Repost

(REPOST)

1.             Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Mallory Towers series

I remember reading Enid Blyton books in my early childhood. I didn’t like eating very much and her stories helped whet my appetite before meals, even if the food described was completely different from the meal on the table. Famous Five and their ginger beers, cold sandwiches, potted meat, lots of cake, tinned fruit. Mallory Towers and the furtive midnight suppers with jams, tarts, and endless supplies of chocolate or tea biscuits.

2.             Red Sky in the Morning by Elizabeth Laird

This book was a gift from my mom and I set it aside thinking the cover looked boring. When I eventually got around to reading it (a few months later) I hated that I needed a box of tissue to help me get through the book. After reading it that one time I never read it again but it’s still one of the more powerful books I remember reading from my childhood.

3.             Little House on the Prairie – Laura Ingalls Wilder

This was also one of my favourite series, I loved the titular character and prairie stories of churning butter, milking cows and corralling horses. I still didn’t really like food at this point. Books for me were imaginary food and I think my favourite snack while reading was lots of butter on plain biscuits or slices of bread.

4.             Ballet Shoes for Anna by Noel Streatfield

I took ballet classes when I was in primary school and this was a book I read over and over because it motivated me to keep attending my dance classes. And I remember the horrible English food cooked by the feeble aunt that I nevertheless found appealing – partly because it was all so unfamiliar and exotic to me, probably.

5.             Girl with a Pearl Earring – Tracy Chevalier

This was an accidental read which I picked up at a cousin’s house. I found it immensely depressing and ambiguous AND disliked because it didn’t have a happy ending.

If I were to list the other titles that bookmark the earlier stages of my reading journey, I would say that they are, in no particular order –

1.    Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

2.    Nancy Drew – Carolyn Keene

3.    Totto-chan by Tetsuko Kuronagi

4.    The Spirit Flyer series – John Bibee

5.    The Dragon King Trilogy – Stephen Lawhead

6.    The Princess and the Goblin – George Macdonald

7.    The early books in Joanna Campbell’s Thoroughbred series

8.    Dolphin Diaries

9.    Magic Treehouse series by Mary Pope Osbourne

10.Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

11. Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

12.Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

I had to do some research to find the names of the series and the authors, mostly because I remembered the plot better than the other details. I’m not sure why the titles I picked have stayed with me over the years – possibly because I felt mediocre and boring as a kid and these made me feel like life was more exciting.

(REPOST)

http://www.gonehomegame.com/

http://www.ludiclearning.org/

The first link is a narrative exploration game that is utilized by the lesson plan in the second link to teach literature using an interactive video game. ‘Gone Home’ is an exploratory narrative where information about the characters, plot, and setting are provided through the clues of everyday items scattered throughout an abandoned house. The premise for the story is provided through a cryptic note left on the door for the main character (played by the gamer) and the player is invited to find out what has happened to the rest of the family members living in that house. Players are given the freedom to explore the house at will and pursue the story however they wish. The aim of the game is to find out what happened to the different members of the family and their backstories.

I think there’s quite a lot of potential for game-based learning in the classroom. Alternative methods of assessment in the classroom will have to be created and there’s the possibility that motivating the students to participate in the game might be an issue, but I think that such ludic learning might be beneficial to students who feel daunted and demoralized by poor performance in conventional assessments. The teacher who utilized this particular video game commented in the second link that the students who tended to underperform academically were more interested and engaged with this unit of work.    

The second link provides a series of 8 lesson plans for teaching the video game as literature. Students are expected to produce a presentation thereafter based on one of several given topics. In terms of assessment, students are expected to produce lesson deliverables by tracking the progress of the story through a particular ‘track’ or topic. In terms of formative assessment, the teacher conducting and planning the lesson commented that guiding the students through this video game involved an extensive loss of control over the ‘classroom’, making it difficult to provide timely feedback since the individual students were pursuing different topics at different paces. The final lesson deliverable that would be formally assessed was the presentation. The students needed to compile individual portfolios as well as a group portfolio of their journey through the narrative as well. In terms of assessment methods; reports, portfolios and presentations are quite conventional. Using the video game as the main source made the lesson more interesting though. However, as an ‘alternative’ type of assessment, creating and consolidating artifacts from a video game narrative gives students more freedom to explore and pursue their interests within the interactive narrative itself while encouraging them to remain actively aware of their own learning.

