The biannual newsletter sent out by Futurelab is always worth dipping into. This edition has a range of articles and podcasts which relate to innovation. In the vision Magazine, for example, there is an excellent article on Tim Rylands who has used games to increase student engagement with the curriculum, but has also introduced other innovations which combine high tech and low tech, with the emphasis being on student learning and creativity. We can’t all have Tim Rylands’ commitment and energy but we can learn from some of what he does in the classroom. A second part of this newsletter is the podcast on new technologies and learning e.g. prezi which is an advanced presentation tool, giving students a wider range of choices than PowerPoint or animoto which promises to deliver ‘beautifully orchestrated video pieces’ from photos and videos. It is also, according to the website, ’shockingly easy’. Try it out and see what you think. There is much more in the Futurelab newsletter to whet your ICT appetite.

The new Poetry Book Society Choice dropped through my letter box recently and it is a book of poems by the Northern Irish poet Sinead Morrissey. The book is called Through the Square Window and contain a wide range of poems on topics but she is particularly good on landscape, including the nearby lough, which is an Irish word for a loch (Scotland) and is pronounced the same way, and lake (England and elsewhere). For example, ‘A liner in the foreground of the Lough… white as a tent in Plantagenet France’; or, in the same poem, ‘Ducks were tugging each other out to sea./they rode each wave the liner sent percussively.’ Stimulating poetry.

I was at my local school today, interviewing the headteacher/principal about students on work experience and how they experience different information environments in the workplace than at school, in many cases. We also talked abut the school’s Rich Tasks programme which is a cross curricular initiative which involves year 7 students in a range of skills and activities, including information literacy. The Rich Tasks programme has its origins in Queensland and has now been adopted in a number of Scottish education authorities. In one area of my local school – Dunbar Grammar School, which I attended in my youth – students are engaged in modern languages, ICT and art and in another area, where they look at a disaster area in the world, they are engaged in craft, design and technology and  geography. One of the elements of both projects is the development of students’ information literacy skills as they are engaged in collaborative research and the school librarian is an active member of the team. I will learn more about this in 2010.

On Sunday, I was involved in doing timing and taking photographs for Dunbar Running Club’s  annual Festive Half Marathon/10K (which turned out to be 7 miles i.e. 11.34K). Every year, different runners turn up dressed in festive costumes to do the runs and this year, there were 2 fairies, an elf and a Xmas tree. What was worrying was that husband and wife team Santa Claus and SANDRA Claus did not turn up for either run. What the implications might be for children across the world on 25th December is anyone’s guess. The information has not been released to the financial markets, in case shares drop dramatically because of fears of non-delivery. Visit the club’s website for photos of festive runners. The photo below shows a fairy on the bridge and a man in a red top – SC in disguise?

Festive runners

From eSchool News, comes a report that the MILE (Milestones for Improving Learning and Education) guide for 21st century skills has been updated from its launch in 2003. The new guide was launched at the AASL National Conference ,which I have attended once and it’s huge, with over 2200 delegates milling around everywhere and it’s one of these conferences where if you meet people once, don’t rely on seeing them again. Despite that it’s a very invigorating experience. The updated guide to 21st Century Skills includes a poster which you can download. The article in eSchool News states that new guidelines on implementation have been included e.g. “a visual mapping and self-assessment instrument”, to allow authorities and schools to gauge implementation. So it looks very useful. Of course, we all must question whether there could possible be a discrete set of 21st century skills which our students can use effectively and accept that many skills, e.g. higher order thinking skills have been around for many centuries, in both oral and written cultures.

If you like pigeons - look away now and do NOT look at the photo below. If you think cities should protect their public sculptures from pesky pigeons, then you may admire the strategy I saw recently in Abu Dhabi. I was walking back to my hotel down a street with lots of public sculptures (see previous entry for example) and this man appeared and started laying down handfuls of grain on the pavement. At first I thought he may be an eccentric bird lover and I wondered if he’d be allowed to do this. After the pigeons flocked off the nearby monuments, I noticed that there was a metal diamond around the pigeons. I then saw a wire going from this diamond to a man, about 20 metres away, holding a wire. He pulled the wire and a net closed over the pigeons. I snapped (see below) the man approaching the netted pigeons but left after that. As to the fate of the pigeons – who knows. In Scotland, pigeons are known as doos. So this paragraph has been about the Abu Dhabi doos (with apologies to Fred Flintstone).

