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Guest Post: Natalie Gleeson – St Francis Xavier College
In this guest post Natalie Gleeson discusses how she has used Practical Reading Strategies with senior English classes to explore the deeper meaning in Twelve Angry Men and On the Waterfront. Students have created questions which connect their texts to the real world, and have used the Meaning Maps activity to interrogate the texts in…
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Interview with Mike Sharples: Story Machines
Feature image by DALL E & Leon Furze I had the pleasure of speaking with Mike Sharples, coauthor of Story Machines, which is available now from Routledge. You can also check out Mike’s AI story writer at https://story-machines.net/ if you want to try your hand at writing (or co writing) an AI story yourself. Transcript…
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Teachers as Writers: Part Three
In the previous two posts in this series I explored the reasons teachers might wish to write, and some of the ways in which teachers could increase their writing output. In this third and final post on the subject, I’ll explore the process of moving from teacher to author, and how to get published. Calling…
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1001 Solutions to the Teacher Shortage
The release last week of the Teacher Workforce Shortages Issues Paper came with few surprises. The media has been rife with stories of plans to address the crisis of teacher attrition for months, and many of the solutions suggested in the paper have already been covered in detail. As the stories have unfolded, I’ve been…
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Repost: Review of Coaching Teacher Writers
While I’m writing about teachers as writers, I thought it would be a good opportunity to repost this review from last year. This book contains some great advice for those of you wanting to delve into writing professionally in education. Coaching Teacher-Writers, by Troy Hicks, Anne Elrod Whitney, James Fredricksen and Leah Zuidem a provides a…
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Teachers as Writers: Part Two
In the first post in this series I explored a few of the reasons teacher might want to write, including the personal and professional benefits of writing. In this post, I’ll go into more detail about four kinds of writing teachers might want to engage in, ranging from modelling in the classroom through to publishing…
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Teachers as Writers: Part One
This is the first post in a three-part series focusing on teachers as writers. In this series, I’m going to explore why and how teachers should write for themselves and for an audience – whether that’s an audience of students or an audience of published work. Why write? There are many great reasons to pick…
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Repost: The Worst Sentence I Ever Wrote
This article was originally posted in 2021. Lately I’ve been working with teachers on the new Study Design for VCE English and EAL, and one of the big fears is the need to be “teachers as writers” in the new Crafting and Creating Texts Areas of Study. I write every day, fiction and non-fiction, and…
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Review: Story Machines by Mike Sharples and Rafael Pérez y Pérez
Mike Sharples and Rafael Pérez y Pérez’s Story Machines: How Computers Have Become Creative Writers presents an entertaining account of Artificial Intelligence, and of both human and machine creativity. Having heard Mike Sharples talk on a podcast about his ideas regarding the future of Artificial Intelligence, I expected the book to be looking forward into…
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Robot revision: Year 12s versus the machines
I’ve been posting a lot recently about AI in education, particularly the potential impact of AI writers in the English classroom. I’m being optimistic too: I don’t think that AI writers are heralding the end of days for human authors. Nor do I think we’re ushering in an age of dubious ethics and constant cheating…