Support for school libraries in Far North Queensland is gr8!  The team at the Far North Queensland FNQ Learning Development Centre – ICT, have put together a fabulous brochure promoting change and essential development to ensure quality school libraries.  They have allowed me to embed the document here, so that you can download a copy for your own school district.  

There is also a gr8 lol::Great Libraries for Learning wiki to support the document – making it easy to cross-reference within your own online sites.

It’s pretty nice to be quoted in this brochure

Mobile visual search signals a very interesting shift in product marketing. Perhaps this is also a introducing a significant shift in information search  for students too?

Right now we can ask:  What is the object? Where can I get it? What it is useful for?  What do others say about it? Does it help me understand (something I’m learning about )  a little better?

In the future?

Convince your key stakeholders  of the importance of a Personal Learning Network – with the help of this excellent presentation (videos included)!!   Great work from  Mark Woolley!

The Kindle 2 has a number of cool features that you need to get the hang of to maximize the value of your purchase.  Since I’ve played with my Kindle for nearly a whole week now – I’ve been asked to pass on information about basic document management.

Documents to your Kindle

Go to Your Account in the top right hand corner of Amazon.

Once there, scroll down till you find the Manage Your Kindle Link

Click on that link, and sign into your account.

This Account Page is an important one for managing lots of things, but for now we’ll just focus on how to set up the email accounts that will let you to put documents and pictures onto your Kindle.

Your Kindle will have a name and a Kindle email address once it is registered (yourname@kindle.com)

If you’re buying it now this will have already happened, but it you received it as a gift, or it was purchased for you, you will want to register it to yourself (and to your credit card!).

Don’t worry about the iPhone or iTouch option – international users can’t register these yet!

Your Kindle Approved E-mail List – this is the important one!

Register one or more email addresses.  Why?  Because it is with your registered email address that you will manage the free document conversion services that kindle offers.

Once you have one (or more) registered, you’re ready for a test.

Send any file (Word, JPG, BMP, PNG) to yourname@free.kindle.com from your approved account.  Not long afterwards you will receive a return email with the file converted into a Kindle-friendly format.

Download this file to your computer.  Connect your Kindle to your computer. Drop the file into your Documents Folder.

Next time you open your Kindle to read, your document will be there ready for you.

Of course, the option is there to send the document via your approved email directly to your Kindle. Then you email it to yourname@kindle.com.  You will pay a small fee for that conversion. It’s fine for a Word document but my tests made it a non-starter for other documents. Doing it this way costs $US.99 per Megabyte and your WhisperNet account!

For more information about managing your Kindle  read Transferring, Downloading, and Sending Files to Kindle.

Lots of people have asked for a post about my first reactions to the Kindle.  I started writing this up, but found what I needed to say for people new to the Kindle was rather long -   so here are my first few day’s evalution rolled into a scribd document  ready to print and share with others.

I’ve just picked up some information about Mixed Reality Presentations that might be worth checking out. The [Zone] Touch Screen Media Television with Searchable YouTube and Fl… is worth testing.

What’s special about this in-world media TV?

James O’Reilly explains:

“You can substitute the uploading of Powerpoint texture slides into Second Life for L$10 each, and stream a Flickr slideshow into Second Life for presentation purposes for free. When in standby mode, the default screen can be replaced with your own picture by dropping a texture into the contents of the TV. This thus enables mixed reality presentations using Flickr as repository”.

That’s cool!

Judy+Dean@ReactionGrid

A bonus of ’school holidays’ is the opportunity for me to actually have more time to engage in exploration of teaching and learning developments – and this term break was no exception. In fact, the timing couldn’t have been better! The SecondClassroom team got busy, and went exploring new virtual environments for learners.

With a host of online buddies,  Dean Groom and myself  – the Second Classroom duo – had the golden opportunity to explore a wonderful new virtual landscape that has emerged as a real contender in the options for schools wishing to put their toes into pool of virtual opportunities. ReactionGrid, managed by an intrepid, highly experienced professional team keen to provide the kind of service that we all like – personal in nature and professional in all transactions.

ReactionGrid is a virtual 3D environment, that uses the OpenSimulator platform. Think SecondLife, but think less traffic, more focussed on education and learning for business and education – and in a PG environment.  A recent interview with Kyle Gomboy, CEO of ReactionGrid, published at the Metaverse Journal explains:

we’re focused on education and business and have laid down rules similar to those environments and have created a culture here that accepts that in order to be able to bring managers, school administrators and others inworld, they need to experience the medium safely. So we’re hiring former teachers, architects, estate managers and more to help us as we grow on thisparticular world.

Their partnership with Microsoft verifies for me that ReactionGrid is an important new space for educators.

Do read the whole article to get a feel for the developments at ReactionGrid. Keep in touch with developments by following Kyle (Dr_Manhattan) on Twitter.

I’ve had the chance to chat with Kyle, Chris and Trevor in the leadup to submitting a proposal to NECC2010.

