CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

The oft-maligned Wikipedia has addressed many of its early problematic issues. Tighter controls mean that authorship and editing of entries are subject to scrutiny and sources are required to verify statements. Having students contribute to this collaborative tool is adding to the pool of knowledge, teaching them research and Web 2.0 skills and creating an authentic audience.

Why not get them to create / augment / correct entries about some of our Australian authors or illustrators? Patricia Wrightson, for example, may no longer be fashionable, but she will always be important. There are many gaps in her entry and at least one glaring error concerning The Nargun and the Stars, recently reissued by UQP Press. (We are tempted to correct it, but will leave it for a little longer so that someone can take up the challenge!)

Students will learn the importance of fact checking from print and online sources and citing them correctly in a real-world situation.

And if you are short of inspiration, check the YA Author and Illustrators pages on this blog. In the meantime, how nice if somebody could give Patricia Wrightson the entry she deserves.

There is more on using wikis in the classroom on our CMIS website.

Have you caught up with Inanimate Alice yet? It is digital storytelling at its most delicious. The fourth of ten episodes has recently come online.

Beginning with Alice as an eight year old living in remote regions of China with her parents, the story will develop in interactive complexity as Alice matures into her twenties. She has so far also been to Russia and Italy and in the fourth episode she is fourteen and living in an ordinary town in England. Why?

The related pedagogy project is attracting educators from around the world.

Each episode takes about half an hour to view. Treat yourself and your students soon.

Inanimate Alice has been created by Chris Joseph, digital writer in residence at The Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montford University, Leicester in the UK.

All at the CBCA Conference last Sunday morning were transfixed by Neil Gaiman’s readings of his own poetry scattered throughout his keynote speech. Wonderful, dark and moody, the poems revisited fairytales and cast new light on familiar landscapes. Nothing can match Neil’s own telling, but Fiction Focus has received permission to link to the text of three of these poems that appear in the online Journal of the Mythic Arts, published by Endicott Studio.

So if you were there, reimagine the morning and Neil’s beautifully paced readings. If you weren’t there, you are bound to enjoy the poems in their own right.

• Locks
• Instructions
• Boys and Girls Together

Margaret Atwood and Jane Yolen are among the authors with poetry on the fairytale section of the site. Add some background reading of Jack Zipes’s Don’t Bet on the Prince or The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood and a challenging unit of work for senior students is begging to be written.

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.

Justine Larbalestier - Australian author, New York resident - ponders this question on her most recent blog entry, sparking an interesting debate. Justine’s most recent titles are set in New York and Sydney and feature a potent mix of teenagers and magic. But, as Justine says, the whole notion of the ‘teenager’ is a relatively modern construct and YA is a problematic genre in that it is the only one defined by its audience. So what makes a novel YA? Read what Justine has to say and see if you agree. What a great discussion topic for a teacher-librarian or English teacher to initiate with their classes.