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Do Androids Dream of Electric Essays? AI in the English Classroom
Rise of the Machines The term artificial intelligence was coined as early as 1956, at a conference in Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. After a brief flurry of activity, government interest – and funding – dropped off dramatically until the 1980s, and it wasn’t until the 1990s that IBM’s Deep Blue caught the public eye when…
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Creating a Culture of Reading
When I wrote Practical Reading Strategies I focused the entire first half of the book on providing instantly usable activities that a teacher could pick up and take into the classroom, adopting and extending them to suit their own students. But in the second half of the book, things get a little more philosophical, and…
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VCE English as an Additional Language (EAL) 2023
With between 3000-4000 students completing Unit 3 & 4 EAL each year, many schools will be adopting the upcoming 2023 EAL curriculum. The volume of students completing the EAL curriculum means it warrants plenty of attention in the upcoming update of the Study Design. Also, with around 400 schools in Victoria having a mix of…
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VCE English and EAL 2023: Exploring Argument
This is the fifth in a series of posts on the upcoming 2023 VCE English and EAL Study Design. For the first four posts, see the links at the end. In the current Study Design, Analysing and Presenting Argument (APA) dominates 50% of the outcomes for Units 1 and 2. In Unit 1 “students focus…
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VCE English 2023: Mentor Texts and Ideas
This is the fourth in a series of posts on the upcoming 2023 VCE English and EAL Study Design. For the first three posts, see the links at the end. Mentor Texts In the new Study Design mentor texts are “Texts to be read and re-read as models of effective and cohesive writing.” They are…
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VCE English 2023: Crafting Texts
This is the third post in a series about the new VCE English Study Design. for the other two posts, check out the links below: Why Writing? For a long time there has been something of an imbalance in the modes in senior English. Between reading, writing, and speaking and listening, the skills required for…
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VCE English 2023: The Personal Response
Over the next series of posts I’ll be exploring the upcoming changes to the VCE English Study Design for Units 1 and 2, which begins in 2023. These posts cover VCE English: with the expanded SD for EAL, English as an Additional Language now warrants a separate discussion which I’ll cover in a later post. For the previous post…
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The New VCE Study Design: Unit 1 and 2 Overview
Over the next series of posts I’ll be exploring the upcoming changes to the VCE English Study Design for Units 1 and 2, which begins in 2023. These posts cover VCE English: with the expanded SD for EAL, English as an Additional Language now warrants a separate discussion which I’ll cover in a later post.…
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Pulling it all together
This is the sixth in a series of posts related to the six Strategies covered in my book Practical Reading Strategies. You can buy a copy of the book here. Check out the previous four posts on Making Connections, Visualising, Questioning, Inferring and Summarising. Synthesising is the final of the six Reading Strategies. As I…
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In your own words
This is the fifth in a series of posts related to the six Strategies covered in my book Practical Reading Strategies. You can buy a copy of the book here. Check out the previous four posts on Making Connections, Visualising, Questioning, and Inferring. Summarising involves recalling the main events or ideas from a text. The…