Nicola McNee

I’ve had such fun again this week with the assignment for edtechcc. The aim was to create a comic describing a practical task. I’ve cheated a little and adapted the idea to create a comic strip of exam preparation tips for my GCSE students. Pixton is a cartoon-making tool suggested by this mashable article. I had never heard of it before but I am extremely impressed. It’s very versatile, intuitive to use and includes great instructional videos on the site. You can easily change the facial expressions of the characters and quickly move body parts around to create an attractive story. There’s a good range of backgrounds and props to use. Best of all I see there’s an educational version – which I am definitely going to be using in the future! I spent about 3 hours on the assignment in total and loved every minute. One very satisfied member of the edtech creative collective signing off with another completed product. http://Pixton.com/ic:1gzmjpnj #edtechcca3

As part of my talk to NQT’s today I shared a glog outlining some of the tools I use with classes I teach. Here it is

I had a great opportunity today to talk to about 20 NQT’s about how the school library can help support their teaching and learning as well as their own “Continuing Professional Development”. In preparation for the session I asked my School Librarian Network on Twitter what they would like me to say. I got some great replies and with the help of a brilliant tool called Storify I have managed to create a slideshow of the conversation between these valued Librarians in my “Personal Learning Network”.

This week I’ve learnt to mix sounds to create a “soundscape” for my second assignment as part of edtechcc. Believe me I never thought I’d be able to write that

I’ve often floundered and come a cropper with saving, sharing and broadcasting various sound formats – especially when preparing for a school assembly. Oh there’s nothing so miserable as standing on the stage in front of several hundred 11-18 year olds only to discover the clip you were going to share just won’t play even though it worked on your PC in the classroom minutes ago. Or rushing around throwing files into Zamzar ten minutes before kick-off so that the clip is compatible with the media player in the Chapel. Sigh.

So I am proud to announce that I managed to save clips from the wonderful Freesound, import them into Audacity and mix them to produce a medieval soundscape.  Although it is currently a mere 40 seconds long I intend to develop it further over the next couple of weeks.  Then I am going to use it for my World Book Day Assembly on the 1st March when I tell the story of the Fish and the Ring set in the castle of York. #edtechcca2

I learnt how to:

• download audacity to my PC.
•  Save .wav files to My Music
• import sounds into audacity
• edit sounds
• use the “time slider” tool
• add fade in and out effects
• export from audacity
• upload a .wav file to my blog
• create an audio boo

Medieval atmosphere

This is my first assignment for the Educational Technology Creative Collective. #edtechcca1 Our task was to create a sign or symbol for our department using a graphics tool of our own choice. (Well it was 2 signs actually but I only managed one )

It’s very hard to depict a library with a symbol. Many designers have tried and many have failed! Here’s a selection I gathered together on a Pinterest board.

My own symbol that I created using the Raven Vector editor on the Aviary suite of tools is very abstract and I’d be interested to see what people think it represents and why I’ve chosen to do it this way.

If you want to know what my thought processes were then listen to this audioboo about it.

Over the holiday season I got  addicted to Angry Birds.  Never mind that I had read a blog post about the educational value of this popular gaming app. Never mind I was tired after a long term with a school inspection at the end of it.   Never mind playfulness.  No excuses.  I made a New Year’s resolution to be more creative with digital technology and then along came The Educational Technology Creative Collective   to help me do just that   #edtechcc is “a collaboration of educators investigating and experimenting with digital technologies to enhance education”.  As those of you who follow my blog know this is something I passionately believe in.  Schools should be enabling students to engage with the new technologies in an educational context just as they already do in the “real world” outside school.

For the next 12 weeks I’m going to be undertaking assignments, creating digital artifacts and sharing what I have learnt through participating in these activities.  I will be learning from other like-minded individuals  which is great because I seem to learn so much this way.  Bring it on. #edtechccp1

For 2012 I’ve decided to have a go at a really easy tool for keeping a record of what I have achieved each day –  Idonethis  And this is in spite of the name – can any grammar fiends out there tell me if it is ever acceptable to say “I done it” instead of “I did it “?

Since signing up on the 30th December I’ve been impressed by how it works. Each day I am sent an email asking me what I have done today (I choose to receive this at 5pm which coincides with my last half-hour at work) and my replies are added to a calendar which I can integrate with my iCal or iGoogle Calendar.

I think this tool is  a really great idea because I’m the sort of person who always imagines I haven’t achieved very much and tend to forget when I did something.

I’ve only come across one issue so far – when I tried to add an item through my iPhone last night my address at the end of the email was included!  This hasn’t happened with my Outlook replies as the app seems to be able to differentiate between the body of text and the signature on my desktop computer.

However I love the clear crisp interface on screen and the daily emails are witty, well written and fun -

 Project Gutenberg have been making their digital books available in different mobile formats linked to a QR code.  So here’s our seasonal countdown calendar based on a “What the Dickens?” theme that ties in with our school production of “Oliver”.  Everyday we are adding a QR code linking to a free Charles Dickens ebook. 

