Websites of interest

While surfing the Web, and checking out the scoop.it links that we follow, I came across some interesting websites that may be of interest - and some use – to others. Take a look.

http://www.pearltrees.com/

Pearltrees is nothing less than a reinvention of how we organize the web. The service provides a completely unique and visual experience to saving your favorite websites, organizing what you find interesting, and even seeing what others are saying about specific web destinations. Pearltrees is a great way to organize, discover and share the stuff you like on the web.

http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/essaymap/

Many students are reluctant to plan – especially when it comes to schoolwork - and this means they sit staring at a blank page for ages when you ask them to write an essay. Graphic organisers are a great way to get them started, and an interactive online one will probably appeal even more. This looks like a nice one – and you can print them out afterwards, so they have a record of their plans.

Check them out and see what you think.

I will be on six months leave starting from Monday, but Carrie will continue to post and keep this blog running – and I will post every so often as well. By the time I return, I hope to have lots of new ideas about ensuring our libraries here at Barkly College continue to be the hub of the school.

Book Review: Shift

Author:  Em Bailey

Shift is a psychological thriller that shifts between two possible worlds. 

It is about a teenage girl named Olive who has just turned her life around; she ditched her old friends and her old life. Now she goes to school, goes to work and hangs out with her best friend Ami like a good girl - but when a new girl, Miranda, comes to her town, she threatens to turn her life back around again.  

 I loved this book even though it’s really high on the creepiness factor.

Reviewed by Emma Vipond

Year 8

Sports Day

On Friday, Barkly College celebrated our annual Sports carnival, with lots of friendly competition between the Houses. 

There were lots of students and staff with red, green and blue costumes and warpaint, including painted hair and nails just to make sure that everyone knows which team they were supporting.

The red team, Stuart, won the day - which was no suprise to those of us in the know.  (Any guesses as to which team we belong to?)

Go Stuart!

Book Review: The Virals

In this story, we meet Tori, Temperance Brennan’s great-niece who has just moved to an isolated island of the coast of South Carolina.  The island only houses about 10 other families who all work on nearby Loggerhead Island.

The friends she makes here are all smart kids who love science and adventure but often are not part of the popular crowd.  Together they find themselves on the adventure of their lives!  It all starts with an old, illegible dog tag they find while exploring Loggerhead which leads them to dead bodies, a kidnapped wolfdog with a deadly virus, breaking and entering and running from people with guns that are out to kill them.

As if that isn’t enough, they all catch the virus from the wolfdog, and it is not just a simple flu.  The virus changes them – alters their DNA – forever.

Some parts of the story are a little bit of a stretch, but if you just let that go, you are in for an absolute roller-coaster ride of a story.  Tori is the star of the story, but the others – Hi, Ben and Shelton are well developed characters and each has their own personalities that contribute to the plot.  And if you like dogs at all, Coop will just steal your heart. He is adorable.

The Virals, as they call themselves, have a battle in front of them although they have some unexpected secret weapons.  The twists and turns keep you on your toes and you are never sure just what is coming next.

This book crosses a lot of genres – science-fiction, adventure, suspense and fantasy – but manages to cover them all extremely well.

The second one in the series is due to be released at the beginning of November– and I can thoroughly recommend this book to anyone – teen or adult – who likes a great mystery or action story.  The sci-fi and the fantasy are just a bonus as far as I am concerned.

Shelagh Walsh

Library Technician

Barkly College

Book Review: All I Ever Wanted

Author: Vikki Wakefield

'Rule Number One:

I will not turn out like my mother.

Mim wants to be anywhere but home- in a dead suburb and with a mother who won't get off the couch.

She's set herself rules to live by, but she's starting to break them.

In nine days she'll turn seventeen. What she doesn't know is that her life is about to change forever. and when it does, the same things will look entirely different.'

This book is so descriptively written that the author literally takes you into the life of 16 year old Mim who struggles with her 'depressive surroundings' and her turbulent relationship with her mother.

Follow her journey as she sets out on a quest to better her life with surprising outcomes. A must read for teenagers. I can thoroughly recommend this book.

Helen Majewski

Support Staff

Poem in your Pocket Day

Poem in a Pocket day was on Thursday 1st September here at Barkly College  - and staff and students were challenged to write or read a poem on any topic of their choice. 

Below is an entry from the Year 11 pathways group about our main street at night.  Great work year 11s!