Jokaydians @ ReactionGrid

So far I have been inspired by what we have found, and the benefits of OpenSimulator for education are obvious. The multiplicity of options for local hosting or hosting on their servers is great. A particularly appealing factor is the cost – affordable for any school, even with tiny budgets. In addition there are no complications with access – students and teachers are free to join and get involved in a school virtual learning adventure.

Steve Collis has gone so far as to draw up a 5-year Plan for Virtual Worlds & Integration with Moodle! Steve has demonstrated so well for schools in Australia that integrating a virtual worlds component into mainstream learning actually works! It’s worth reading about the school’s experiences.

The first demonstration of the power of using ReactionGrid for a school project was shown by Vicki Davis and her Digiteens. I visited their work on ReactionGrid and have been inspired by the flexibility and focus on learning.  In fact, if you’re wondering how ReactionGrid works,  take a quick look a the videos from the Digiteen Dream Team: ReactionGrid. The video tutorials might be just the thing to kick you off on your own virtual adventure!

To find out how to log into Reaction Grid with the SecondLife client, or other client options check out Logging into ReactionGrid.

We’re keeping a close eye on ReactionGrid developments at SecondClassroom, and have had a number of new members join the Ning once they realised that something hot! was under discussion.

Jo Kay and the Islands of Jokaydia have helped Australian educators begin to understand and explore ReactionGrid.  Check by to find out when the next meeting scheduled! Jokaydia@ReactionGrid is a great place to start your learning adventure.

Dean and myself – the SecondClassroom duo – won’t let this new opportunity slip by. We know that all educators should be learning about 3D virtual worlds.  Soon enough there will be 3D web access to these environments – but for now we must continue to play and learn together in these new environments.

Keep an eye out for a project or two that might emerge via SecondClassroom.

Check out this video and see what EducationAu has to say about Virtual Worlds in Education.

Supporting Cancer Research

Just to realise that the term had finished, and the break from the busiest term of all had arrived was amazing. I am so far behind in my real and virtual worlds – it’s a joke!

However, a little time to to relax is not a bad thing – and for me that means an escape out of town if I can do it!

So my friend June and myself hit the road – headed off in the general direction of Mudgee, and really followed where the scenery took us. We wandered the roads – no map in hand – and discovered some wonderful delights.

We visited lots of places, but really laughed a lot when we finally arrived at Rylestone – because there we were, two girls on the road, greeted by a country town with NO mobile phone reception and the powerlines and trees all decked out in bras! That’s right…ladies attire in all shades of the spectrum.  This is a whole town’s statement of support for research into breast cancer – but what a statement!  Even the country roads between Rylestone and our next stop in the Capertee Valley had pink streamers hanging from the gum trees.

June waits for Yum-Cha

Rylestone was a very interesting stop..better than the wineries (which we also visited in the surrounding areas) because it’s just a bit alternative, modern, old and comfortable – all rolled into one. Yes, there was a hillbilly-like ‘guns and ammo’ shop, but there was also a marvelous art gallery, and the best yum-cha in the whole of NSW in the tiniest chinese artifact shop.

Interestingly, back at school and chatting over lunch, it turned out that I was lunching with a colleague who had grown up in Rylestone, and who knew the place that we were headed for for our overnight stay.

In fact the quick getaway lead to a little synergy for me – we ended up at the Glen Davis Hotel in the Capertee Valley.

Glen Davis hotel at dusk

This amazing little place in the middle of nowhere has a history associated somewhat with the school I work at.  St Joseph’s is a Marist College, and therefore part of a global Marist network. It turns out that our hotel was at one time a retreat for Marist brothers, and that just a few days earlier a couple of them visited for the first time, and were able to spot some of the Marists they knew in the photo pinned to the history board!

There is not much at Glen Davis these days – though in its heyday it was a very important place. The story that applies to many of the towns in the region. There is the hotel, it’s wonderful owners who are working to restore the art deco grandeur of the place, a camping ground up the hill, and a few local and holiday homes. No place to buy milk or bread if you run out!

The attraction is the surrounding countryside – abutting as it does to the natural beauty of the great dividing range. The Wollemi national park is also nearby, as are many other amazing attractions.   We saw kangaroos grazing on the grass in the hilly fields, and listened to the abundant Australian wildlife. We enjoyed the quiet and the beauty of the countryside and wondered what was going on in the world – no paper, no mobile phone, no wireless access. First thing we did when we got back into range was check our messages, and begin to remember the huge amount of work ahead of us this coming term.

Thanks to the Australian countryside on our backdoor (just a few hours drive away from home) for the serene country interlude in our busy online lives!

Road from Glen Davis

The Guardian reports that the British Library revealed it has made its vast archive of world and traditional music available to everyone, free of charge, online.

That amounts to roughly 28,000 recordings and, although no one has yet sat down and formally timed it, about 2,000 hours of singing, speaking, yelling, chanting, blowing, banging, tinkling and many other verbs associated with what is a uniquely rich sound archive.

The recordings go back more than 100 years, with the earliest recordings being the wax cylinders on which British anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon recorded Aboriginal singing on his trip to the Torres Strait islands off Australia in 1898.

What an extraordinary record and resource for current and future generations. Amazingly, much of the British archive was obtained by the library in 2000-01 in a lottery-funded project!!