Year Nine Book Trailers

Today we wound up our Year 9 Book Trailer unit with our inaugural "Book Trailer Award" showcase in the Lecture Theatre.Our Year 9 cohort enjoyed watching the top trailers from each of the five English classes as did the teachers who were present. At the end of the showcase, Liana announced the overall winner who was David from 9B. His book trailer"Laws of Magic" was deserving  as it demonstrated an excellent combination of understanding,creativity,mood  and engaging elements.
See his trailer below

Laws of Magic Trailer by David Ting is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

For our PLP this year,Year 9 English teachers Will White,Tyler Smith and Joy Reid and myself worked collaborately to introduce this wide reading unit called Book Trailers.The goals of our project were to:

• Introduce Year 9's to wikis as a learning and communication tool.
• Teach year 9's an engaging and useful presentation tool (Animoto) whilst simultaneously encouraging them to read and appreciate literature.
• Help students to understand their legal and ethical responsibilities as users and creators of online content.(Copyright and Creative Commons)
• Increase collaboration between Year 9 teachers and our teacher librarians.

To see this unit  click on Year Nine Book Trailers

Well, we certainly achieved our goals  and  we were all very excited with the learning that occurred for both students and  teachers involved.Yes, we were all on a steep learning curve but an enjoyable and engaging one!Thanks must go to Shane for his invaluable ITsupport and Will and Tyler for their risk taking as technology in the classroom is rarely seamless.It's  now a "thumbs up" for this unit to be embedded into the Year 9 curriculum and we look forward to further developing it in 2013.

Differentiation in the classroom

At our Staff Conference on Monday, 16th July, Donna Sweeney from St Pauls will be speaking to us about the importance of teachers knowing their students as individuals and employing a range of flexible teaching strategies in responding to them. At the end of her presentation she recommends the following three resources that I have ordered for the ISC and they  should be here early next week.

You might also like to re-acquaint yourselves with the two blog posts below from last year that covered pedagogies that personalised learning.

Visible Thinking

Teacher Channel Videos

 Visible Thinking is a research - based approach to teaching thinking,begun at harvard's Project Zero.It develops students' thinking and comprehension abilities.The book contains a varied collection of practice,including thinking routines -small sets of questions or short sequence of steps - as well as documemtation of student thinking and comprehension.

 

In this book Dylan Wiliam stresses the importance of formative assessment as a key process for increasing teacher quality whilst having the biggest impact on student outcomes.  This book offers over fifty practical techniques for classroom formative assessment that every teacher will be able to implement into their regular classroom practice. Formative assessment strategies include classroom questioning, learning intentions, productive feedback and collaborative learning.

This book,focussing on Years 9-12,  explores  how  teachers incorporate differentiation principles and strategies throughout an entire instructional unit. There are annotated lesson plans for differentiated units in English, mathematics, history, science, art, and  languages.There are  Samples of differentiated product assignments, learning contracts, rubrics, and homework handouts.An overview of the non-negotiables in differentiated classrooms and guidelines for using the book as a learning tool

Copyright and Creative Commons

As technology continues to evolve at an ever increasing pace, the area of  copyright can be a minefield for educators.With constant online connectivity and students now publishing beyond their classrooms,students need to know what they can legitimately copy when creating their own work.
Luckily there are a number of excellent resources to assist us :
Smartcopying - The official resource for Australian schools and TAFE
Australian Copyright Council - An excellent resource explaining all things to do with copyright

Copyright and Copyleft - This is a one stop shop intended to provide educators and students with a simple to understand overview of Copyright, Creative Commons and other licences that exist.
Nothing Beats the Real Thing -This free Australian online resource features ready to use units that investigate copyright,film and TV piracy issues. A variety of learning areas are covered.
All Right To Copy - An interactive online resource from the Smartcopying website.It is designed to teach students about copyright, and how it impacts them as both users and creators

The Copyright Friendly Resource Link - This is the link on our ISC VLA that accesses copy friendly resources.
At the end of last term, for our PLP, Will White,Tyler Smith,Joy Reid and myself introduced and began implementing a Book Trailer Unit into the Year 9 English curriculum.We are very excited about this unit of work.It is still in progress and I will report on it in this blog  after its completion.However, one of our goals for this unit  was to increase our students' awareness of copyright issues and upskill them so that they could become more digitally responsible.Consequently, one lesson was devoted to copyright issues and the prezi below was used as a teaching tool.In this unit students were introduced to Creative Commons resources and are required to attach a Creative Commons licence to their own videos.An example of a licence is  below the prezi.



Copyright and Creative Commons by Marianne Lee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Other recommended resources are the three  videos below:

Free ebooks at State Library of Victoria

The State Library is now offering a new service that allows you to borrow Australian non fiction ebooks on cooking,travel,sport etc. for up to seven days .To access the Electronic Book Library (EBL) you need to be a registered user.Click here to sign up for a library card.
Last year I also blogged about how you can now  subscribe free of charge to eResources and have access to indexes,full text articles and guides from the National Library on a range of topics. There are many excellent and expensive databases on offer including JStor,Austlit,Art Index,MacquarieNet and Applied Science and Technology.Scroll through all the free resources on the link http://www.nla.gov.au/app/eresources/list/licenced
I would highly recommend that you sign up to this fabulous service and encourage your senior students to do so as well.
All you need to do is sign up for a library card here eResources