IT Journal Submission

These are my 5 IT Journal entries for assessment:

Survey Monkey http://loverodneytech.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/week-5.html

Etherpad Lite http://loverodneytech.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/week-6.html

Teaching Shakespeare http://loverodneytech.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/week-9-teaching-shakespeare.html

Poetry Resources http://loverodneytech.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/week-10-poetry-resources.html

Stupeflix http://loverodneytech.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/week-8-stupeflix.html

Week 10 - Poetry Resources

The first site I'm going to look at is The Poetry Archive (http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/aboutus.do). This website is an archive of recordings of poets reading their own works. The site description reads, "The Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded."

The site enables readers to search for poets by name, or by geographic region, and poems can be searched by title, theme, or poetic form, the last being particularly useful for teachers. It also contains a glossary of poetic terms, which would be useful for teachers and students. There are lesson plans and ideas for teachers to incorporate poetry into lessons, to make learning poetry more interesting and creative for students.

It gives tips on listening activities, and activities for students to interact with the poetry they've heard/read. there is also background, and biographical details of poets to help contextualise their poetry. The site also has a list of links to other poetry websites with even more resources.

Another site with a varied array of resources is Poets Graves (http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/index.html).

This site is valuable for dealing with personal information about poets, to help set the scene in a lesson, to make poetry more personal and human. It lists poets grave sites, but also has a glossary of poetic terms, a selection of classic poems, a timeline of poets' lives to contextualise them, as well as poetry book reviews, and further links to other poetry sites. There are also forums for poetry discussions which contain a lot of valuable information and resources.

A site to encourage poetry writing in the classroom is Instant Poetry Forms (http://ettcweb.lr.k12.nj.us/forms/newpoem.htm). The site provides a lot of templates for poems where students fill in words in a poetic structure to create a poem. The students are scaffolded in writing simple poetry, can then be led to create a similar poem without the scaffolding, and then be able to work with their own words and styles. It also provides lesson plan ideas for teachers to incorporate the poetic structures and sample poems into the classroom. I think it's an easy, non-threatening way to introduce young students, or students who feel poetry is not for them, to poetry and poetry writing.

Week 9 - Teaching Shakespeare

The internet has a wealth of information for teaching Shakespeare, including lesson plans, class activities, materials, and ICT extras. There are many compilation sites with links to diverse resources. The first I'll look at is Shakespeare in Education (http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/educational.htm#Courses):

My first impression is how comprehensive the site is, with a wide variety of links. However of the first 10 links I clicked on, only 1 took me to the site it advertised. The site hasn't been updated since 2009. It takes a bit of patience to find the still-valid resources. The commercial resources section seems to be the best-maintained part of the site.

I'm giving up on that site and trying Folger Shakespeare Library's Lesson Plan Archive (http://www.folger.edu/eduLesPlanArch.cfm).

The Folger Shakespeare Library is in Washington, D.C., and is a research library which also has public programs of plays and reading, as well as a strong educational focus. This site was last modified today, so has currency, and well-maintained links. It has lesson plans for individual plays, sonnets, general lessons, introducing Shakespeare, making films, using interactive media, etc. The plans are very comprehensive, and have a wide variety of activities for all language modes, and age ranges. There are video and audio resources for use in class:

They also produce a blog to keep teachers in touch with their new resources (http://folgereducation.wordpress.com/), primary texts from their collection with relevance to Shakespeare lessons, and quizzes and games for younger students. It has a huge number and variety of resources for setting the scene of a play, introducing them, teaching the plays, analysis, interpretation, representation by students, etc. After seeing this site, I'd skip the first one completely!

Shakespeare Illustrated (http://shakespeare.emory.edu/illustrated_index.cfm) is a great site for accessing images by artists of scenes or characters from Shakespeare's plays:

I think this is a great resource for introducing characters, or to use as an illustration to guide students to make their own representations of characters or scenes from the plays. They are also good for having in a powerpoint presentation introducing a play.

