Free Virtual Pop Up Book Maker

I just came across ZooBurst. A free and paid for service that lets you make virtual pop up storybooks and they even have an augmented reality browser for it as well.

There are teacher and student sign ons so you can set up your whole class to make their own pop up book.

This is a great language activity as well as for languages other than English.

The free version lets you put together 10 pages on unlimited books and will let you upload your own art work or you can use the open clip art they have linked to.

Check out my book below - took about 3 mins

Mobile Interactive Classroom

I've just finished making up a client's special order. Usually the equipment that I sell goes into a school or college and stays put - usually in a classroom. This client is different.

The client has a group of lecturers that go to a range of community centres to do ESL classes for the community. Because these classes are part of a government program they must use some aspect of the Internet and make it accessible to the students. These are language teachers not technicians, so setting up a mobile lab of 15 computers and then lugging it to the next community centre would be problematic.

The solution was a mobile interactive classroom. The client has bought 15 kits that we put together for them - Each kit contains

a laptop
an eBeam IWB solution
an Epson 1725 projector (with 3000 ansi lumens - but small and light)
A USB 3G modem

and a Targus Urban Overnight roller bag for it all to go into -

This kit lets the teacher walk into any centre, grab a whiteboard and set up in about 5-10mins. All the resources will be on the laptop and they will also have access to all the resources on the Internet as well. Then when they have finished it all packs down into the overnight bag that they just wheel out to their car.

This is an such a great idea not only for community based language teachers, but any teacher that has to move from school to school.

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Myschool website

Image via Wikipedia

At the beginning of this year the Australian Government via ACARA Launched the Myschools website. a league table of all the schools in Australia, both public and private - based on one metric - the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy, a series of tests given to year 3, 5 7 and 9 students in May.

To say it is a little unfair would be understating problem. One metric on one week determines the score for an entire school. The test is based on the New South Wales Curriculum (each state has it own curriculum - National Curriculum is coming this year).

The tests are mostly (except for the writing) multiple choice, and the mathematics test has almost the same amount of reading as the comprehension tests, severely limiting ESL students who my be capable of mathematics but can't comprehend the way the question is worded.

The website does integrate information like demographics but the format is difficult to read if you just want to get an overall feel for the school.

Max Cruise wrote an excellent article in Rotarian Life and has given permission for me to copy it into this blog. He has an excellent idea.

Finally, thanks to myschool.com, we can see how badly our local school is performing. We got a NAPLAN average of 301! How bad is that? Actually, it's hard to tell because nobody knows what it means.

Then, even when the score was adjusted for ICEA RAW (although we don't know what this means either), it was only 108, which can't be good, can it?

Humans are funny. If we can rank something or categorise it, we will.

However, it is difficult to see the advantage this latest bureaucratic offering offers us in dealing with disadvantage - ostensibly the reason for myschool - since we know where the disadvantage lies anyway.

Nevertheless, we can now see our rank, thus enabling us to blame someone other than ourselves for our children's failings.

Fantastic! But why stop at schools? Why not a myschool thingy for all public services?
Lets start with politicians; they would surely welcome mypollie.com to weed out under performers. We could use the Commonwealth Research Assessing Politician's Laziness and Niceness scores. Adjusted for disadvantaged electorates, such as those with National Party members.

Better yet, how about a myparents.com? Schools could see who the under performing parents are so that they can be sacked or retrained or given more resources.

Hang on as with schools, we already know where the under performing parents are, so lets give them some dosh and cut out the middle-plan.

As with the current obsession with metrics and KPI's in the corporate world - National testing is not going away... and even if teachers strike on test days (which is what a lot of teachers are planning) there will be some sort of public ranking.

I just wish is was more broad based than one series of tests on one week. We don't assess students on one test for their reports, we take into account a range of assessment tasks as well as behaviour and improvement. It reduces 'gaming" the system and assessments can be made in a range of contexts.

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English langauge PowerPoint Files

Image via Wikipedia

I got this from Larry's blog.

Barry Fun English
This site has a large range of PowerPoint files specifially focused on english language for either lower primary or ESL learners. These lend themselves to be integrated with TurningPoint ARS to make them even more interactive.

It is great to see some very good interactive resources devoted to english and literacy - instead of 1000's of printables.

Barry also has a range of flash games and tools that can be used online or with eBeam Scrapbook. - I do like his version of wheel of fortune.