Pigeons.net

Serendipity is a wonderful thing. I was checking out something this morning on the American Association of School Librarians’ (AASL) website and was also deciding what to write on the blog, when I came across an article about digital collections in schools. The article refers to a newspaper report about a Chicago private school which has decided to do away with all of its books and have an entirely digital collections. Unsurprisingly, this has caused headlines asking if this is the end of printed books – as opposed to e-books – in school libraries. Comments from AASL note that this particular school is not necessarily to be seen as a precedent or a model for other schools. The key questions here are whether the learning of the students of the Chicago school will be affected and also whether the digital collection will be effectively used. If the answer is no, what is the educational objection?

One of the features of Abu Dhabi as a city is some of the public sculpture that you can see in some parts of the city. In one street, for example, which leads to the corniche, there is a series of large sculptures which include a canon, a bell and (pictured below) a large jug. Public sculpture adds to our enjoyment of cities and also adds an aesthetic touch in the midst of skyscrapers, traffic and bustling streets.

Abu Dhabi street sculpture

Firstly, there was no blog last week as I was doing a consultancy for the university in Abu Dhabi, of which, more later.

In a recent article in Technology Guardian, the author discussed ’searching beyond Google’ and argues that Google is no longer the leader by a country mile over other search engines, as perhaps it once was. Nowadays, Victor Keegan argues, Google is more of a brand and other search engines, including Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, have caught up. What Keegan suggests is that we try newbies such as Leapfish or Duckduckgo and that one of the features of these search engines is that you search in real time but also link with social networking sites such as Flickr and YouTube. He also suggest using Monitter as an alternative search engine. Keegan admits, as we all have to, that none of these new search engines will replace Google but they do provide alternatives and who knows, maybe even some competition.

Last week I was in Abu Dhabi, as a consultant reviewing a teacher librarian programme. When you are in the middle of Abu Dhabi, with its constant 3 or 4 lanes of traffic which goes on steadily for most of the 24 hours in a day and completely blocks up at peak periods; and with its multitude of skyscrapers and its streets bustling with people (mostly men); and its poorer back streets; then you might wonder why it is being promoted as a tourist destination. The answer lies in its developments such as the Al Raha Beach but also in its cultural icons such as what is known as The White Mosque which looked spectacular as I passed it in the car. Would I be a tourist there? Maybe – check it out,

I’m almost finished marking my students’ current assignments. One of the most common descriptions of school students which some of my students use is digital natives. This phrase is used very blandly and not only by my teacher librarians students. A useful article on the term ‘digital natives’ discusses the original term coined by Marc Prensky who saw young people as digital natives as they grew up with technology which was ubiquitous in their lives. The implication of this term is that school students in particular will be more comfortable with technology and will use it better than their older “digital immigrant’ counterparts. Like most generalisations, this is untrue in many cases. Some school students may have grown up with  technology but are not very good at using it to learn. Older generations grew up with TV but that doesn’t make them more discerning viewers. The term ‘digital native’ may be useful but it has to used in a context.

Here in Scotland, autumn is in full swing and the leaves are falling as well as the temperatures. Keats’ poem Ode to Autumn is a favourite poem of mine with so much elegant use of language e.g. the season autumn “conspires” with the sun to produce plentiful fruit. At the weekend, my wife and 15 other runners ran the Goat’s Gallop race which goes over Lammer Law from Long Yester and past the Hopes Reservoir, where the photo below was taken. It was a still, sunny Sunday morning and a very peaceful place to be, waiting for runners to pass and be photographed against the autumnal backdrop.

Hopes reservoir in autumn

In yesterday’s technology Guardian, there is a link to Oxford University’s WW1 War Poetry Archive which should prove a very useful source for TLs working with English teachers, history teachers and their students. As well as having a vast range of poetry by WW1 authors, it has multimedia sections  in which you can click on poets such as Robert Graves and find photographs and scanned manuscripts. The archive also has a Second Life  section which features interviews, film footage and an opportunity to explore a WW1 area such as a battle trench. Instructions about joining Second Life (which I am yet to do but …) are provided. Looks a great resource, so check it out.