Week 8 - Stupeflix

Stupeflix(http://studio.stupeflix.com/) is a video-making site. Here are some of the types of video effects they provide:

You add your own photos, videos and text, choose from the site's music library, and create short, personal videos. This has a wide-range of applications in the classroom. The most obvious is using the Representative mode of communication. Students could make their own videos to illustrate a poem, or short fictional text, or part of a novel. Video dossiers could be made for the major characters of a novel. Students could use this to storyboard their own texts, or as a pitch to make a text into a movie. The videos that students make can also be used as part of a lesson for the other students to evaluate and critique.

Teachers can use this as a way of setting the context for a lesson by making a video with a series of photographs of a particular theme, and then getting the students to discuss the video. They can be drawn out to provide an interpretation of the video. Their knowledge of a particular topic can be gauged, vocabulary evaluated, interest aroused, etc. Teachers could make their own videos to illustrate a poem or part of a novel as a way of introducing it. The students could guess what the text might be about. Then the students could make their own videos, and the before and after videos compared and contrasted.

Here's a video I created, based on photos of a building site:

The main problem seems to be that you only get one video for free. Students could all get a free video, then if a similar video was needed for a lesson, another video-making site (Animoto, One True Media) could be used.

Week 7 - Belonging

I got to the Belonging blog (http://hscbelonging.wordpress.com/about/) by following the links for Analysing a Picture Book, but the blog has so much more to offer. "The purpose of this blog is to present simple introductions to texts which might be appropriate for study as related material for New South Wales Higher School Certificate Area of Study, Belonging." There are many links to other websites, resources for other areas of study, plus links to short stories, poems, novels, graphic novels, films, etc.

The Short Story Finder link is a customized Google search tool which searches for full-text, or full-audio short stories. It's a great way to discover short stories for use in class without wasting time. The link can also be given to students to find their own short stories related to the unit or lesson.

The post for picture books contains information about the grammar of visual design, a book by a picture book author, links to websites (Picturing Books and Webquest Direct) with many teaching resources, useful lists and details about the elements of a picture book, and a video about postmodernism for use with lessons about the postmodern picture book. Using the Picture Book category limiter also reveals a number of posts dealing with individual graphic novels and picture books.

This blog offers valuable resources not just for texts to study, but also resources to build the field before starting on a major text, or for finding texts which enhance the main text.

Week 6 - Etherpad Lite

I briefly looked at Etherpad Lite (http://typewith.me/) in Week 2's post, but want to look at it in more detail here.



This is a site which allows online collaboration. Each person logs in to the same Pad, and has a different colour when typing. I've thought of two ideas for class activities where it could be useful. The first is a "blind" conversation. The teacher creates Pads so that there are enough for all students in the class to be in a pair. The Pad names can be distributed randomly around the class, so that students enter a Pad with someone, but they don't know who their partner is. I imagined this for a lesson about gendered language, so the experiment is to see what sort of language students use when "talking" to someone whose sex they don't know. As the "conversation" continues, and clues point to the pair being boy-boy, girl-girl, or girl-boy, does the language change? Would the students use different words/slang/phrases? The various conversations can be shown to the class for analysis. Other students can guess if they think the writers are boys or girls. This could also be used with the students adopting a persona. Each could receive a card telling them that they are to pretend to be, for example, an 80-year-old French woman, or a 25-year-old architecture student. How would a conversation proceed with these adopted personae?

I also thought this site would be useful for writing exercises, either fiction, or autobiographical writing. Each student could have a Pad, and they start a story on a certain theme or subject. Then students swap Pads, and continue with the story that someone else started. Each student could write a paragraph, and the next student is only allowed to read the previous paragraph, not the whole story. For a lesson on Identity, I thought students could write about some aspect of their own identity (family, friends, religion, sporting activities, etc), and then another student logs into that Pad and writes about his or her own identity in relation to the first person's. This is a way to get them thinking about themselves, and how they differ from others.