For further reading:

MOE article on game-based learning -

http://singteach.nie.edu.sg/issue45-research02/ 

wordle (leejing)

i really like this site for analyzing essays.
it helps you to see what are your most frequently used words -- but not in a way that makes you feel bad about yourself, simply in a beautiful artistic word cloud. this is also a good way to help catch students' "crutch phrases" -- it points them out to students in an easy to grasp manner, since the frequency with which the words are used is reflected in how big the world is.

more importantly, especially for students who are visual learners, this can be a way for them to see their essay in (literally) a new light, and help shed light on the words being used.

Literature Learning Ladders (Geraldine)

Like a few of the posts before me, I found it particularly difficult to find websites about assessing Literature. However, I found this website, http://eduscapes.com/ladders/themes/interactive.htm, that had quite a few ideas on bolstering student-learning by equipping teachers with online resources.

On the main website, there's a side bar which gives you options to explore:

I found that the Interactive Projects and Lit WebQuests tabs were full of possibilities for engaging students and for assessing how much they have learnt in class while simultaneously having a creative outlet for ideas.

1. Online Magnet Poetry

Under the Interactive Projects tab, there was a suggestion under 'Teacher Tap' to use the concept of Fridge Magnet Poetry to teach and assess student learning of poetry in terms of form, rhyme, metre and so on. 

You can choose between 6 types of themes/genres/periods on the Fridge Magnet website and when you select one, you are brought to a page where there is a blank page, words on the side, and the option to create your own poem by dragging words from the pile on the right into the centre. I tried it out and it was quite hilarious.

Teachers can use this website to set tasks such as, create a Sonnet or Blank Verse, or to ask students to make a rhyming couplet to see if they know what these forms are. It also pushes them to use words creatively and to think about their own word choices:  'why x not y?'. Students can save their word and upload it up to a class forum or to submit their poems to their teacher for comments.

I think students will really enjoy Fridge Magnet Online because it generates interest in poetry and gives them ownership over generating their own content. Hopefully, we'll have a generation of poets yet!


2. Literature WebQuests

Aside from the appalling prevalence of comic sans, this is a pretty good website.

Under the Lit WebQuests tab, there are a host of websites dedicated to particular books or authors which you can use to gauge student learning. For example, this one is dedicated to Lord of the Flies by William Golding, fashioned as a CSI case to create a hypothesis about the events leading up to the ending.

There are a few tabs on the left side of the website that can guide students through their task systematically, keeping them focused and providing stop points for them to track their own steps throughout the task.

What I really like about this task is that it allows for self-directed learning as students can go at their own pace through the WebQuest. After they have created their timeline of events have have occurred in the book, they will go through the evaluation rubrics and judge their own work from that rubrics. It's a good way of helping students remember plot and key events of the book, which can sometimes be lost in the sea of skills, content and assignments.

Hope this has been helpful! :)

Literature Circles (Francesca)

Website: http://www.litcircles.org/Overview/overview.html

There are a plethora of literature circle resources online, but this here is the mother of all literature circle websites, I reckon. To start with, it explains what literature circles are and clears up some common misconceptions about them (e.g. they are unstructured and uncontrolled periods for students to talk without accountability). More importantly, the website also offers guides on how to facilitate discussions in literature circles. There are discussion formats to choose from, as well as pre and post-discussion activities.

Personally, I’ve never taken part in any literature circle in secondary school or junior college, but I think it’s a rather effectual method of assessing students’ critical thinking skills. To begin, the teacher divides the class into small literature circles of four or five, and assigns each person a specific role. There are many different roles within a literature circle, but I believe the more common and salient roles are the discussion director (who develops questions about the text for the group to discuss), the word wizard (who picks out words that are difficult or unfamiliar words and finds their definitions), the capable connector (who finds connections between the text and the real world context), the literary luminary (who points out interesting or significant passages in the text), and the ingenious investigator (who looks up background information related to the text and author). Each person in the literature circle would assume a new role every week, so as to ensure that everyone gets to experience each role at least once.