Also in The Guardian, which is ever present in my letter box in the morning – Monday to Saturday –  yesterday was a picture of starlings returning to roost in the UK for winter. The word for a gathering of starlings is murmuration, which one writer suggests is “a word that perfectly describes the rustle of a thousand pairs of wings> For more words about birds, collectively that is, read an Independent article. I like words like murmuration and I once came across an article on biblioclothanasia which literally means death by overcrowding by books although I’m struggling to find the “clothanasia” part for overcrowding. Aren’t words great? If you use too many of them and include too many archaic words, of course, it’s tushery - against which our English teacher always warned us.

From eSchool News, an article entitled Reinventing Education which outlines how, in the USA schools are about to change the way they teach students by using more technology and using the technology more effectively. In the article, an educational strategist (sic) argues that in San Diego, schools will have “an engaging and personalised learning environment, mindfully designed to optimise teaching and learning through the interconnected use of visual and auditory media, mobile computing and formative assessment technologies across the curriculum”. Hmm – interesting e.g. “mindfully designed”? – the opposite being? OK – we’ve all used terminology, so people in glass houses … The key point here, however, is that this is not reinventing education per se, it is changing the way teachers teach and to some extent how students learn – and education in my book is much bigger than that.

At the weekend, I travelled from Tauranga, New Zealand to Auckland, New Zealand, to Sydney, Australia, to Dubai, UAE and then to Newcastle, UK where I landed. I was then driven to Dunbar in Scotland. So, a long haul. Travelling – which I like very much – is obviously a physical experience – on the plane, off the plane, on another plane, off… It’s also a mental experience and the way I cope with long journeys is to not be on a long journey but a series of short ones. This may sound like a North American business guru’s seminar – small steps, big achievements blah, blah but one aspect that is different with travelling is your concept of time. I try to forget about time as I travel and just accept that e.g. you’re going backwards in time as you travel west. My advice is always read when you can, sleep when you can and watch movies when you can, in the sure and certain knowledge that your aesthetic standards will drop dramatically – when you’re tired, you’ll watch films you wouldn’t normally watch.

An article in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald attracted my attention. I read it in hard copy and am struggling to find it online. It’s by Brad Stone and discusses the availability of novels as e-books on devices such as Kindle and Reader and claims by both Amazon and Sony that people are actually reading more novels because of their availability as e-books. The article is rightly sceptical about claims from these companies about novels and their quotes appear selective. Novels in e-book form will increase certainly but books publishers are sceptical – as you might expect. One interesting aspect in the article is that e-book piracy may be on the rise and it quotes a reader IN Washington DC who claims to have linked her e-book reader to a friend’s account and gained access to the novels her friend paid for.

Walking on Mount Maunganui beach is a pleasure not just for the purity of the sand and the white, white waves contrasting with the blue sea, but also for the range of shells and colourful seaweed which you find there. The picture shows some of the shells you can find here. Exactly which sea creatures lived in these shells, I’m not sure, but they are beautiful to look at and to handle.

Shells on Mount Maunganui beach

The ever up to date eSchool News reports that Windows 7 - launched on my birthday coincidentally – has been favourably received by schools. According to the report, it “simplifies tasks and improves functionality” which could mean just about anything. Improvements include much easier mobile access to resources and better use of memory. However, it also adds that most organisations running XP should plan to migrate in 120-18 months, which may or not be good news for some. This raises the question of who is controlling what we have on our computers – Microsoft or us? A good question to get your senior students to debate.

The photo below of a man cycling a penny farthing bike was taken in Tauranga, New Zealand where I am this week. Penny Farthing bicycles were invented by Penny Farthing, an 18th century inventor. She was a pioneer who didn’t give tuppence for what people thought and if anyone objected to her inventions, she said that they could go sing a song of sixpence. Some people thought that she wasn’t the full shilling but she claimed to be related to Florin – ce Nightingale and she would pound away at her invention. If you believe that, you’ll believe anything. Penny farthing bicycles were invented in the 19th century but there’s a dispute about who did what.

Penny farthing bicycle