Tag Archives: Literacy

Making It Easier To Read & Write with OneNote Learning Tools

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Few would argue against the fact that technology should support teachers and learners in the classroom to achieve better learning outcomes and comprehension. Sadly, too often the technology is shoe-horned into learning environments simply to “tick the box” that eLearning is happening. By creating a role of eLearning Integrator that is filled by Mr Tom Adams, St Andrew’s College has committed to supporting our teachers maximise the benefits of the technology available.

Therefore, it is very pleasing to see that Microsoft have recently released some tools for OneNote to further support the literacy of students by making it easier to read content and improve their writing. The Learning Tools For OneNote, a free download, provide a set of extended features that will help improve learning outcomes for all students.

It’s a game changer.

Mr B. Clark (Head of Learning Support)

From the website:

  • English language learners can increase their fluency.
  • Emerging readers can feel confident when reading material at a higher level.
  • Students with learning differences like dyslexia can decode text more easily.

Learning Tools

Watch the above Office Mix Video to see Learning Tools in action.

Features

New features in the OneNote Learning Tools

The downside of this new tool set is that it is currently only available for Windows clients of MS OneNote, leaving Apple Mac users and OneNote Online web clients out in the cold. Nevertheless, when Mr Adams talked with St Andrew’s Head of Learning Support about this new feature, he replied “It’s a game changer.”  

As a result of this positive endorsement, which was echoed by our Head of English Ms Tam Yuill Proctor, the ICT services team will be deploying the OneNote Learning Tools (download directly here) to all laptops/desktops managed by St Andrew’s whilst also encouraging students to install it on their BYOD devices.

I look forward to hearing from students and teachers alike how these new tools are supporting positive literacy outcomes.

Storybird Helps Young Authors To Fly

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The annual Preparatory School Book Week Parade

The annual Preparatory School Book Week Parade

I’ve mentioned a few times how exciting it is to get tip-offs from staff about the awesome things happening in the classrooms of their fellow teachers, and this time it was our Library Manager Mrs Cathy Kennedy providing the inside scoop.

She mentioned that Year 5 teacher Mrs Mary Leota had been using a product called StoryBird to promote writing amongst her students in the lead up to the annual Book Week festivities that happen at St Andrew’s College. I took the chance to talk this process through with Mrs Leota and it was interesting how the process of story writing had evolved for her students as they learnt the fundamentals of the editing process and also the relative strengths and limitations of Storybird. The Storybird website describes it’s services as follows:

Storybird lets anyone make visual stories in seconds. We curate artwork from illustrators and animators around the world and inspire writers of any age to turn those images
into fresh stories.

The students in Year 5 were keen to write picture books for the students in Year 1 – many of whom were siblings of the older children.

The First Draft:

They started out writing their drafts in their exercise books as they normally would and then attempted to write them into Storybird. One of the great functions of this product is that key words generate suggested images e.g. if the story was about a rabbit then a range of illustrations of rabbits would be presented for the students to choose from.

Whilst this was great, what they soon realised was that they could only choose a single artist’s collection of artwork per story – they could not mix and match. As they discussed this perceived limitation, they realised the value in this: the story would become quite disjointed if the images were a mixture of styles and themes.

The Second Draft:

Having learnt from this, the students abandoned the first draft and instead looked through the collections of artwork from the various artists and then chose a set of illustrations they wanted to work with. They then used this collection to inspire their story writing, matching the narrative to the individual pictures they had selected.

Here is an example of a story called Sara Couldn’t Find Her Way Home:

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Discussing Digital Citizenship:

One of the great features of Storybird is that it allows the stories to be published online for reading by a wide audience. This realisation generated both excitement and some problems for our students as they had to learn two important lessons:

  1. Once you hit “publish” you can’t edit your work anymore. This reinforced the need to hone the drafting process – proof reading and checking they were happy with the story before they hit the very tempting publish button!
  2. Feedback through the comments option needs to be constructive. Even throw away comments like “eww that is stupid” are unhelpful and when these comments can be read by anyone, not just other members of the class, they quickly learnt to be more measured in what they posted as comments.

These conversations were talked over at length with Mrs Leota and from my perspective, are critical things to weave into the wider learning experience that was taking place here. Whilst the focus of the class was on writing stories, the use of technology, appropriate ways to feedback online and the importance of editing drafts were all part of the learning outcomes for the students. Here is another story called Hannah’s Adventure:

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Final Thoughts:

One of the most pleasing aspects of this process from Mrs Leota’s perspective was a piece of feedback she received from a mother of one of the boys in her class who told her:

My son is such a reluctant writer and hates having to write anything and yet I could hardly get him off the computer at home last night because he was so keen to finish writing his story in this way.

It is always pleasing to see technology contributing to the motivation of students when it comes to literacy focused activities, and this echoes parent feedback that Dr Jeni Curtis received when introducing MS OneNote to her students in Year 9 this year.

