Australian Poetry Library

There I was, at the conference last week, talking about my age old dream for a site that would allow access to a range of contemporary Australian poetry for a micro-payment and lo and behold, I’m told that such a site already exists.

Called the Australian Poetry Library, the site is funded by the Australian Copyright Agency. They say:

The Australian Poetry Library has been developed to promote a greater appreciation and understanding of Australian poetry by providing access to a wide range of poetic texts, many of which are now out of print, as well as to critical and contextual material relating to them, including interviews, photographs and audio/visual recordings. At present the site contains over 42,000 poems, which can be searched via keywords, and which are also indexed according to some selected poetic forms and main themes. It will be progressively developed over the coming years to include work by more poets, as well as more critical and contextual material.

Through keyword searches the site will allow teachers and/or students to select poems relating to a particular subject or theme that students are studying, and to create their own personal anthologies. Teachers and/or students will be able to download and print poems for a small fee, part of which is returned to the poets via the Copyright Agency Limited. Further reproduction, electronic display, email or other communication is not permitted except in reliance on the statutory licence scheme under Part VB of the Copyright Act 1968

Well worth a look, with thousands of poems available.

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Index cards – spotted in the wild!

After my recent forays into the world of flash cards in a digital format, it was nice to see some good old fashioned paper versions in class this week. Here’s to paper too!

 

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Ted-Ed and all that

There’s been a bit of bite-back recently around the ‘Ted-Ed’ concept and the usefulness, relevance or otherwise of the whole shooting match of powerful people spouting powerful ideas. Apparently, they censored a Ted Talk that was critical of the inequity at the heart of American society. That idea sure ain’t going anywhere fast. Gary Stager had a field day. He’s hated the Ted Talk thing from day one. Salon described Ted Talks this way

Strip away the hype and you’re left with a reasonably good video podcast with delusions of grandeur. For most of the millions of people who watch TED videos at the office, it’s a middlebrow diversion and a source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it’s changing the world, like if “This American Life” suddenly mistook itself for Doctors Without Borders. (here)

Admission 1 – I was always a bit sceptical about the $1000 a seat, or invite only idea that the Ted Talks seemed to be about in the first place. Yes, I too, smiled and nodded in hearty agreement when Sir Ken Robinson told us all how schools were killing creativity, but not a lot of the videos interested me, and the education ones always seemed a bit ‘off’ somehow. Too American maybe? Or too corporate? Or is that the same thing?

So, I hadn’t paid much attention to them really. I like video, and I think that they are a great resource when used carefully and judiciously. I’ve been actively campaigning for YouTube access at my school, first for teachers and, just this week, for senior students too. So far, the sky hasn’t fallen.

Admission 2 – However, I’m very dubious about the Khan Academy kind of approach to learning. **Maybe** the drill and drill kind of repeat and rewind thing might be useful for a skill based kind of subject (a concept in Maths?) but for Literature? I want to show that part from Olivier’s Hamlet where he finds himself in the graveyard as Ophelia is brought there, or the amazing swordfight at the end of Branagh’s version. I want to show it at the right moment in the teaching, that three to ten minute scene, then talk about it. That’s not anything to do with a chalkboard screencast of factorisation repeated until you can say it too.

But (Admission 3) I have become very interested in the concept of the *flipped classroom* and how that might supplement and enhance the classroom work I’m involved in. What if I could deliver that 20 minute overview of the SAC *success criteria* in a podcast or vidcast, and then gets the students to watch that at home? Wouldn’t that leave that 20 minutes or so free for the class to actually talk, collaborate, seek support, get on with things? That’s tempting. And (Admission 4) the tools for creating and delivering some of these enhancements, these ‘flipping’ tools, are so powerful and accessible and first time ever that they’re almost too good not to use. I can add audio to a PowerPoint with Adobe Connect and put it online so my students can watch it, and listen to the audio. I can set up an online meeting (I’ve talked about this before) with Adobe Connect and have a revision session prior to the exams, everyone in their own homes, meeting together. And that’s not to mention Skype, Slideshare, Edmodo, Class Dojo and good ol’ podcasts themselves to support student learning. So many geat tools, so little time.

Which brings me back to Ted-Ed, and their next innovation, allowing teachers to ‘frame’ a Ted Ed video with some questions: questions for understanding, questions for deeper meaning, deeper questions. And, they promise that it will work with YouTube videos too. Which is pretty exciting. A YouTube video taken away from the hideous comments and un-related playlists and brought into a learning context.

