Term 1 week 8 learning

In week 8 most students were working on their second and third texts for their 2989 assessment.  It was great to see students making independent choices about their topics, questions and text choices.  I also saw lots of good work on summaries of the information relevant to the student's question and assessments of how useful, convincing and credible each text was.  Ka pai!

Some students were ready to start something new, and we began our work on Shawshank Redemption, classifying characters according to evidence of how evil or good each of six chosen characters are.

It's been great to have Nicole in our class for two lessons each week, encouraging and supporting students in their work.

Shawshank Redemption

This week we took a break from our reading skills work to watch a truly fantastic film: Shawshank Redemption.  This film shows incredible endurance in the face of corruption and bullying.  Today we will explore some of the important ideas in the film.  At the end of today's lesson, you may also have some more ideas of topics and questions you want to research for your 2989 reading skills assignment.

We will start with a quiz on the film.  Click here to play.

Then, I want you to create a continuum, ordering the characters according to how good or evil you think each one is.  You need to provide evidence to justify your decision.

How relevant is your text to your topic & question: three sections

For the 2989 assessment, we all need to decide how relevant our text is to our topic and question

using three key ideas:

1. Usefulness - how useful was the text to you for answering your question?  Give some specific examples.  e.g. My text was partly useful because it gave me a lot of information on the symptoms of depression, but I still don't know about the possible treatments (topic: depression, question: What are the symptoms and treatements for depression?)

2. Credibility - How reliable is this text?  Was it written by experts (if so, how can you tell?) of by someone blogging about their personal opinions?  Did it use statistics and graphs and examples to give thorough information?

3. Currency - How up-to-date is this text?  Can you tell when it was last revised?  How recent is the information in the text and how can you tell?