The Story Home is a story based website designed for children featuring the reading of well known children's books by Alan Scofield. The site, created by Alan and Sharon Scofield, claims to strive to provide original and classic children's audio stories, to delight and inspire children and their families, throughout the world." (About The Story Home 2014). 

Alan Scofield himself is an author as well as the founding director of Youth Imaginations Arts Education Agency.

We can see that the story telling podcasts are from an up-to-date website as it was last updated this year (2014). Podcasts are able to be listened to on the site but also purchased through the reputable method of PayPal. The Story Home can also be contacted through its contacts link. 

Teaching Literacy in the Primary Years is a blog created by primary school teacher of eleven years from the Geelong area named Kelly Jordan. Kelly Jordan's blog features links to literacy based interactive programs for children and updates on her own fourth grade class which she is teaching in 2014. The blog is set out well and all information is easily accessible.

Elmo was spotted in downtown Melbourne brushing up on his trumpet skills

Podcast

A man with dulcet tones and brilliant intellect and a knack of conveying high brow themes and subjects to the common man, woman, and not so young child. In this episode of series 2 of his Podgram show, Stephen Fry explores the topic of language in his peculiar yet rational way.

For someone such as myself - who doesn't listen to much radio - I find it difficult to fully grasp and maintain focus on what is being discussed in podcasts without the aid of any visuals. I find that 'going back' and re-listening to parts of a podcast tends to destroy the flow and momentum of the broadcast. Yet I can quite easily flick back a page or two of a book for the purposes of plot affirmation or purely for pleasure without having 'the moment' tarnished too much. This is probably also the reason that I have been reluctant to jump onto audio-books. However there is much delight to be drawn from hearing Stephen Fry discuss a topic he is clearly passionate about and knowledgeable on.

A great accompaniment to this podcast is Stephen Fry's book and television series entitled Planet Word.

Stephen Fry's Podgrams - SE.2 EP.3 Language

The Smith Family - Tech Packs Australian charity, The Smith Family, provide Tech Packs which are internet ready computers to disadvantaged families that would otherwise not be able to afford such items. The Tech Pack comes with a days training and 12 months of free internet access.

Reading Kingdom (youtube video)

Reading Kingdom (youtube video) - The Reading Kingdom is an online program designed to teach children, aged 4-10, the skills of reading and writing. Reading Kingdom was founded by Dr. Marion Blank and her son, Jonathan Blank, is the flagship product of Mojo Learning Inc., who are based in Las Vegas, Nevada. On the Reading Kingdom homepage we see several recommendations and glowing reviews of the Reading Kingdom program by highly qualified individuals such as university teachers which gives it a degree of authority. One major issue for UK and Australian libraries with anything to do with spelling is that the US spells certain words differently to the UK and Australia. So although as adults most of us can discern between English and US spelling it may become a hard habit to break for any child learning any US variations of words. It does depend of course whether you care if your child uses 'ise' or 'ize' as these days it seems to not matter. I personally prefer to use the UK spelling but this may be a generational trait. 

How to Photocopy

How to Photocopy (trial version) - Dean (loosely) demonstrates how to photocopy in this trial version.

How to Photocopy (extensive version) - Dean shows us how to photocopy in this more extensive demo.

Wiki's

Programs for Kids & Teens is an online wiki which is available by accessing the Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki and following the link under Programming. I chose this wiki because of its relevance to my topic of childhood literacy and learning. Not sure about other members of the class but I had real trouble deciphering what was a wiki page and what wasn't. I did find a couple of college links which I was able to log in to by simply clicking on the login tab and this automatically signed me in (through my DOE login, I assume). Despite not being too familiar with wiki's I agree with the description given by Meredith Gorran Farkas of Norwich University in here slideshow, Wiki: A Beginners Look. In this article she points out that wiki's feature 'simple syntax' and one of the benefits and downfalls of wiki's is that anyone can make changes. Of course you can establish a wiki so that potential users must sign up with details in order to make changes which decreases the chances somewhat of vandalism and spam. I did notice just while looking at a Claremont College wiki that I was able to sign in using my Department of Education access and make changes to that wiki if I chose to.

Children's Literature is Central to Children's Literacy by Denise Krebs

Children's Literature is Central to Children's Literacy by Denise Krebs This image was adapted from an image called Child Reading by Dihl et Guerhard. The photo was edited with a program called WordFoto used via an iPod. The image itself is quite clever in its use of word-play to create the central image of a young boy (or girl) reading a book. Through searching for Denise Krebs via LinkedIn I discovered that Denise Krebs is a primary and secondary education teacher at Arizona State University, which I concluded was the same Denise Krebs by the fact that the profile image was exactly the same.

See Bibliography page for citation details

Too Many Elephants In This House by Ursula Dubosarsky with pictures by Andrew Joyner is the National Simultaneous Storytime book for 2014...Where the heck are they all coming from?

RSS Feeds

For my RSS feeds I am using Feedly. It seems difficult to find suitable blogs that are compatible with Blogger (as they may be hosted by competitor blog hosts such as Wordpress) and do not have the ability to be shared via a RSS feed. I wonder if creating a Facebook page would have been given us more options, however you then take away a lot of creativity in the asthetics of a web hosted site that is offered by Blogger or Wordpress.

The Book Chook is one blog which I am currently following through my Feedly account. See Bibliography page for citation.

If you were running a library blog or website yourself for an organisation I would strongly recommend spending $5 a month and upgrading Feedly to the Pro version. This seems to have much more options. Feedly's inablility to be accessed through the IE (Internet Explorer) browser is also a huge deterrant for it to be used in school's which use IE as a default browser.

Flickr photo add

Campbell Street Campus This is a picture of the entrance to 75 Campbell Street. I uploaded this image to my Flickr account then posted a link onto my blog.

Drysdale TasTAFE This image is taken at the Drysdale TasTAFE library and is of the travel section.

See Bibliography page for citations

Clicker 6 software videos

National Simultaneous Storytime 2014