I couldn’t get it to work at first, and of course if that YouTube video goes away, so does your lesson. But it’s a much better way of looking at and framing a YouTube video in the classroom, or set for homework like the example below.

Here’s one I put together for Literature homework on Frankenstein. 

Getting started on thinking about ideas in Mary Shelley’s text: http://ed.ted.com/on/Cd3PnwNz

Or this one for the students I’m working with in Pen Club: http://ed.ted.com/on/US1FygmB

I’m still not receiving invites to Ted Talks, and console myself that any club that would have me as a member I don’t want to join. Andrew Douch said recently that he thought audio was more powerful and effective than video anyway, but here’s another tool for learning which, when combined with thoughtful teaching, might make a difference.

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Flashcards+

I’m always a little envious of those kids with piles of flip cards. Bundled up in big wads, encircled with rubber bands. ‘This is what I need to know’, they seem to say. Here is the contained knowledge. They sit at their desks and spread them before them, almost smugly.

So, I wanted to have some for my students … Just like they had in Psych. And, who knows, maybe some students actually learn like that? Like the question and answer, the certainty, the ability to review and revise.

Doing *some* research for flash card apps (of course I wasn’t going to go down the ‘paper’ pathway, I found Flashcards+ which works quite well (actually it took me quite a while to work out how the cards could be viewed) and works well with Quizlet, a kind of online community of Flashcard makers. I was very surprised to find several sets already made for Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which isn’t’ that widely taught.

Still, I made a set of cards for our literature study of *Wide Sargasso Sea*, mainly terms, concepts, characters, factual stuff, which connected more to the things I wanted the students to know and work on, rather than the standard vocab. style ones already there. You can look it up on Quizlet.

 

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Then I told the students about it in class and via the class blog where I could EMBED the cards so you could actually play them from the web site.

And, a couple of the students really liked it. Said it was useful. Said I should do it again.

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Ipad or notebook as a classroom tool?

Will the classroom notebook computer go the way of the Dodo! (I know, lame link!)

One of the things I been pondering over likely is whether the iPad can really be a replacement for the notebook computer as the default classroom device. I’ve taught in a one-to-one laptop program for over 15 years now and I that I can’t imagine teaching any other way. And perhaps that’s my problem, that I can’t imagine what a different model might look like. A model without a keyboard.

But when I really think about, how often are my students, even the senior students, writing long pieces in class? Mostly, they are note taking in OneNote and writing their longer pieces at home. And the iPad will handle that just fine.

Yesterday, I joined a colleague to do some writing and I didn’t take my laptop. One, my laptop is clunky, heavy, overheats, has a battery life of about an hour and is just so far removed from being an enjoyable experience that it’s not funny. Secondly, I wanted to see whether I could do some decent writing on the iPad.

So, I packed my iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and left the laptop at home. I wrote in Evernote, not because that’s a particularly good experience, but I knew it was automatically syncing with a shared folder in dropbox. We were revising a textbook for the new edition so every revision became a new note. I used an app called Popplet to do some simple mind maps and annotate some news photographs. I wasn’t writing anything really long but I hardly missed the laptop, maybe just the full-size keyboard.

Could I write a whole new book on the iPad? I doubt it. And it wouldn’t be a very pleasant experience if I tried. But could the iPad be the device during the day, the lightweight device with 10 hour battery life, instant on and a highly personalised personal productivity tool? I think it could. I never want to be without a “real” computer. It’s not the post-PC age for me. But more and more I’m thinking that the real computer might be a powerful desktop computer at home and the travelling computer an iPad.

I’ve changed a bit in my thinking about this. About a year ago I blogged that I didn’t think the iPad was good enough for senior students. I still think that senior students deserve the best tool possible, it’s just that I’m finding that the iPad is a more powerful tool than I thought

(Dictated to Dragon express, Photo by Warrick, of new iPad case I got for my birthday)

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The power of the voice

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I had one of those, ‘thank goodness that effort wasn’t  totally wasted’, moments a couple of weeks ago when doing some revision work with literature students to do with podcasting.
 
Teaching the poetry of Gwen Harwood earlier this year I was very keen to include as much audio as possible; after all poetry really lives when it’s spoken I feel.
 
So, I organized for each of the poems to have a definitive ‘reading’ by a student who knew the poem well. Hearing the poem is critical so I recorded each student reading in Audacity and saved them out as .mp3s which I put on the class wiki. I also recorded a series of mini-lectures on each poem, about five minutes each just talking through the poem like I would in class. So, each poem had a wiki page with a reading, a mini-lecture and the student contributions and notes.
 
