The National Library of Australia’s Digital Collections gives users access to more than 130 000 images including books, journals, maps, music, pictures, manuscripts and oral histories.

The SBDS prototype will be a new discovery service focussed on Australia, Australians, and items found in Australian collecting institutions. It will provide a single point of access to resources currently discoverable via the Library’s multiple discovery services, and to digitised material freely available online anywhere in the world.

This prototype is an exploration of ideas and techniques aimed at making information easier to find and showing it within a useful context. This development of this prototype will be strongly influenced by user feedback.  Please give your comments and suggestions on how to improve it.

from the SBDS website.

Educators will find useful Internet Gateways on the CMIS website.

WolframAlpha was announced in March 2009 by British physicist Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009. Unlike Google, which searches for web resources to match a query, WolframAlpha generates answers to factual queries by computing the answer from available data.

Watch Part 2 of of the video.

Related CMIS blog posts include:

• Maybe AND/OR/NOT isn’t so hard
• Seek and you shall find…a list of Search engines (other than Google!)

Take a look at the CMIS webpages on Search Tools

Useful resources to support teachers and students entering this competiton or undertaking media studies units can be found on the CMIS Media Production and Analysis page.

In June 2005 U.S. Librarian of Congress James Billington proposed establishing an Internet-based, easily accessible collection of the world’s cultural riches  to highlight the achievements of all countries and cultures.

On April  20th 2009 The World Digital Library site was launched.

from the WDL site…

The WDL makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures from around the world on one site, in a variety of ways. These cultural treasures include, but are not limited to, manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings.

Items on the WDL may easily be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution, or can be located by an open-ended search, in several languages. Special features include interactive geographic clusters, a timeline, advanced image-viewing and interpretive capabilities. Item-level descriptions and interviews with curators about featured items provide additional information.

Educators will find listings of more digital resources suited to educational use on the CMIS Internet Gateways page and in our previous WoW Websites blog posts.

(Scroll down the page to see our earlier posts.)

Use the CMIS Resource Bank TOPIC SEARCH page to locate CMIS recommended websites. Use ‘website’ as your keyword search term and refine your search by Phase of Development, Learning Area and Outcome.

One year later, 17 participating institutions have contributed to The Commons from their photographic archives. Australian contributors include: The Powerhouse Museum, The State Library of NSW and The Australian War Memorial.

Screendump from www.flickr.com/commons

The program has two main objectives:

1. To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge.

If you make use of a photo from The Commons, you are advised to read the usage rights statement.

from The Commons website…

The best way to get involved is to add a tag or two to the photos you see, and if you happen to know anything else about the subject, by all means add a comment.

*Any Flickr member is able to add tags or comment on these collections. If you’re a dork about it, shame on you. This is for the good of humanity, dude!!

For readers new to online photo sharing here is quick introduction.

We are proud of our community.
We are proud of our history and our present.
We are proud of our children, and our artists, and our songmen,
we are proud of our whole place.
Because we are proud of all these things,
we are sharing them with you.

from Inside Film

…Twelve Canoes is a website which paints a compelling portrait of the art, culture, history and place of the Yolngu people whose homeland is the town of Ramingining and the Arafura Swamp of north-central Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory.

The high-end site is a work of art in itself; honouring the people of the Arafura swamp, and built around twelve filmed “visual poems” describing and illustrating many aspects of Yolngu history, life and culture from Creation, Our Ancestors, The Macassans, First White Men, Thomson Time, The Swamp, Plants and Animals, and Seasons, to Kinship, Ceremony, Language, and a slice of contemporary life in Nowadays.

Other features of the site include galleries which showcase Ramingining art and artists, music and songmen, language and common terms, and photographs that capture the essence of life in the region. More…

The Australian National Film and Sound Archive is hosting the Twelve Canoes website.

The CMIS Resource Bank Help pages will assist you in using the Resource Bank to locate resources suited to your specific curriculum needs and your students’ phase of development.

Tag clouds are popular to both represent and navigate web content. Now students can build ‘word clouds’ from written text to help them visualize the main concepts in the text.

From the Wordle website:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

So what text was used to generate these Wordles? The image at the top of this post was created using the first section of the Classroom First Strategy: A shared understanding.

Below are Wordles created from the first two of the six key elements of the strategy:

1. A focus on student achievement: success for all

2. A classroom orientation: sound teaching

Have some fun and generate some Wordles of your own.

Please be aware that some clouds in the Wordle gallery include examples that might offend.

Add an online stopwatch timer, a To-Do list and a pet tree frog at the same time. You can even choose a theme to suit your mood.

RSS [Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary] combined with a Personalized Home Page will let you do all this … and it’s easier than you think:)

That’s the last of the technical jargon I’ll use in this post.

PLEASE NOTE: RSS feeds are not supported in Internet Explorer 6.

Sue Waters of The Edublogger has a simple guide to Making Your Life Easier Using RSS which will help readers using Internet Explorer 6 set up an RSS news reader.

Follow these 3 steps to create an iGoogle account with RSS feeds.

Click on the images to view more detailed versions.

Due to different computer configurations your computer screen may not look exactly like the images included here. Despite some minor differences the process should be the same.

Step 1: Create an iGoogle account:

• Go to Google and click on the Sign in link.