TENNANT CREEK mainstreet

Where in the middle of Tennant Creek is where them heart is people walking from that end of the street to the other end of the street cars driving from South to East North to West

  

Smells of Spinifex burning smoke Fireries running red and blue light people cooking feed when people spill grog anywhere around town fire burning in the distance and the smell of the smoke travelling through thin air 

Sounds

People fighting Dogs barking kids making noise drunk make noise when they walk pass hostel cars go pass trucks make noise having great time partying having disco singing songs playing band music playing loud and old cars passing by with big sounds, people cheering and shouting

  

When i walk down the street at night i see people fighting, screaming, singing, people driving around the street listening to music, trucks kids running around happy  

street lights glowing golden orange umbrellas staging friends talking warm. Dark skies with stars twitching stories of old stories.

I see new people coming in Tennant Creek from other places.

  

How do the people feel? sometimes the peoples feel sad and other times people feel happy homeless hungry sometimes happy sometimes people feel weak and tired 

  

How do you feel? worried, sad, lonely, scared for them warrungu men in their loud broken cars, scared sometimes boring feeling sorry for other kids wondering around the street sad sometimes happy bored 

Year 11 English Pathways

Leroy, Kelisha, Alisha, Jacinta, Magdaline and Natalia.

Barkly Writers Blog

If you are a writer, interested in writing - or planning to become a published author - you may like to check out the link below.

There has been a new blog started for Barkly writers which gives you the opportunity to keep up with what is happening here in the Barkly in the writing world, meet some of the writers and check out some examples of their writing.

The link is:  http://thebarklywritersink.wordpress.com/

For any further information call Ktima at Barkly Arts and have a chat to her. I'm sure she would love to hear from you.

Have a great weekend, one and all!

Websites of Interest

Listed below are some interesting websites that we have come across in our prowls through the web just lately.

We think that some of these could really useful within classes and a couple would be great professional development tools.

Check them out and see what you think.

http://www.awesomestories.com/

AwesomeStories is a gathering place of primary-source information. Its purpose - since the site was first launched in 1999 - is to help educators and individuals find original sources, located at national archives, libraries, universities, museums, historical societies and government-created web sites.
AwesomeStories is about primary sources. The stories exist as a way to place original materials in context and to hold those links together in an interesting, cohesive way (thereby encouraging people to look at them). It is a totally different kind of web site in that its purpose is to place primary sources at the forefront - not the opinions of a writer. Its objective is to take the site's users to places where those primary sources are located.

http://www.greenlanediary.org/

This curriculum linked education program helps 8-13 yr olds to become aware of the stresses our planet confronts & how sustainable living can make a difference. Learning about the environment & what part our actions play is important so that we can make wise choices & take positive action!

http://www.macquarieonline.com.au/

Australia's premier reference publisher now offers a variety of quality resources online. Our range of services includes the Macquarie Dictionary Online, the Macquarie Thesaurus Online, MacquarieNet, the Macquarie Spellchecker and the Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia.

http://www.glogster.com/

Simply put, a Glog is a kind of poster —fully designed by you! A Glog is a unique creation made up of text, images, music, and video. It can be colorful, edgy, emo, or rock—it’s up to you to make your Glog stand out. Glogs are a perfect way to express who YOU are!  Glog stands for Graphical Blog.

http://www.digizen.org/

The Digizen website provides information for educators, parents, carers, and young people. It is used to strengthen their awareness and understanding of what digital citizenship is and encourages users of technology to be and become responsible DIGItal citiZENS. It shares specific advice and resources on issues such as social networking and cyberbullying and how these relate to and affect their own and other people's online experiences and behaviours.

http://livebinders.com/

LiveBinders is your 3-ring binder for the Web

·  Collect your resources

·  Organize them neatly and easily

·  Present them with pride

http://www.wordle.net/

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

And our favourite – for the moment at least:

http://www.scoop.it/

Be the curator of your favourite topic.  Create your topic centric media by collecting gems from relevant streams. Publish it to your favourite social media or your blog.  Scoop.it lets users follow topics, not people. Scoop.it brings you content on topics you’ve decided to follow and shared with other people.  People we meet are users who are willing to talk about the same subjects. What gathers people together are their passions!

Hope you enjoy checking out these sites and let us know what you think - or of any other good ones that you know.

Book Review: In the sea there are crocodiles

Author: Fabio Geda

This is the true story of Enaiatollah Akbari, a boy who was forced to leave his home and family behind in Afghanistan at age ten. It follows his remarkable journey from Afghanistan to Italy with many hardships, and even life threatening challenges as he tries to find a safe place to live and belong while running from the Taliban.