 There’s been lots of “That is soooo cool” comments from passing students but I’m hoping some of them will actually have a go at reading a Dickens novel over the Christmas holidays!

Last week I attended an excellent briefing about the state of ebooks in libraries that had been organised by my professional body in the UK – CILIP. There were representatives from academic libraries, public libraries, library suppliers and the publishing industry.

What I learnt was this – publishers and academic librarians seem reasonably happy with the developing
role of ebooks in university and further education libraries but publishers and public librarians can’t come to an understanding which is harmful to both parties concerned. The main reasons for this situation lie in the specific ebook formats, the previous business model for selling to different library sectors and how books are used by the consumer in those markets.

Academic libraries and ebooks

The speakers from universities and colleges seemed to view ebooks as PDF versions of hard text that are read by students on desktop pcs and laptops. For them the issues relate to models of acquisition and how students “discover” available titles. Should they buy ebooks outright or buy licences to packages of ebooks supplied by library aggregators? A newer model of “patron driven acquisition” is being provided by library suppliers (like Dawson) allowing students to find ebooks through the library catalogue, view their contents and, if they want to go on and read further, enable the library to purchase that book. This is so seamless that students do not know the library doesn’t already own that particular ebook. Last year the University of Sussex acquired over 700 ebooks this way with an average cost of £64 per title. And this is the nub of the (for now) successful partnership between the publishers and libraries in this sector – the PDF format is easily controlled by publishers and universities are prepared to pay as they are used to paying similar prices for hard copy academic texts.

This is all well and good for the near future but in my head my thoughts are rushing onwards. I say to myself
“meanwhile on the interwebs a new vehicle for content has emerged. It can be versatile, regularly updated by experts, edited in an accountable and transparent way and consumers can add good practice to it. It’s called a wiki – see Wikipedia ”

Public libraries and ebooks

Speakers from this sector explained how the consumer sees the ebook as “something you read on a mobile device”. Library patrons arrive at their local library with numerous kinds of devices that work with mutually exclusive ebook formats. They expect to be able to download and read their ebooks whilst they are on the bus, at the beach or in the park. They want to read current best sellers and can’t understand why it’s not easy to do so. The issues for librarians are ones of format compatibility, the multiplicity of devices and DRM by publishers (digital rights management). Publishers are running scared and choose a variety of methods to protect their interests- from deciding libraries can only “lend” an ebook for a fixed number of times to the ultimate control of not allowing libraries to purchase their ebooks at all. Shockingly only 20% of ebooks on the current bestseller lists are available for libraries to purchase. Library suppliers (like Overdrive) can manage the bewildering range of digital rights imposed by different publishers but if the titles are not being made available for libraries they can’t supply them.

Meanwhile I’m thinking “across the interwebs a new vehicle for exploiting the reading for pleasure experience has emerged. It’s consumed on a mobile device, contains embedded links to websites, has video or audio and it’s called “an app”. See, for example, this app about our environmental future shared in a recent TED talk.
http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas.html

What does this mean for ebooks in Kingswood Library?

I went to #ebooks11 to plan for the development of my school library. In the near future I intend to invest in providing ebooks for students to download to their mobile devices. This fits with my schools aim to encourage young people to read for pleasure because we know it has a profound impact on their educational achievement. I also intend to provide a service to manage the PDF ebooks that members of staff acquire across the school for study purposes.

However inside my head I’m saying “Is the era of the library and the publisher nearly over? I think it probably is and, you know what, I find I’m over my grief about it. I acknowledge the amazing job both libraries and the publishing industry have done since the mid 1800′s to help disadvantaged individuals in society develop themselves. But aren’t the new technologies, such as wikis and apps, exciting? When I look at the explosion of educational opportunities for all in African countries because of mobile technology I can’t help but be glad.”

Sadly this does not refer to my blog but to the official trailer for The Hunger Games posted on Youtube just two days ago.

It’s been very interesting to watch the marketing of this film and the reaction from the book trilogy’s ardent teenage fanbase. The trailer has had a world premier on ABC’s Good Morning America and is viewing on the “Jumbotron” in New York’s Times Square. It has been described as the successor to the “HP” and “Twilight” brands but this has really raised the wrath of the Hunger Games readers. Much teen angst has been posted across social media sites (over 17,000 comments to the Youtube trailer alone) about the insult of comparing their beloved series to a vampire love story. Typical are comments like “The books are the most presise* (sic) well written books I’ve ever read, no comparisons to anything else!!!” and “The Hunger Games has more meaning, depth and emotion lovingly splayed out on it’s first page than Twilight has crammed up into it’s entire disgustingly popular series”!

Who says the kids of today can’t recognise literature when they see it?