Keeper – Mal Peet – review

reviews

KeeperKeeper by Mal Peet
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This extraordinary book grabs you from the first paragraph and doesn’t let go until the final page.

It’s unusual for me to read a sport related book, and even more unusual for me to read a book about soccer. But his is more than just a book about soccer. This is the story of a young, awkward man, who plays soccer so badly that he doesn’t even get put in goals. H eis the village joke. Disillusioned and bored he wanders further and further into the South American jungle near where he lives, and where his father goes every day to harvest the forest trees.
The boy meets a man – a man who will teach him everything there is to know about being a Keeper. But this is only part of El Gato’s (The Cat) story.
The forest that his father is so busy cutting down is busily encroaching on the village. The environmental effects are noted but do not intrude. The intrigue and wealth that is involved in high stakes soccer is explored, as is winning, and losing.

I was so pleasantly surprised by this book, and am now in the middle of the follow-up title, The Penalty.

A must read for readers from 13 and beyond.

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Rufus the Numbat – David Miller – review

Ramblings

Rufus the NumbatRufus the Numbat by David Miller
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a delightful book, with David Miller’s trademark paper constructions illustrating the story of Rufus the Numbat’s shambolic journey through town. Rufus wanders around, entirely oblivious to the mayhem and destruction he leaves in his wake, and once the journey is complete he returns to his burrow for a well-earned rest.

I was not completely happy with this book at first; something was making me uncomfortable; something was not quite right. And then I realised – the text is superfluous. In fact, it’s a bit of a distraction from what might have been a wonderful word-less picture book. Miller’s visual storytelling is far superior to the text, and I feel the book would have been more complete without it.

The production of this title is Ford Street usual excellent standard, and this book would be a fine edition to any library or bookshelf.

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Week 7 – Key Activities

education, Web 2.0

1. If you haven’t already seen it, watch the section of Joyce Valenza’s Wizard of Apps video on research tools.

http://dotsub.com/static/players/portalplayer.swf?plugins=dotsub&uuid=b957d7b5-282e-41c2-8c46-ec27ba20eb91&type=video&lang=none

This is such a great video. I can’t imagine (at this stage) getting any of the students at Mentone suspending their cool for long enough to do something like this. But you never know. 🙂

2.  What are your experiences with plagiarism in the classroom? How have you addressed the issue? Explore this site for more ideas.

This is a great site, and I have put it on my blogroll for later use. I have previously used Google (quote marks) to do basic searches, and really like another website that I can’t remember the name of at the moment. You can put in up to 200 words and it will analyse the text and attach links to the marching websites, which means that you can really get proof of the plagiarism.

3. Investigate some of the following tools:

  • State Library of Victoria’s Ergo

An awesome site, and one I often send senior students to for help with writing essays and getting organised.

Diigo is good. I have already used Delicious, but I think that Diigo might be a bit more user friendly.

  • Google Search Posters; Primary and Secondary. They show students how to research effectively using many Google options

These are a good idea but the design sucks! I had a go at Glogster, but I don’t like it much. Very clunky!

I tried to have a go at this, but I left my SLV card at work. Will have another go at work/ or in the holidays.

  • Set up a Google Custom Search Engine . By logging in with your Google account details (same as your Google Reader username and password) you can customise your Google search to only search from specific sites.

To tell the truth, I couldn’t see the point of this.

4. Join the Elluminate session featuring Jon Hurford from Ergo on Wednesday 9th June. You can access the session via the link in the Ning.

John was a bit boring for me, especially after the previous two fantastic elluminate sessions. I didn’t manage to get all the way through.

Week 6 – Learning and Teaching Tools 2

education, Web 2.0

1. Research some of the following tools

I have seen TLF/ DLOs before. I have found Scootle unwieldy in the past, so I hope that the interface has improved somewhat – or maybe it’s my skills that needed upgrading! Edmodo is new to me. See TeacherTube and YouTube, not really used edublogs tv, and find that iTunes is very biased towards history and economics.

Irene Anderson at ISV (irene.anderson@independentschools.vic.edu.au) is very helpful getting independent schools onto Scootle.

2. Write a post on your favourite discovery of the week, ensuring that you link it so that readers of your blog can access it. Can you envisage using something like edmodo for learning and teaching? How could using any of these tools transform learning?

I think Edmodo is probably the most useful for me at the moment. We are investigating LMS at the moment, and this seems to be a reasonably good, free, web hosted incarnation.

I’m encouraged by Irene Anderson’s enthusiastic and competent management of Scootle membership and I’m really hoping that it has improved since I used it last.

I can’t really see how edublogs tv  is different to YouTube. Both upload videos, although there seems to be less silliness on edublogs, but many of the videos appear to have been uploaded from other sites, as well as from schools.

TeacherTube is a great way for educators to share great stuff they have found and made with each other, although a fair bit of it is pretty amateur.

iTunesU is very American and is quite narrow in its subject focus. I can see potential for some great learning to be done using it though.

Week 5 – Q. 10-13

education, Web 2.0

10. Watch some of this Marco Torres video relating to students using copyrighted music in videos and how to avoid problems:

Oh, wow! This is one of those tl:dw moments. I got about 23 mins in, and had to get back to work. But I’m going back to this one. You really need to go BEYOND the music, because it gets way deeper.

Pity about the sync problem.

11. Explore these resources.

Loved the Spectrum of Rights comic strip. I would definitely use this with students to show how using Creative Commons works can really help their presentations. I have always had trouble with searching for items that have CC licenses. Any ideas, anyone?

I have seen and used all the other sites before, and they are all good. Most overlap each other, but none cover the whole range of copyright issues, so you really need to use them all together.

12. What are the things that you need to be addressing at school in terms of protecting intellectual property?

Definitely music, and web images, especially thumbnails/ images that you can search for using Google. Students use these media all the time to ‘jazz’ up their presentations, but have no idea about attribution or usage. Trouble is, neither do their teachers, so maybe that is where we have to start. 

13.  Attend the Elluminate session on with Sandy Phillips on Wednesday 26 May. Access to the session is via the link in the Ning.

Good stuff! Lots of Dept resources that non-dept school teachers don’t know about. Plenty to share. (When?!!!!)

On to Week 6.