These activities involve not just writing, but reading as they have to interact with someone else's text. Hopefully it would also mean that all students are busy with their own activities and wouldn't be chatting. The swapping of Pads means that students get the writing broken up into smaller chunks, and they get to compare and share their own writing with others. Sharing with the whole class is instant. You could even get different students to read out others' writing. The Pads have a timeline feature which shows all the keystrokes for the text, so it's possible to see if students have cheated in the first exercise by revealing who they are talking to.

Week 5 - Survey Monkey

This week I want to look at the uses of Survey Monkey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/) for classroom activities. Below are some questions of a survey that I made for a lesson plan. They are asking about nationality/race, religion, and language and were the start of a lesson investigating identity.


After getting students to think about themselves and their families, the survey asked about bullying and being bullied.
The aim of this survey was to get students thinking about the sorts of themes and issues to be covered in the lesson. It's a quick and easy way to activate students' schemas about a particular topic. A survey could also be devised as a getting-to-know the students exercise. Instead of getting them to write down on paper, the students could complete a survey about their likes and dislikes, what books, music, sport, etc. that they enjoy. A Survey Monkey survey could be used at the end of a lesson to consolidate the lesson. It could be a quick multiple-choice quiz to integrate new vocabulary introduced in the lesson.

You could also devise a survey to get feedback on a lesson, an activity, or on the teacher's performance. It can also be used in advance of a lesson to gauge interest in a subject, and find out what activities would most appeal to the students. I thought you could also make a survey to ask students how they're feeling at the beginning of a lesson - hungry, tired, angry, happy, etc. It could let the teacher know if half the class are tired, and therefore won't respond too well to a long writing exercise. Maybe a quick, fun activity would get the energy levels up.

There are a range of answer types that can be used for a survey. They can be 'Tick one answer' questions, multiple-choice, writing a comment, 'Yes or No' questions, open-ended questions, etc. It lends itself to a wide range of language choices. The free version of Survey Monkey restricts you to only 10 questions, but that is enough for a quick 5-10 minutes survey in class.

After the students have completed a survey, the results are available for the teacher to analyse. These can also be used as part of the lesson to illustrate a point. The data can be exported to Excel to create a chart or graph (to create one in Survey Monkey involves paying for services).

Week 4 - Visuwords

Visuwords is an online graphical dictionary and thesaurus. It's an easy way of generating definitions of words in a visual way which shows relations of words, if they are the same or the opposite, related words, whether a word or phrase is a noun or verb, etc.


For one of my assignments I plan to use 'Identity' as a keyword for a unit of work around a particular book. It generates terms such as 'gender identity' and 'personal identity,' but also suggests similar words like 'identical' and phrases that come from that. Scrolling the mouse over words generates a definition of the words presented. It's a fun way of generating ideas with students, or ways of exploring concepts, terms or words. It could be used after a brainstorming session to compare answers.

I think this tool could be used to extend beyond the words presented in Visuwords. A graphic could be generated, and then groups of students could be given one of the terms and use that word to extend the 'tree' beyond the boundaries of this site. Or students could generate their own trees from a word which they can compare afterwards with the Visuwords-generated phrase tree.

It does seem to have limited applications, but it is more fun and engaging than just getting students to search for a term in a dictionary. It could be used to build the field when starting a new unit, or lesson. It can get students to activate their schema in relation to the new topic being taught.

Week 3 - Inanimate Alice

Inanimate Alice is a digital novel which combines video, text, photos, animation,and sound effects to tell the story of Alice, a young girl who lives in different places with her parents. "Designed originally as entertainment, ‘Inanimate Alice’ has been adopted by teachers eager to connect with students through media they inherently understand. Created around a high-quality robust text, the content is suitable for the deep-reading and re-reading necessary for academic investigation" (from the website).

