More 'Goodnight Mr. Tom' resources

I am having trouble with the new blogger format at present and so have loaded up the Sliderocket multi-media presentation for GMT on my wikispace-clunky compared to a website but at least you can view it from there until the current blogger problems are remedied. 


www.stannersenglishmatters.wikispaces.com 

What I like about Sliderocket is that it is a user friendly way to embed video and audio into ppt without having to fiddle with all the codes and so on. It is costly to some of the freeware that is available but it provides a large online repository of presentations in case of computer meltdown.
There is simply so much that is available to teach this text. Hope you find this presentation useful and while on the wikispace site, check out some of the primary evidence resources also available.
Will hopefully get some of the glitches fixed up with this blogsite-please bear with me. 


Today's English web tools and sites


Poetica: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/poetica/default.htm Poetry Podcasts from the ABC.


Coloribus: Advertising Archive: http://www.coloribus.com/adsarchive/?from_tracker Get the creative buzz with Coloribus - the world's biggest ad archive. More Than 2,000,000 Print and Outdoor Ads, TV and Viral Commercials and Global Winners Showcase.

Electronic Books and Online Reading: http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic93.htm#1 Explore online reading including interactive stories, articles, and books. Involve readers in writing stories including adding to stories, writing new endings, creating illustrations, and facilitating discussions.

To Autumn

This short clip captures the visual and auditory richness of the Ode by Keats that makes us reflect on nature's bounty. Each time I teach or prepare resources for the English Romantic poets, especially Keats, I am encouraged to contemplate the power of nature to restore and rejuvenate the spirit. 
Being busy in the garden in preparation for the onset of winter, autumn is by far my favourite season - without the extremes of high summer or deep winter. There are many texts that extol the virtues of the seasons but this poem has retained its ability to make the reader envisage the scene and imagine themselves within it.
For those who might be preparing work on Keats, there are some excellent websites, podcasts and wikispaces available including the following:


http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/keats.html

And by far, the best site I have found for studying Keats -

http://www.keatsian.co.uk/revision_notes_autumn.htm

Hope you enjoy perusing what is available. If you find something really wonderful, send an email and we can share it with everyone. 

Anzac Day Break

Took a day out yesterday to reflect on what is really important in life. Anzac Day signals a real sense of community for Australians and New Zealanders here and around the world. War is not celebrated but commemorated, and while nationalism is politicised, so too are the virtues that remain universal such as resilience, fortitude and honour. More and more visitors go to Gallipoli and Kokoda each year, demonstrating a need for connection to the past in a time of growing secularism and social uncertainty. While many point out that Anzac Day has been actively promoted by recent governments as a way of enhancing patriotism, it cannot be ignored that such a day has a positive unifying impact. It is also a fine way to acknowledge the work and contributions made by older citizens and to remind children and adolescents that the best things in life should need literally and metaphorically, to be fought for by others. School celebrations help emphasise what makes it an important day to remember.

War texts often feature in both junior and senior curriculum but they typically are those that hold moral messages about the personal and social costs involved. Poetry by Owen, Sassoon and Dawe are familiar but there are contemporary poets that address recurring themes of sacrifice, courage and suffering within a modern war context.

http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/2011warpoetry.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/8455677/Modern-war-poetry-British-soldiers-explore-Afghanistan-and-Iraq-wars-in-verse.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/25/war-poetry-carol-ann-duffy

Mark Twain had scathing words for war and his famous 'War Prayer' is a powerfully condemnatory attack of what can result. It is a brilliant text to do with senior students in relation to examining how he uses language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJsZCpp8hR4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsoJ-WJZGXM

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel . . . And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth.
Mark Twain

V for Vendetta Resources

Love this film and students respond to it well as a dystopic text. It also works extremely well as a companion text to '1984'. I have added some resources on my other site which has more options for loading material.
www.stannersenglishresources.weebly.com

Great sites and web tools

Stumbled across this image while working on 'Northanger Abbey' and thought it would be useful for todays blog about some excellent Austen sites as well as some more useful classroom web tools. Austen is so addictive - reading, image surfing and film adaptations. There are so many blogs dedicated to the fashions of the era as well and and after yet another viewing of 'Sense and Sensibility' I think I agree with the sentiments expressed in the image. Men certainly do look better in cravats.

http://old-fashionedcharm.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/shakespeare-week.html   

http://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/links/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/index.html 

(for watching shows online)      

Some other ICT tools  useful for the classroom include the following:

One Word. So Little Time.: http://oneword.com/index.html

Interesting site! Useful for writing exercises. "simple. you'll see one word at the top of the following page. you have sixty seconds to write about it. as soon as you click 'go' the page will load with the cursor in place. don't think. just write."
Telescopic Text: http://telescopictext.com/

Very clever website that is useful when teaching about good creative writing and expression.

http://english.byu.edu/novelinks/Index%20of%20strategies.htm

Great site with a mass of novel reading strategies and literary units.

Another tool that I found on an American homeschooling site is how to have any written text transformed into audio. For a MP3 clip I think you have to pay but it is great for rhetoric exercises as it offers English and American accents as well as male and female so that you could compare how something is read and what the impact is on meaning. Hope you find these gems useful.

http://www.naturalreaders.com/bbcshow.html

Goodnight Mr Tom movie trailer

If you go to my other blogsite on my weebly page, I have posted a movie trailer for this novel that a teacher or student has uploaded to YouTube. It is a good exercise to set for any close study of text and it is quite amazing what digital skills actually have for this sort of thing. Moviemaker or Photostory3 are easy to use or you can get more upmarket and use something like Sliderocket.
www.stannersenglishresources.weebly.com (blog page)

More English webtools:

video annotation
http://blipsnips.com/

wall poster creator from any size image
http://www.blockposters.com/

Cool timer – downloadable stop watch
http://fur.ly/197z

Had better get back to school and workshop preparation for Term II and while I like doing the resources but it still takes a long time.

Barbara

'Goodnight Mr. Tom' Link to my other blogsite

Blogger is too cumbersome to upload richer texts and so I prefer to use my weebly website for things such as powerpoints and document files.
I have uploaded a PDF version of a powerpoint that gives an historical overview of the novel's context.

www.stannersenglishresources.weebly.com

Hope teachers using 'Goodnight Mr. Tom' find it useful.
Barbara