Tag: writing
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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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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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Replacing myself with robots: Why I’m leaving the classroom
There are a few reasons why I’ve decided to leave the classroom. I’m lucky – I’m not burned out or disenfranchised with education. In fact, I’ve never felt more enthusiastic about education as a whole, despite the complications of a first semester fraught with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. But the lockdowns, remote learning,…
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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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The Authorbot Diaries: Creative writing from the mind of a machine
This is the third post in a series (of two posts… so clearly I got carried away) on AI writers and their possible use in the English classroom, and education as a whole. For the previous posts, see here: Do Androids Dream of Electric Essays? AI in the English Classroom I, Writerbot: Critical Literacy in…
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Guest Post: Ashleigh Cavalin – Practical Reading Strategies for Romeo & Juliet
Now that Practical Reading Strategies has been out in the wild for a few months, I’ve started to receive feedback from teachers around how they’re using the book in their classrooms. This post is courtesy of Ashleigh Cavalin at Kilvington Grammar School. Ashleigh has taken PRS and adapted the activities to target her audience of young male…
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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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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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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…