 I didn’t think much about it, although to be truthful I was a bit disappointed that students didn’t see to see the value in the audio. So, in the very last lesson of the year I was pleased and surprised that a student from another class told me that she’d been listening to the audio and that it had been the most powerful thing for her own learning. That made it worthwhile somehow.
 

And justified me buying a new Yeti microphone in the recent Apple sale and putting it under the Christmas tree for a present to myself.
 

So, next year, more audio supplements to the teaching, more attempts to bring these works to life and maybe even a return to some of those rambling Ed-tech style podcasts I did a couple of years ago!
 

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Living in the future

Someone sent me this clip below from one of my favourite movies, 2001: A Space Oddysey and thought it looked like they were looking at Ipads (and that movie was made in 1969) I must admit that I don’t remember that scene from the movie, but it did make me think about the tools and technologies we have now, and how what seemed like science-fiction a short while ago, is something I’m holding in my hands right now.

We sure live in interesting times, with some amazing tools. Let’s use them to help students learn.

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The iPad trolley

I know it’s somehow inevitable, maybe even a good sign in some ways, but I was also kind of sad to see this ad in a teacher magazine today: the iPad trolley. Coming soon.

Surely of all the 1-1 tools we’ve yet seen the iPad is the most personal and personalisable device? Surely this s a device that students might actually own? Rather than be rolled out on special occasions to ‘do’ technology. A bit like the ‘education revolution’ promised? (sighs)

Nice trolley though.

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Writing on the IPad

Had my first experience of using the iPad in a real life writing session this week in a longish briefing on the Australian Curriculum. Three hours or so in an uncomfortable little seat all squashed up I was pretty glad I wasn’t balancing a full sized widescreen Dell or something and was interested to see how the iPad would go.

The answer was, pretty well. Battery life wasn’t going to be an issue meaning I didn’t have to fight the early arrivers who’d already camped on the four power points available. I used to do that I thought smugly!

So I got settled and got ready to take my notes and suddenly thought, what am I going to take my notes with? Evernote? A bit clunky for note taking. IA Writer, nice distraction free app but no formatting. And no formatting either for Notesy, which I finally decided upon, and which worked well and was happy knowing it would sync with Dropbox in the background. Don’t know what app others would recommend bit k did go home and buy Pages that night, for the formatting options. Would have loved an app for OneNote, which is where these notes were heading in the long run anyway. Not that I could actually get my notes off the ipad when I got back to work. For all the talk about the cloud and anytime anywhere computing, Windows networks don’t play well with other tools. I got the notes on to my computer finally when I got home to own little network.

Oh, and four phones went off in the meeting with each of the recipients doing that mock-sheepish thing where they hurry out of the room trying to look simultaneously embarrassed and important, but all the time actually taking the call as they go. If it was a student what would everyone be saying about those young people and their technology?

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Living and working with an Ipad

My wife works for a publishing company, in sales. She’s on the road a lot talking to people in bookshops and also health stores, new-age emporiums and anyone else who’ll listen. Times are tough in the book trade, and some of that’s to do with e-books, e-readers and the move to digital.

But that’s another point. The point is that she uses a notebook computer for work, almost exclusively for email purposes, but also some document handling, some online training and some access to the company’s database checking stock levels on various titles, and what’s new on each of the lists.

Currently, she uses a Dell PC running Windows Vista that we got about three years ago. The company doesn’t supply her with a computer; she has to buy her own, and her own internet access and try to claim it back on tax as a business expense. The Dell laptop looks and feels like a roof-tile and runs like it. It’s slow, unresponsive, constantly needing Windows updating and battery life is now down to 40 minutes fully charged. She needs something new.
And, for the first time, I’m thinking there is an alternative to bringing home another charcoal-grey box, and that alternative is an Ipad.

The Ipad will run her email, albeit only in the webmail format. She can open attached documents in either Google DOcs or an app like GoodReader. She can access her company database and keep a decent looking appointment calendar, task list and customer notes. It’s got roughly ten hours battery life and, if she got all fired up, she could be showing her customers glossy looking PDFs all stored on the Ipad.

For the first time it feels like it is possible that the next device might not be a notebook computer, or a computer at all in some senses, but something quite different.

And,if I’m thinking that’s going to work for her in her work, I wonder am I being open enough in my thinking about how it might work for my students?

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