I couldn’t imagine at age 10, being left alone in a new country or a new city with no family or friends, not even any food or a place to sleep. This is exactly what he is faced with in one day after fleeing his small town of Nava in Afghanistan. His mother feels the only way for Enaiatollah to be safe is to give him a new start away from the Pashtun, a group who wish to take him, and will surely end up killing him just like his father. I think she would prefer to know he has a chance at surviving, rather than surrender him to a fate with the Pashtun.

I am amazed Enaiatollah is still alive after reading this story. He moves to find a better life, a safer life but to do this he has to get trafficked from country to country in horrible conditions, with no idea if he will make it to the next place. He is forced to hang off and hide in a lorry, walk for weeks through mountains and cross the ocean in a rubber dinghy. Then after all this, there is no guarantee that once he undertakes the dangerous journey and risks his life, the police won’t just catch him and throw him back over the border to where he started. It shocks me what he can endure at such a young age. It is only when he finds a safe place, one where he belongs and can’t be sent back to the horrible places he has been, will he be able to stop.

Fabio Geda tells the story for Enaiatollah as he recounts the journey to him. He describes the sights, smells and each place with detail. I found it easy to imagine what these places might be like in my own head with never having been there.

This book would be ideal for middle to senior school students because it is a true story of a boy at the same age, and enables them to see how different his life is, compared to their own.

Review written by Clare McDonald

Support Staff

Barkly College Secondary Campus

Further musings on Digital Citizenship

Becoming a digital citizen and being a digital native is the way of the future. It can’t be stopped and it can’t slow down. The material world that we live in feels sometimes as though it fades into the background and we are communicating more and more via digital methods.

For those of us that are old enough to remember, the internet was something that you did research on and received information about a topic. You could basically look at the internet as a one way street; giving us information without giving us the means to return the favour. This was called Web 1.0. Today however, Web 2.0 is here and this is the natural habitat of the digital native. Within this habitat, the digital native has many tools that it needs to survive. These tools include: blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, ebay, twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Myspace, Delicious, Stumble Upon, Wikipedia, Skype, Photobucket, flickr and visual thesaurus, just to name a few.

Many of the tools that the digital native is competent with are also useful in an educational setting. What does this mean for the modern library and more importantly, for this particular library? Do we need to think about changing the way that we provide information to many of the digital natives (students) that we assist every day?

With the introduction of eBooks, iPads and media players, we already have a big fat foot plonked heavily into the digital world.

So where to now? We use facebook, ebay and many other Web 2.0 tools every day. Many of them could be utilised in schools to deliver information efficiently because of the collaborative capabilities of Web 2.0.

Although this all seems fine and dandy, there are a few complications. How do we control the flow of information so that it is still beneficial to our students learning? We have a duty of care with our students and it would be necessary to make sure that they are aware of online privacy laws and what that means for them. Do they know that you are not allowed to put up any one else’s photo without their permission, and what can they do if someone has done this to them? Do they know how to adjust the settings on Facebook or similar to block out unwanted people/comments? How do we moderate digital conversations so we know that students are safe from bullying in the library, the one place where students traditionally come to feel safe and secure at recess and lunch times?

Questions I think we need to ask ourselves/to ponder upon.........

·        Most of today's young people are comfortable with technology, but are they using it appropriately – or even capably?

• Do they understand their roles and responsibilities in digital society?
• What are our own personal standards / ethics, especially if we think we cannot be caught or seen?
• How can we, as adults, help children to become responsible digital citizens?

These are challenges that at some stage, every school library is going to have to face. To provide relevant information to students we need to be in tune with the ways in which they are comfortable with receiving, and in using it. Libraries have been doing this reasonably successfully since around 3 A.D, and this is just another step along the long road of information storage/retrieval and usage. We just keep changing our methods of doing this to suit the clientele we are working with.

The scary part of this ramble is that it sounds like I know what I am talking about – and I do, to some degree, but in actual fact, I am being a duck. Calm and unruffled on the surface – but paddling like crazy underneath, just to keep my head above water. The good bit is I don’t think I am alone – and that is comforting in a way – we can all keep paddling along together and learn from each other. After all, isn’t that what this digital and social world is all about – collaboration?

Digital citizenship and what it could mean.

Have you ever used the internet to comment on what you see online, share information about yourself or others, communicate with friends, play games, get material for an assignment or buy stuff? If you answered YES to any of these then you are a digital citizen.

