We Give Books

www.wegivebooks.org is a digital initiative by the Pearson Foundation and Penguin Books. A large library of popular children's books are available free of charge online. The Pearson Foundation and Penguin then donate books to many great causes so that children all over the world can enjoy printed books of their own. Every time you read a book online, one is donated on your behalf and you can dedicate it to a family member. All for free.

The use of this site for primary school literacy and other lessons are many:
- Put the site up on the white board and have group story time.
- Set homework reading on the site, that might motivate a reluctant learner.
- Use DK non-fiction titles to investigate a new topic.
- Create a "scavenger hunt" and allow students, in pairs, to find the answer to clues or questions in a book or books.
- Use the free resources at http://www.wegivebooks.org/resources to explore books and themes in more depth. These are organised in Grade order.
- Start a class project to support the giving of books to the less fortunate in your community or in another country.

The site can also be used in Senior School classes:
- The resources page (http://www.wegivebooks.org/resources) gives some ideas for Senior School years as well. Two examples are:
- Set up a Reading Mentoring programme with children in primary school years using the resources on the site to guide reading of books on the site.
- Literature Review Blogging Project provides a nice set of resources for creating a blog about reviewing children's literature.

The only downside of this site is that it doesn't yet allow books to be read on an iPad as the books need flash. Such a pity!

iPads in Classrooms

Here is a post about "5 Critical Mistakes Schools Make With iPads" which I think is a great summary of the issues around using tablets in classrooms - and how to avoid them. Schools need to learn from each other and the "late adopters" should not repeat the mistakes of schools who have already gone down this path. Thanks Edudemic for another really good post.

Innovation

Since acquiring an iPad for my birthday in May, I must confess that I haven't spent too much time using it to read books. Of course, it has become my primary tool for reading emails, Facebook posts and using other Web 2.0 sites and apps. Since acquiring a very cheap bluetooth keyboard I can now also type a lot more easily so I now hardly need to use my laptop, iPad does almost all 'casual' tasks just as well. So I figure I should get on and try to read a bit on the iPad too.

First on my reading list is 'Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography' by Walter Isaacson. While I am fascinated by all the techie details and the computer history angle, what really interests me is that here is the biography of a truly innovative man. Steve Jobs, unlike his contemporary Bill Gates, was not a very technical man himself, he got others to carry out his plans and put his ideas into action. But Steve was the creative force behind the devices which are rapidly becoming part of our everyday lives: iPods, iPhones, iPads and indeed the iMac computers. My interest lies in trying to figure out how such creative genius is formed. What do we, as teachers and parents, need to do to nurture innovation in the next generation?


The following video 'Where good ideas come from' by Steven Johnson, gives some insight into the process of having an innovative idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU&sns=em

Johnson emphasises that ideas are not just flashes of inspiration that strike us, they are developed over time and often are aided by input and collaboration with other people. This is an important point which comes out in the Steve Jobs biography as well. All along the way Apple 'begged, borrowed and stole' other company's and individuals ideas. The difference was the passion of Steve Jobs for the products which he was creating. In this short interview he talks about passion and having the correct people around you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuNQgln6TL0&sns=em

In his book 'The World is Flat' (a pre-iPad read), Thomas L. Friedman explains how, in our increasingly globalised and technological world, America is losing its monopoly on innovation. The Indian and Chinese masses, some of whom have been educated in the West to a very high standard, are starting to catch up. The people who were being used for cheap labour are now starting to take their expertise home and create their own products and come up with their own ideas.

So, on to my current book (which I am reading on the Kindle app on my iPad because I find it is easier to download Kindle books than iTunes ones when you live in Dubai) which is 'Creating Innovators' by Tony Wagner. In this book Wagner explores what we need to do to nurture the next generation to become innovators. In Chapter 1 he identifies the following qualities which are necessary for the innovator: curiosity, collaboration, connected or integrated thinking and a bias towards action or experimentation. These are all qualities, he argues, which can be taught.

I see so many opportunities for using our new technologies in our classrooms to help nurture the next generation of innovators. As tools for research, collaborating, connecting ideas and 'doing' things which can already start to make a difference. The world of technology opens doors for our children, lets make sure we help them find out what is on the other side.

Updates to follow...

Using Pinterest to create PLNs

The web is full of so many great ideas, tools and resources. As teachers it is easy to become overwhelmed by all the choice, all the possibilities. Those of us who grew up without the Internet had to learn how to find the information we needed from books. Today's learners don't need to learn how to do this, they have search engines, and neither do we as teachers struggle with this but how do we remember where all these great resources are when we need them? The answer is Personal Learning  Networks.

In this post I'd like to tell you about one of my favourite tools for keeping the 'stuff' I come across, Pinterest (www.pinterest.com), and how you might use this social networking site in your professional (and personal) life.

I feel I may have a Pinterest "problem"! It could easily occupy me for days on end... Pinterest is an online pinboard for things you come across on the Internet. It pins images onto boards which you create to collect pins under particular headings. For example, I have a board called Classroom Ideas and another called Learning Technology. I have a couple of others too - ideas for decorating a future home, crafty ideas for rainy days (ok, Dubai days when it is too hot to go outside) and things I think my mother should knit. I follow friends on Facebook, colleagues and other random people and repin their pins and get some off the categories in Pinterest which collate pins according to topic. Occasionally I will pin something off the web. Pinning an image makes a link back to the site it came from so the image acts as link or reference to the information you need. I use mine from my tablet in an app but it works through a browser too.

Obviously Pinterest is a great tool for teachers to use to better organise their online finds, but how could we use this tool with our students? The following infographic from Pearsoned shows some of the things Pinterest might be useful for:

• It is possible to create a board which can be edited by more than one person. You could create a shared board for a class to gather ideas for a topic.
• Students doing investigations for a design project might create a board of all the ideas they have come across which inform their design choices.
• Create boards as stimulus for a creative writing project.
• Use a board as a more engaging way of creating a list of resources for a research project.

Note that as Pinterest is a social networking site, and their Terms of Use prohibit children under the age of 13, you are limited in your audience to older students only.

Project Based Learning vs The Flipped Classroom

For some years the idea of the 'flipped classroom' has been a fad amongst teachers. The idea is basically that you do what is traditionally done in classrooms (i.e. lectures) at home and do the work which is traditionally done at home (i.e. working through problems and activities) at school. In this way teachers are available to aid students while they are actually working and the 'passive' activity of listening to a lecture can happen when the student is at home.

I can't say I've ever really used this approach in my own classroom but I found this blog on the subject very interesting: http://plpnetwork.com/2012/10/08/flip-love-affair/

What this writer is implying is that flipping the classroom is not all that interesting or successful (in her view), but using a Project Based Learning (PBL) approach is the way forward. Interestingly enough, this teacher does this without everyone having a computer in front of them.