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.

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?

Reading skills: select, read & assess to gain information

This week we are practising our skills at selecting, reading and assessing texts.  I have created a page of prompts to help you identify your own topic and key question before you choose a text, and then questions to ask yourself before, during and after reading your text.

This year we are going to record our responses to the texts we read, both for our practice and for our actual assessment.  In the weekend I had a go at this process myself:

  If I can do it, so can you!

Reflecting on Smash Palace: thoughts, questions & issues

Our focus today is on Smash Palace.  To start, please add your thoughts and questions on the film to this padlet.

We will add our thoughts, and watch 1-2 key scenes again to further develop our discussion.

Then we will each write our own thoughts on the film, using specific examples from our discussion and notes today.

Learning objective: to develop ideas on the film Smash Palace, with supporting detail.
Success criteria:
1. We have all contributed to the padlet, and to listening to each other's thoughts respectfully.
2. We can identify at least two important issues in the film
3. We can explain what makes these ideas important in the film and in society then and today, using a range of supporting detail.

Welcome

Welcome to ENC212!  This year we are all about developing our literacy and communications skills through studying a range of New Zealand films, and reading texts on the topics we each find important or interesting in the films we watch.

We are starting with Smash Palace, a film which shocked New Zealanders when it was first released in the early 1980s.  This thoughtful review by Roger Ebert explores what makes this film powerful.

After watching the film, we will share our ideas on the film itself, and what seemed interesting or important or brutal in the film on this padlet.

From our discussion, we will move in week 3 to finding texts on the topics we pulled out of watching Smash Palace.  We will read a range of texts, answer some not-too-tricky questions and then grab some credits for our work.  Not bad aye?