Vale Steve Jobs.

- look at the volume of news stories for the various categories. Compare these by country. What do the different stories tell us about our country’s focus or perspective?

- select a story (or a selection of stories) and undertake some background research

- explore a story, and ‘re-write’ the content of the pop-up box, with your own abstract

Resources:
- Listverse – you could use this site as a basis for ideas, or replicate some of their lists with your own selections.

Picture books can be written for peers or parents. They can be created by older readers for younger audiences.

There are a range of different tools that can assist with the process, from online story makers to idea generators …

Resources:
- Storybird – this free online resource provides a wonderful collection of artwork to use within your books. Books can be freely viewed online. PDF versions (for printing or downloading to iPads etc) can be purchased.
- Little Bird Tales - another free online tool. Upload your own artwork or photos; then add text, and record any narration or comments.
- Picture Book Maker - an interesting online tool with a selection of illustrations and a hand-writing text editor.
- Seventh Sanctum Writing ideas generator. Select one of the links under ‘Story Inspiration’ to get ideas for plots / characters ….
- Magnetic Poetry – this could be an interesting way of generating the text for a picture book

There are also a number of resources listed on the ‘Make your own stories’ page of Sites2See

See examples of existing quizzes, and share your quiz(zes) on the Quizzes page – see note below.

Note: “Technically, yes, you can download Stu’s Quiz Boxes for free. But if you use it, there is a cost. You MUST produce a good-quality Quiz Boxes question file on any subject and share it by emailing it to me for inclusion at this site.  Click on the Quizzes page for more information about this.” 

You may want to use Fakebook - it allows teachers and students to create imaginary profile pages for study purposes.

It might also be interesting to set up Twitter feeds, where students post tweets ‘in character’.

Using this as a model, students could create a collage of significant people in their life/community or famous people animals/buildings/objects …. then tag and link to relevant sources of information. If appropriate to the task, geotagging may also be a useful feature.

The collage could be inserted into Powerpoint or a webeditor, or created using Glogster. Links to appropriate information resources would then be added added. If using an IWB, hot spots could be added to the file / learning object.

Resources:
- there are many free image ‘collage’ makers available on the web, incl. Photovisi, Shape Collage, Collage Maker …
- Google Earth : Google Tools for Schools
- Glogster EDU lets you create interactive posters, with text, photos/images, audio and video
- creative commons sites for images, music  etc   Wikimedia Commons, FlickrCC, ccMixter …

Idea contributed by Barbara Braxton (Teacher librarian at Cooma)  barbara.288@bigpond.com

Students could select one poster, and develop a presentation around it (having found a range of supporting evidence / further information)

Students could develop their own infographic, on a topic of interest. Relevant sources of information would need to be located and cited as part of this process.

Resources:

- The World of 100: our global village  (blog posting based around these posters)
- Cool Infographics blog
- Infographics Showcase
- David McCandles ‘The beauty of data visualization’ (TED videoclip)

Resources:

- Social Issues - a website that provides links to resources, using ‘multiple perspectives’.

Create a set of ‘cards’ (or IWB files) based around the various components of a set number of citations. These cards / files will need to include punctuation symbols, plus versions of the citation elements in plain text / underlined / italics etc.

“A variety of resource items was used for the exercise, from books with varying numbers of authors, to articles from CD-ROM and print encyclopaedias and videos. Each class approached the activity in their projected groups as before, Each group was given a resource (book, print-out, video) along with its set of cards. The groups were then given five minutes to consult their Style Guides to determine the correct order for the cards and to collect and include any of the common element cards necessary for their item. Each set of cards contained one “dirty trick” in that there were two different date cards. The purpose was to force the group to consult the source to determine which was correct, and thereby where the publication date could be found.

Each group in turn then came to the front and arranged themselves in front of the class to display a correctly written bibliographic citation. As the examples became increasingly more complicated – such as multiples authors or articles within another publication – the activity became more difficult. In these cases eight hands were usually not enough and the group had to call for volunteers from the audience to assist them. The class became quite vocal about who was in the wrong position or where a card was missing.

This activity easily took up the whole period by the time it had been modelled, and each group had the opportunity to perform once or twice. It is definitely not recommended for any teachers who have difficulty with a lot of noise and movement in the classroom – in fact, next time I think a whistle would come in very handy. To the outside observer, it would have looked to be quite chaotic. However, it was definitely a more engaging and enjoyable way of tackling the issue, and required the full participation of all members of the group.”

[Full details of this activity, including outcomes, can be found in PEEL Seeds #42,  p.4  1998, by Glenda Scott (Mount Scopus Memorial College)].

Related resources:

- Human Citation activity  from the Active Learning Techniques for Library Instruction site