Over the past ten days I have been busy revamping our Year 8 English Wide Reading Project called "Reading in Pairs". In the past, paired up students have worked together on a number of tasks and presented their reponses to their chosen novel as a powerpoint presentation. Although this was a popular project it was nevertheless time to move on and introduce some web2.0 tools and have students create and present to a wider audience. In Term 4 they will create their own blogs and write regular blog entries from the perspective of a main character.There are a variety of multimedia tasks such as:
- inserting images
- creating a character avatar.
- selecting and inserting music
- filming and publishing a one minute movie
Each Year 8 English class has its own
blog and student blogs will be linked to it.They will all be a "work in progress". All tasks and assessment criteria are on the class blog and each week a new post will help scaffold students through their tasks.This new project is certainly exciting for us. It will hopefully be engaging and will give our students opportunities to learn new skills. Unfortunately I am away on Long Service Leave in Term 4 and so won't be able to witness the steep learning path for both students and teachers. It should be fun but no doubt fraught with some difficulties along the way. I will be very keen to hear how it all goes and ISC staff will post a blog about it all in Week 7.
As a Year 8 English teacher I am really looking forward to this project. I will be learning about blogging with the students and it will be a steep learning curve. It's essential that we move beyond PowerPoint and integrate these Web 2.0 tools into our classroom landscapes. Teachers really are lifelong learners!
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