CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

There’s been a bit of talk about Wordle on the lists lately, and we have also talked about using it in the classroom on our Technology Focus blog.

It’s an application that can be overdone, but used judiciously as an intriguing book promotion, it can be pretty effective. Here’s an example of the popular Stephenie Meyer title Twilight (not that it needs much promoting!) It was created very quickly just by copying the text of the review into the Wordle creator and tweaking the colours, layout and font.

This is best viewed by clicking on the image. Have fun.

Having just commented on Laurie Halse Anderson’s ALAN award yesterday, news has come through of a cool competiton she is running - and yes, Australians can enter.

In February, in the very early days of this blog, we ran a post on hooking kids into books and talked about book trailers (check out the tag cloud to access it). Now Laurie is running a book trailer competition for her book Speak or her newest title Twisted, which became available here on 1 June. Both titles deal with fairly meaty issues so are are best suited to mature readers.

Full details of the competition are on Laurie’s blog. Don’t be put off by the North American emphasis in the details - we’ve been in touch with Laurie and she’s be thrilled to receive entries from Australia or indeed anywhere else. Sounds like fun, so let your creative readers know. With school holidays just around the corner for most states, the timing is perfect.

Entries close on 31 August.

To visit Laurie’s website click here.

Boys and books have been on the reading agenda for a while now. James Roy is one who has been an articulate advocate of the cause. Here are some blogs dedicated to boys and books, well worth you and the boys in your school keeping an eye on:

• Boys, Blokes, Books, from the Centre for Youth Literature, State Library of Victoria
• Guys Lit Wire, a new YA blog from the US
• Boys Blogging Books, a blog for boys by boys
• Books and Boys, another US site

And then there’s Guys Read, the site of US Ambassador for Children’s Literature, Jon Scieszka.

If you are aware of any others, let us know.

For the second time this month, the Fiction Focus team is heading off to Melbourne. It seems no time since we returned from All the Wild Wonders, the CBCA conference. On Friday we will be taking part in the Novel Ideas seminar organised by the wonderful Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria.

Our brief is to talk about some of the best new titles for Years 7 and 8. We will be sharing our ideas with about 150 teachers and teacher-librarians, and if that isn’t nerve-wracking enough, other speakers (each with their own topic, fortunately) include Morris Gleitzman, Maria Boyd and Dr Susan La Marca and Pam Macintyre of Viewpoint magazine. Mike Shuttleworth (CYL Program Coordinator) and Lili Wilkinson (manager of the inside a dog website) are also presenting.

We’re a bit worried that we are going to ‘do an Ishmael‘ and faint as soon as we stand up to speak. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Yesterday we posted details of two sites where students can engage with others about reading. Overnight, news has come through about the latest OzProjects initiative, Beware of Books, an online reading group. Teachers and teacher librarians can now do some cherry-picking in order to match their readers with a site that will really work for them.

Beware of Books is pitched at the 15-19 age group. Although it is possible to browse as a guest, why not register yourself and some students and actively participate in the project? Make a start by posting some reviews or reading recommendations and become a Beware of Books pioneer.

The OzProjects Middle Years Book Club, for students aged between 10 and 14, has been running for just over a month and already has a number of registered teams, including one from Singapore.

Have you checked out Penguin’s relatively new online community for teenage readers, Between the Lines? We alerted Fiction Focus subscribers to the site in the last issue of 2007, but in the end of year busy-ness it’s easy to overlook such things.

Launched last September, the site is targeting readers aged between 14 and 18, and there’s plenty for them to get their teeth into. Interaction is encouraged through blogs, author chats, book discussions and competitions.

Book of the Month for April is Sarah Dessen’s Just Listen, and being discussed on the blog is Peeps, by Scott Westerfeld who will be joining the discussion at the end of the month.

Australian author James Moloney has a new title coming out soon. We will be reviewing Kill the Possum in Fiction Focus of course, but he will be chatting online about the book on 24 April. Schools need to register in order to participate.

It’s early days for this site but it is rich with possibilities to get your students engaged in reading, as is the wonderful, and more established, Inside a Dog, from Melbourne’s Centre for Youth Literature. Both of these sites are on the Fiction Focus blog roll. It’s worth taking some time to explore them.

Judi, our regular Fiction Focus blogger has not been able to post recently. (Hurry up and get better Judi - we all miss you)

As guest blogger this week I’m going to share a website that was very popular with students at the school where I last taught.

Literature Map - the tourist map of literature

This simple to use website allows users to search for a favourite author and then suggests other writers who may appeal to the reader. The closer two writers are, the more likely someone will like both of them.

The CMIS website also has lots of useful information for teachers and students looking for something new to read. Check out the Focus on Fiction pages and the In the Classroom section of the website for links to:

• Author Studies
• Genre/Theme Studies
• Specific Titles & Series
• Teaching & Learning Strategies
• General Teacher Resources

The CMIS Resource Bank has a searchable database of over 5,000 fiction resources!

What determines our choice of film? Yes, we usually read reviews and we follow recommendations of people whose judgement we trust, but often the clincher is the trailer we see when we are already captive in the cinema. The same principle applies to students ‘captive’ in the library or the classroom - when they are selecting something to read we can point them to reviews, they can listen to the thoughts of others, but this visual generation will also appreciate a book trailer, and there are now plenty of great examples out there in Web 2.0 land.

Last year Arizona’s Pima County Public Library ran a competition with its teens to suggest suitable titles. The winners then worked with a professional production team to create short trailers to be voted on by other teens. The shortlist included:

• The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (an oldie but a goodie, except for Tom Henderson, the protagonist of King Dork)
• Lois Lowry’s The Giver ( sure-fire literature circle winner)
• Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (teen romance novel of the year in many schools)

And simple but really effective examples are on the Blue Valley North Library Media Center (Kansas) site. The witty promos for Dairy Queen and Kiki Strike : Inside the Shadow City demonstrate what can be achieved with few resources. Note the best practice in the citation of sources.

That vast repository of online videos, YouTube, has plenty of examples if you are specific in your search. The 2006 and 2007 US Teen Book Video Award winners are there, including How I Live Now, The Book Thief, The Invention of Hugo Cabret and A Great and Terrible Beauty. These (and other) titles can also be found on the Expanded Books site, although it must be said that a teacher-librarian’s input to the developers on how to search effectively would have made this site more user friendly. Best to search on author or title rather than genre. And if you can’t find Markus Zusak under Z, it’s because he has been indexed as Zusak Markus. It’s a pity, as this site has real possibilities and looks like it will become the official repository for these awards. (And wouldn’t it be great to have an Australian Teen Book Video Award!)

So why not use technology to introduce some of these titles in your classroom or library? Better still, why not collaborate with others at your school and run a book trailer competition of your own. Don’t forget to post the results and tell us all about them. What exciting times we live in.