The other upside of using Storybird was that it allowed Mrs Leota to see all of the work her students were doing from a single web page, and she could add comments for them to consider during the writing and editing process.

Judging by the success of this project I am sure there will be other teachers in our Preparatory School keen to try out Storybird for themselves!

Promoting Reading With eBooks & OverDrive

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A selection of eBook titles available through OverDrive with St Andrew's College

A selection of eBook titles available through OverDrive with St Andrew’s College

I took the opportunity in the last week of Term 2 to sit down with Cathy Kennedy, the Library Manager at St Andrew’s College, and discuss the implementation of eBooks in the College libraries. Having personally used various eBook readers, from Kindles to iPads, I was keen to learn more about the journey to arrive at the current solution in place.

Due to the length of this post you may want to skip down to the various sections below which include:

  • Background
  • Launch
  • Benefits of OverDrive
  • Challenges
  • Uptake amongst students
  • Promoting eBooks at the College
  • Conclusion

Background:

Since around 2010 Cathy had been closely watching the development of eBooks and was always keen to introduce them to the students here at St Andrew’s, however it was not until OverDrive came to Australasia and offered a package targeted at schools that it became truly viable. Prior to this, there had been other vendors but they were too expensive and their solutions were still really in their infancy and not easy to implement. OverDrive was an obvious choice because:

  • It already had massive market share in the public library sector
  • The option existed to form a “consortium” with other schools and combine your respective eBook libraries to increase the size of the total collection
  • It combined with our existing Library Management System “Oliver” from Softlink meaning that there was only one platform from which students could access all their books, in both paper and electronic formats.
  • Audiobooks were supported and could be accessed by our students in the same way as eBooks.
  • Fantastic support materials, both technically and from a promotional perspective, with posters and videos to help our students use the system easily.

After enquiring about other schools in Christchurch that might be interested in setting up a consortium and sharing eBook collections, Cathy found there were no equivalent Year 1-13 schools keen to partner and so she decided to go it alone in Term 3, 2013.

Launch:

Deciding on a “soft launch” first, the new eBook library was introduced to staff only in Term 4, 2013, before students were given access to the full collection in Term 1, 2014. Now six months on, Cathy is satisfied with the decision to go it alone and not partner with another school, as it has allowed her greater control over the selection of titles in the growing library. Interestingly, she did comment that:

For smaller schools, the appeal of a consortium must be very high, as the price of entry into eBooks is not cheap. To be able to quickly grow your catalogue with another school would make it significantly more affordable.

Benefits of OverDrive:

A shot of the interface used by the Library to help identify potential new eBook Purchases.

A shot of the interface used by the Library to help identify potential new eBook Purchases.

One of the biggest drawcards for using OverDrive is the wide range of publishers that are supported, allowing the library to select from a massive number of titles. The pricing model is based on an annual subscription, half of which covers the support of the platform itself, and the other half is credit towards eBook purchases for that year. I thought this was a rather smart “hook” by OverDrive to guarantee a minimum number of eBook purchases by schools each year, whilst it does meant that the students benefit from a continual supply of new titles.

To assist with the selection of new titles, the interface used by the Librarians shows a “Top 200” titles in various categories that we currently do not own (see screenshot on the right). From this, it’s easy to sort through Young Adult, Fiction, Audiobooks etc to locate popular titles that could be added the collection.

OverDrive supports two formats for eBooks

  • OverDrive Read: allowing a user to read the eBook directly within the web browser on their device
  • ePub: one of the more established eBook formats on the internet and supported by apps on tablets and smart phones and requires the use of Adobe Digital Editions

Additionally, OverDrive eBooks can be read on most common eBook readers including iPads and Nooks, with the major omission currently being the Amazon Kindle. This is being supported in the Northern Hemisphere and Cathy is hopeful that support for the Kindle may be available in 2015. Student laptops can also be used to read eBooks on as well.

As mentioned earlier, the integration with Oliver was crucial as this makes it easy for students to find any title, printed or electronic, from the one platform. An upgrade is planned to support “ezread” which will allow students to borrow eBooks directly from Oliver, without the need to be redirected to OverDrive.

Logging into OverDrive from an iPad and being asked for standard username/password

Logging into OverDrive from an iPad and being asked for standard username/password

Furthermore, both Oliver and OverDrive support Single Sign On (SSO), allowing students to use their existing username and password to authenticate to the systems to borrow books. This allows us to restrict younger students from accessing content intended for senior students, as our students are grouped by Year Level.

This level of integration is becoming an increasing requirement for third party products that we look to deploy into the College, as it allows for centralised management of student data and avoids issues of students forgetting their passwords and being dependent on a third party to reset and provide to them.

 

Challenges:

One of the biggest challenges being experienced is the need to continue to provide new titles in both formats: paper and eBook. Students and staff have not yet fully accepted that a title may only be available in one format or the other, meaning that new titles are effectively being purchased twice. Cathy’s end goal is very clear however: for borrowers to be comfortable reading a title in either format, meaning she only needs to purchase it in one format or the other. Continue reading →