Australian Poetry Library

There I was, at the conference last week, talking about my age old dream for a site that would allow access to a range of contemporary Australian poetry for a micro-payment and lo and behold, I’m told that such a site already exists.

Called the Australian Poetry Library, the site is funded by the Australian Copyright Agency. They say:

The Australian Poetry Library has been developed to promote a greater appreciation and understanding of Australian poetry by providing access to a wide range of poetic texts, many of which are now out of print, as well as to critical and contextual material relating to them, including interviews, photographs and audio/visual recordings. At present the site contains over 42,000 poems, which can be searched via keywords, and which are also indexed according to some selected poetic forms and main themes. It will be progressively developed over the coming years to include work by more poets, as well as more critical and contextual material.

Through keyword searches the site will allow teachers and/or students to select poems relating to a particular subject or theme that students are studying, and to create their own personal anthologies. Teachers and/or students will be able to download and print poems for a small fee, part of which is returned to the poets via the Copyright Agency Limited. Further reproduction, electronic display, email or other communication is not permitted except in reliance on the statutory licence scheme under Part VB of the Copyright Act 1968

Well worth a look, with thousands of poems available.

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Should I be on “The Facebook”

In the normal classroom discussion the other day I was interested to find that everyone in the class (16 of them) have joined a Facebook group that one of them set up as a Literature study group. They’re all there, I asked and checked, and are discussing and asking questions and supporting each other (I hope) and pushing each other in the right directions (I hope)

I hope because I’m not sure. And I’m not sure because I’m not there. I’m not allowed to ‘friend’ students or be connected to them in social networks according to our school policy; a policy that I had a hand in developing. But, you’ve got to wonder. Here am I out here, trying to utilise our own online tools including a pretty decent wiki and blog setup, to get student collaboration and participation going and, here are they in there, doing it themselves, in their space, where they live, with the whole class.

I know you could argue that I shouldn’t be there, that it would change the dynamics if I was, and that they should have a space where they can test and re-test their ideas in their own way. True. And I don’t want to take over. But I could contribute, could support, could help shape that discussion and use that discussion to shape the classroom interactions and the things we do next. Could. Can’t.

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It begins

What do you do first lesson of the year? What do you do first in that lesson? With that group for the first time. Remember, this is the first class of the year after the long summer break, and after the long induction and prequel and all that thinking about how you’re going to do it better this year; how you’re going to do it different this year.

What do you do that first lesson?: talk about the summer break? roll out the PowerPoint about the course again (in case they missed it last year when you had that orientation session)?, ask them to talk about their reading over the summer? share some stories of first impressions of the text (Mrs Dalloway), mark the roll or get straight in to the book?

I must admit that, even after all these years of teaching, I still get slightly edgy about that first lesson of the year. I want to get it right. I want it to be a start, and not a talk-fest from me but an idea about how this class will be, and who we will be in this class together.

So I did all of the above, maybe not as purposefully and mindfully as I should have, and we made a start. I spent a little time getting OneNote organised (because it’s got to be from day 1 and organising it isn’t super-easy) and I asked a student to read from a passage (the skywriter scene) and we talked about that for a while. I told them how much I enjoyed reading Woolf again after a few years without having read her, and I got some nods, but also one or two half-looks of ‘I didn’t’. I should have followed up that look I think; what was troubling about Woolf? And what was difficult? And, I couldn’t help but think that a couple of students hadn’t quite finished it and didn’t want to talk about the text in too much detail, and didn’t want that conversation yet.

Afterwards, I felt vaguely disappointed that I hadn’t really grabbed them somehow. Not sure why, but it was that anti-climactic feeling that I could have done better. So, I emailed them all and clarified the lesson’s objectives, what I hoped they’d got out of it, and what the homework was, and a mindmap I’d done on the iPad and put into OneNote.

And, so we’ve started.

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Reading on the screen

Just about every English teacher I know is passionate about books and reading. Loves it. Is good at it.

They (we) love books. The smell, the feel, the texture, the excitement of a new book. And, if I had $1 for every one I’d heard say something like “I couldn’t possibly read a book on the screen”, then I could buy an ipad.

So, it was funny the other day teaching Jane Austen to my Lit class and talking about some important passages that were revealing about Austen’s views and values to look up and see one of the girls looking at her computer, not the dog-eared Penguin Classic everyone else had open.

When I asked her why she wasn’t looking at the passage we were discussing,she said she was, but that she preferred to read it on the screen, where she could annotate it direct and make notes on the discussion somewhere else than in the margin. It wasn’t so much as an ‘aha’ moment, as a ‘oh yeah’ moment. I did give them the text version of Emma from Project Gutenberg and had encouraged them to use it to find quotes or to pull apart key passages. But, I hadn’t thought that some students actually PREFER to read this way. That it’s not all about the book for everyone any more (if it ever was)

And I find myself reading more and more on the screen now. Not just online newspapers and the reports from the Giro cycling race in Italy. But substantive articles, even books. I read The Call of the Wild for the first time ever on the plane going to the USA, on my ipod application called Classics, which had 24 other classics I could have chosen. Or, from another app called Classics2Go which has 60 classics from Wuthering Heights to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Or, I could have opened up Grimm’s fairy tales or the Shakespeare app I paid a couple of dollars for which contains ALL of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry. A lot more choice than I could fit in my take-on luggage.

So, if my reading behaviour is changing, little wonder that our students are going to have less qualms and want more opportunities to be doing their reading in a new format. The stories remain the same.

Below and above: screen shots from my ipod-touch and the apps I’ve talked about above.

Cross-posted at English Teaching it IT (with more screenshots)

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