Monday 25 May 2009

Library Competition

The library reading competition has started again at school this year, 4-5 weeks of students getting books out and getting a point for every book taken out. Yes there is a flaw in this which is the students can get the books out, keep it in their bag for a couple of days, and then put it back in the slot. Some of the students will read the books. But I have been thinking about how the competition can be modified for the last couple of years. I have posted about these before, though I always come back to the concept of wild on books.

One idea I would like to try is a weetbix concept. This is having a unique code that the students can enter on a website. This is another way to see how many students read. Last year I tried a concept of coxing the students to enter there name, form class in a web form and what brand and model cellphone they have, I gathered over 400 pieces of information about cellphone trends throughout the school from it. One of the issues I didn't foresee was that students have more than one cellphone, one on vodafone, the other telecom.

A way to get this out to the students is to develop a wallpaper with the information on it, the house values and reminder to enter the competition. We have a managed network environment which allows us to define what the homepage is when the students open up Internet Explorer. However there has been an issue with the runonce environment and it is ignoring our constant requests for http://intranet so the students have been missing the intranet site.

Why do we have to just lock it down to school, we don't. We have shown through the open choices last year that students will access the site from home. This raises another piece of work for me, is that there was a request last year to help incorporate this for the maths week. When is maths week?

Back to this,
The easiest way to get the unique code out is to create a bookmark with the unique code as part of it. Four bookmarks, one for each house, Pohutakawa, Kauri, Kowhai and Rimu. Each to have a image of the tree on it, with the house colour and values for each of the houses.
I can't seem to find a copy of the Values placed on each house at the moment.

Off track
And I am sorry but this has got to be one of the lamest endings to Life on Mars, I want the English version back. The americian version was lame.

So we have a wallpaper, or four wallpapers?
bookmarks and a way to create the unique codes for the website, unique code starts off with the house letter associated with it, no same code after this must exist.
and an interactive website, student id/login, what is enabled for each code you put up.

Bookmark size - 45mm x 210mm this would allow for how many on a page?
The bookmark size was found from a free bookmark from the Stoke Library

The bookmark beside this post is from the LIANZA website.

An idea for a student project?

This could also link in with the Library Week 10-16 August (currently the website is being rebranded - End of June, Early July), this years "theme" is Escape, Explore, Discover - Sounds like a space theme, though we should let the students see where this goes. A question is why do we have the house reading competition outside of this time,

I managed to get the bookmarks that were used as part of this promotion, they are located in my google docs area - currently private, this provides the student with a place to start, what needs to be included and sizes. Though an issue is what paper, we need to start looking at different paper and supplies in our classroom. Why do we have to get the office standard 80 gsm. Why can't we start looking at gloss, matte and other papers in different weights.

man, I have been looking around and www.mathsweek.org.nz and www.libraryweek.org.nz are on at the same time. I wish people would talk to each other. I can see some issues surrounding this.

Catch you later...

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