a 24/7 boarding school imposes. We don’t get much time at all to participate in the PLP online Ning, but we do chip away at it at school, taking ideas and enthusiasm from the PLP project run by Will Richardson and Sherly Nussbaum-Beach which is empowering our transformation. We’ve embedded an official time each fortnight within our teaching schedules so that we can be guaranteed to meet and evolve our own understanding as well as our student’s learning. We have online collaborative tools that enhance our connectivity – Google Chat and Google docs are our mainstay at the moment. We will probaby also use Microsoft Onenote within school too.

Will we go into virtual worlds together? I certainly hope so, as there is such a strong interest emerging in Australia now, and Jokaydia is getting to be such a central hub for developments in the school and tertiary sectors.

Roll on 2009!