Category: reading
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Teaching Writing in the Age of AI: Assessment and “Cheating”
This is the fourth post in a series on Teaching Writing in the Age of AI. The first post provided an overview of some of the changes we’re facing as the number of AI writing tools increases. Post two covered conversations about academic integrity, and the third post offered some practical advice on teaching students…
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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…
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Two Truths and a Lie: We’re All Teachers of Literacy
There are two times a year when a cohort of teachers is likely to be told “we’re all teachers of literacy”: at the start of Term 1, after the release of VCE and HSC results, and after NAPLAN results go public. It’s a line worn smooth with overuse, to the point where it is basically…
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Planning for the 2023 VCE English/EAL Study Design
Update: Since writing these original posts VCAA have released even more advice about assessment. I’m adding my recent posts on comparative judgement and how to assess the VCE Crafting and Creating Texts outcomes below. I’ve also added the ‘Teachers as Writers’ series of posts because the new Crafting and Creating Texts units are going to…
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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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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…
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Reading between the lines
This is the fourth 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 three posts on Making Connections, Visualising, and Questioning. Inferring means ‘reading between the lines’. In practice, however, it’s one of the…