According to Wikipedia:

"A digital citizen commonly refers to a person that participates in society using a certain amount of information technology...through means of digital tools such as computers or mobile phones, along with access to these devices...

People characterizing themselves as digital citizens often use information technology extensively, creating blogs, use social networking and other means of modern communication. Digital citizenship begins the first time any child, teen, and/or adult signs up for an email address, posts pictures online, buys merchandise online, and/or participates in any [kind of] electronic function."

Using the above criteria, at face value, it would seem that most, if not all of us are digital citizens.  However, a discussion has been happening in the Library over the difference between digital citizen and digital native, terms which are often used interchangeably. The feeling in general here is that these are actually distinctly different terms.

One of the ideas put forth is that most students would be considered digital natives as they have been born into this era, where it is all there for them to access, they are not afraid of using the technology and have reasonably unrestricted access to it.  Depending on our ages many of the staff fit into the digital citizen term – or in some cases may even need to be ‘naturalised’ before fitting into this terminology.

Another comment made was that instead of digital citizen, maybe digital immigrant is a better term, with digital citizen being used to define someone who can manage their digital footprint safely and responsibly in our online world, and this is a comment that I can feel comfortable with.    

I cannot give you my own definition. This is because the definition is a collaboration of what many people think, not just one singular person coming up with the idea. Many websites split the population up even further. Digital toddlers, digital deniers and digital immigrants are some of my favourites. I don’t know how far I have to go until I earn my digital citizenship but I am excited about the places that it will take me (digitally of course!).

Worthless Wisdom # 4

Here is another worthless wisdom post - because we can, and because we were asked to.  No idea whether or not these are true but they are certainly fun to read about and share.  Enjoy!

·       A snail can sleep for three years

·       The Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt holds a constant temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit

·       People who chase after rare birds are called twitchers

·       Human eye detects 10 million colours

·       One California law states that sunshine is guaranteed to all people

·       Blueberry juice boosts memory

·       If you keep a Goldfish in the dark room, it will eventually turn white

·       'Jedi' is an official religion in Australia with over 70,000 followers

·       Frogs use their eyes to help them eat their food: frogs can pull their eyes inward toward the mouth to help push the food down their throat

·       Some kinds of frogs can be frozen solid then thawed, and continue living

·       Butterflies smell with their feet

·       An egg laden goldfish is called a twit

·       The average chocolate bar has 8 insect legs in it.

·       On average, a 4-year-old child asks 437 questions a day.

·       The collecting of Beer mats is called Tegestology.

·       During thinking, we use only about 35% of our brains

·       Ants never sleep

·       The study of flags is called Vexillology

·       The human brain is 80% water

·       A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second

·       Antarctica is the only continent without reptiles or snakes.

·       A flamingo can eat only when its head is upside down

·       Peanuts are one of the ingredients in dynamite

·       A lover or collector of books is called a Bibliophile.

Weblinks of Interest

Below are some sites that may be of interest to staff and students.  These are ones that cover study skills, help with generating bibliographies, as well as cyber safety and digital citizenship.

Check them out and see what you think.

http://www.studyvibe.com.au/home.aspx

is a new free resource for students between the ages of 13 – 17.

It has been designed by a small group of teacher librarians and teachers from Perth, including Leonie McIvenny.  The site focuses on research and study skills, from motivation to referencing to suggested iPad apps.  It also offers many downloadable documents and subject specific resources (for maths, sciences and English amongst others).

A Teachers’ Lounge is currently in the works and should be available in the next month.

http://www.schools.ash.org.au/dckc/refgen/refgen.html

This is a site for helping students to put together a Harvard style bibliography for their assignments.

You simply choose a category from the left side bar that is closest to the item you need to reference and fill in the boxes with the information from the item.  Then click generate reference and you will be given a bibliographic entry to add to your work.  Continue with each item until you are finished.

http://cybraryman.com/cybersafety.html

The internet catalogue for students, teachers, administrators & parents.
Over 20,000 relevant links personally selected by an educator/author with over 30 years of experience. 

http://www.cyberbully.org/documents/cybersavvyschools.pdf

Trying to prepare students for their future and teach them about Internet safety without Web 2.0 in schools is like trying to teach a child to swim without a swimming pool!

A combination of factors should ~ and will ~ lead schools to reassess how they are managing student Internet use, addressing Internet safety education, and responding to the concerns of youth risk when using technologies.

A recognition of the relatedness of these factors provides the opportunity for schools to address these issues in a more comprehensive manner. This document will outline how these issues interact and how Cyber Savvy Schools can embrace the future.