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• Click on Create an account now

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• Fill in the boxes and click on I accept. Create my account.

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• Check your email and click on the link in the new message from Google to confirm your account.

Congratulations – Step 1 done. (Easy wasn’t it!)

Step 2: Sign in and Add Stuff

• Go to Google and click on the Sign in link.

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• Enter the email address and password you just used to create your account to sign in.

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• Click on iGoogle (a new screen will appear)

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• You may have to click on iGoogle again (in a different spot this time)

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• Select the content you would like to appear on your personal iGoogle homepage by ticking or unticking the boxes. Click Save

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• Your page will look something like this – depending on which boxes you selected in the previous step. You can set iGoogle as your homepage and select a theme for your page.

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• Adding more tabs is easy. You can select different themes and gadgets for different tabs. Drag and drop the title bars to re-arrange the content.

Step 3: Add CMIS RSS feeds:

• Create a new tab called CMIS. Untick the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ box. Click OK.

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• Go to the CMIS Evaluation blog and click on ‘Subscribe by RSS’

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• Click on Subscribe

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• Click ‘Add to Google Homepage’

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• Congratulations! You have added the rss feed to your iGoogle homepage. Every time there is new information on the CMIS Evaluation blog your homepage will automatically update and show you the new content. You can even read the post without leaving your page by clicking on the +sign next to the post title.

• Now visit and add the feeds from the CMIS Fiction Focus, Primary Focus and Technology Focus blogs and you will always be up-to-date.

WOW Websites

• Use the Internet Public Library Kidspace site to Say Hello to the World.

• Forvo is the place where you´ll find millions of words pronounced in their original languages. Cool, isn´t it? Be a part of this cultural phenomenon now!

• Aboriginal Languages of Australia There are more than 200 Australian Indigenous languages. Less than 20 languages are strong, and even these are endangered: the others have been destroyed, live in the memories of the elderly, or are being revived by their communities. This site has annotated links to 231 resources for about 80 languages. About 35% of these resources are produced or published by Indigenous people.

• International Children’s Digital Library. The mission of the International Children’s Digital Library Foundation is to excite and inspire the world’s children to become members of the global community – children who understand the value of tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas — by making the best in children’s literature available online.

• iLoveLanguages’ purpose is to list, categorize, and promote Internet resources related to language learning, education, and use. We want to make sure that people who are interested in learning a language can find information, products, and services they can use to help. We also want to promote language education by giving everyone the opportunity to delve into a language other than their own.

• The CMIS Learning Area page: LOTE contains extensive links to resources to support LOTE programs.
• Also available are the CMIS WACE webpages to support
  • French
  • Indonesian: Second Language
  • Italian

• K-10 Language (LOTE) Syllabus documents are available via the DET portal. [logon required]

This search strategy will help you locate useful TLF digital resources in this collection which support LOTE teaching programs:

Have you used TLF Learning Objects in your classroom?

Please take 10 minutes to complete a simple online survey to provide feedback

Survey link for Teachers

Survey link for School Leaders

Survey link for Principals

Survey link for Sector Personnel

Closing date is June 11

	ProtoZone Interactives – Art Machines
Interactive artBots that will generate a wide variety of images. For the most part, they’re drawing / painting programs that produce pictures with underlying constraints.

SwarmSketch

SwarmSketch is an ongoing online canvas that explores the possibilities of distributed design by the masses. Each week it randomly chooses a popular search term which becomes the sketch subject for the week. In this way, the collective is sketching what the collective thought was important each week. A new sketch begins after one week, or after the previous sketch reaches one thousand lines, whichever comes first. SwarmSketch was developed by Peter Edmunds as part of an honours project at the University of Canberra.

Renaissance Connection

The Renaissance Connection is an interactive, educational website that uses the Allentown Art Museum’s internationally recognized Samuel H. Kress Collection of Renaissance art as the foundation for teaching math, arts, science, language arts, and social studies. The connections between the visual arts and selected subject areas reveal that Renaissance innovations in many disciplines contributed to contemporary advancements.

	The Zoom Quilt
Click and drag up and down with your mouse to zoom in and out.

	MoveMixer
Mix, make and shake. Create a dance of your own.

	Big Room Web Dances
Created by choreographer and web designer, Richard Lord these four dances were created specifically for the web and exist in no other form. Check the ‘Rose by any other name’ link for more information.

	Tony-b machine

	Jam Studio
Requires registration for a free account. Upgrades to subscription accounts available.

Media specialists may appreciate our earlier post: Create- Animate!

Middle Childhood and Early Adolescence

Creativity: Fifi Colston
Explore Fifis studio and discover how she creates wearable art. Look at aspects such as inspiration, motivation, planning and techniques. Plan a design to communicate a message. Choose objects and materials. Use tools to arrange elements of your design such as size, position and colour. Review and revise your work. Use your design to work with real objects.

Also: Sonic space: city, Sonic space: travel, Sonic time: our world, Sonic motion: water world

Also: Found art: park, Found art: outback, Found art: beach.

Learning Area Context List

Dance

Expressive Movements using body, space, time and energy.

Drama

Taking on role and acting out situation.

Media

Communicating with print, film and electronic media.

Music

Sounds and silences making music through body, voice and acoustic and electronic means.

Visual Arts

Visual and tactile experiences in two and three dimensional forms.