The stories are increasingly complex, with different and more elaborate effects. The work is certainly engaging, but it seems a little slow to me. Sometimes I'd like to skip ahead, but the story needs to be followed one scene at a time. After the story has run through, it is possible to go back to previous scenes, and then forward to later ones, but one can't flip through to the end, and go backwards.

I can see how this could be used in classes as an introduction to activities where students make a similar "book" about their own lives. They could use tools that enable them to add photos or videos to a folio about themselves, their homes and their families. The stories can also be used as springboards for students own fiction. Or the teacher could pause the story and get the students to anticipate what will happen next.

The episodes are quite short, but can also be extended with games and other activities. I think these are distractions in the classroom, and could be followed up by students in their own time if they're interested. It also seems a bit like putting children in front of the television to be distracted by colour and movement.

Week 2 Part 2 - Box of Tricks

The resources listed in these sites are extremely valuable, but one problem I'm noticing already is the feeling of being drowned in information. The links work well for random serendipitous discovery, but if one is looking for a particular tool, with certain things that it needs to be able to do (online shared document tool with capacity for 30 students to work on the same information simultaneously, for example), then there is too much information to trawl through. This is the sort of situation where the human brain can out-compete a computer - if you ask someone knowledgeable in this area about the specific type of online tool you need, from memory they could be able to give you an answer straight away, rather than you having to look through long lists of tools, read the descriptions, and follow links to demonstrations.

With that caveat, I did find quite a number of useful tools on the Box of Tricks - Technology and Education site.

This is a very similar site to Cool Tools (see the last post for details), but organises the sites by alphabetical order rather than subject type.
In my search for a specific online collaborative tool (see above) I came across a number of sites that all partially meet my needs, but which may be useful for other classroom activities.

The first site is Stixy, a collaborative bulletin board. Students could work on projects together, adding images and text, editing collaboratively. Then groups could share their work with other groups in the class.


Wallwisher also looks like it could be fun to use in class. This is an online notice board with "sticky notes" that students can move around, and add to. It could be used for brainstorming ideas, putting elements of a story or poem together, composing a letter or essay, etc. I would need to experiment with it a bit to see how many users could use it at once, what the size limits are, how many people can move items at once, etc.


Etherpad-type applications are easily accessible. These are like Instant Messaging applications, and allow a number of users to type information simultaneously, and see what is happening in real time. TitanPad is the first:


And EtherPad Lite:


A sample conversation:


This could be useful for collaborative writing exercises, particularly ones where one student writes some text, then another student adds to the story/article/poem, etc.

Week 2 - Cool Tools

Cool Tools

Cool Tools is an excitingly comprehensive site of links to various ICT resources for use in educational environments. The main feature is a list of categories - tools for presentations, collaboration, video, music, drawing, mapping, etc. - which lead to further expansive subcategories and lists. The Presentation Tools section, for example, links to subcategories of 'Presentation Tools,' Publication Tools,' 'Broadcast Tools,' and 'Mulitmedia Posters and Pages.' Each tool has a link to the site which provides the service, and a brief description about the services provided. Some of the sites/tools do have fee structures, and it would be useful to have an indication of this on the Cool Tools site.


Cool Tools also offers a section titled 'Teacher Resources' which links to subcategories such as 'Classroom Resources' (lesson plans for all areas of the curriculum, interactive whiteboard resources, etc.), 'Quizzes, Games and Activities,' 'Professional Development,' and 'Tests and Assessment.' These offer links to other compilation sites with a wealth of ideas for classes of all grades and abilities. It's heartening to see that many educational professionals are so passionate that they freely share their lesson ideas and activities.



The site is easy to use because it is basically a reference tool. All the resources I chose had active links, so the site is up-to-date and well managed. The major drawback is the acid-green background chosen for the site. It's certainly eye-catching, but rather disconcerting after long periods. Another issue is that although the tools linked to from the site can be used in classrooms, they aren't necessarily exclusively education related, so may need to be adapted for classroom use.