Day: November 18, 2009

I Love What I Can Do Online

Leave a comment

Hmm, perhaps that title needs a little work…

What I love, though, is that last night I was idling on the internet when my Skype  pinged to tell me that my friend Mayu in Tokyo was saying hello – we chatted for half an hour or so about the weather, time differences, just catch-up kind of conversation. I changed the language settings on my computer and typed in Japanese – I am so out of practice! I took a photo of myself with the built-in camera and sent it to her – so many ways to communicate so easily! Text, language input modes, emoticons, file transfers… On Skype I have shared video conversations with my boss. I have used Skype to phone my Mum, and do video with typing on the side…  Applications like Skype make it so easy to connect with other people despite distance – there are so many ways I could use this with my colleagues and students, molding the tool to suit my purposes…

Also this week, I love that I can ask for friends around the world to have their classes answer an online survey, direct them to a wiki about the project, log in and check the changing accumulation of results, and demonstrate the power of real data collection and the meanings behind the statistics by projecting the results onto a screen for my class to discuss. I love that I can tweet this request to various people in my network and ask them to pass on the url. I love that I can connect so easily to like-minded teachers and teacher-librarians around the world, just by typing and clicking…

I wonder what’s under the rest of the iceberg?

What’s the point of author visits?

Leave a comment

Now that I’m in recovery mode, and have had a chance to refine my event planner checklist, I’ve been thinking about the benefit of these author visits – how would I justify them to the powers that be if my budget came under fierce scrutiny?

I have hosted three author visits this year, two of them purely serendipitous. The visit last term by Jeannette Rowe gave our prep boys a chance to hear about how books are made, to see someone drawing pictures in the familiar style of known books, to understand some of the motivation behind writing books, and to enjoy well-known stories in a new way.
The book tour visit by Andy Griffiths gave students new insight into how funny books can be, how such outrageous ideas are developed, and how text and pictures interact. The drama performance of a short excerpt from the latest book also demonstrated how readers can interact with a text to bring it to life in a new form.
And this week’s event brought together sport and reading – a great AFL player up there on stage talking about how his old school friend asked him to help write a book, and now there are seven in the series with number eight planned for next year. Although many audience questions concentrated on Gary’s sporting career, there were quite a few about the series, how long it takes to write the books, things like that.

What are the students getting out of these events? For me it means a lot of organising – crossing ‘i’s and dotting ‘t’s – such as coordinating changes to timetables, supervision, ordering more copies of the books…

But for my students – the ongoing interest in the books, the discussions about the event and what they enjoyed, the connections they make between books on the shelf and the creative efforts of the person who put the story onto the page – those are very powerful things.

That’s the point.