These literature circles may be assessed informally. The teacher would sit in on a different literature circle each week and take note of the group’s interaction. We can consider the students’ abilities to contribute to the discussion through the roles they’ve been assigned and the depth of understanding demonstrated by each student.

I think one thing to take note of is that it would beneficial for the students to choose the texts they want to read and discuss (Encouraging initiative and industry! Increasing intrinsic motivation!). However, for practical reasons, it is likely that if literature circles were to be implemented in class, the students would all be discussing the assigned O / A level texts. Nonetheless, I think literature circles would still be beneficial as they ensure that every student can participate in conversation. This is particularly useful for students who are left out in or feel intimidated by classroom discussions. Also, students would be constructing their own interpretations of the text, rather than just waiting for the teacher to provide them with the “correct” analyses and being passive consumers of knowledge. Hopefully, over time the students would become familiar with the various role in a literature circle and internalise these habits, so that eventually they can effectively analyse a text on their own, with minimal guidance.

Creative Alternative Assessments for Literature (Michelle)

[Dr Loh, I am going to start with a little disclaimer. I was not ripping off Beatrice's ideas/assessment website from her earlier post when I wrote this entry. It just so happens that we both found the same website but she beat me to writing about it. However, she zoomed in on one particular method of assessment. So, I shall go broad, by talking about a few methods of assessment that I found interesting. I shall start my post proper now.]

I was looking through http://novelnovice.com when I found a post about one Young Adult Literature teacher's list of 25 alternative assessments (available for download here). Novel Novice has some pretty good resources too by the way. For example, book reviews of the latest YA books, classroom ideas, essays and project ideas. It is definitely more suited for an American curriculum, but some of the classroom and essay/project ideas can be adapted to any text you may be teaching.

The list of 25 alternative assessments was designed by a teacher named Adrien Alsobrook, who manages to make literature really fun for her students. I have grouped some of her more interesting ideas according to suitability for teaching of certain topics. 

Setting: 

These are assignments that are great for assessing students' understanding of setting and encouraging self-directed learning. 

4. Research - Research to learn more about the culture and historical background surrounding the time period of your selection.  How did they live?  How were they governed?  What was their religion?  What is considered appropriate behavior?  What is considered taboo?  What references to this information is included in the text of your selection?  How does the author relate that information to the reader? How is this information pertinent to your understanding of this selection?  Make an oral presentation of your findings.  Try to relate the information you learn to specific parts of the selection. 

11. Timeline Poster – Create a timeline poster (1/4 poster or larger) with the major events listed for the novel.  Include color and some graphics.  Submit a bulleted list explaining the significance of each event you include or of the events taken together in terms of the structure of the novel as a whole or the meaning of the novel as a whole.

25.  Travel Brochure – As the author of your book, write a travel brochure for a scenic tour of the setting of your selection.  Describe the sights the travelers would want to see and include photos or illustrations.

Plot:

2.  Create a Game - With a partner, create a game based on your selection.  It can be a computer game, board game, card game, or any other kind you’d like, but actual passages from the selection should play a part in the action of the game.  If you create a computer game, write a detailed description of how it will be played, with samples of the graphics.  For other kinds of games, create actual boards, cards, and other playing pieces.  Write out the rules to play the game.

(This sounds quite complicated and time-consuming but could potentially appeal to the boys. It may be useful for generating interest in the subject when students don't like to read.) 

5. Jackdaw – Collect artifacts that pertain to elements of the plot, setting, theme, or characters in the text.  Build a display for these artifacts, label them, and explain the significance of each artifact in terms of the meaning of a particular part of or the whole book.

6.  Story Quilt – Make a “quilt” relating to the book and include quotations on each quilt square with a graphic.

Character:

14.  Eulogy - An eulogy is a speech or written tribute praising a person or thing.      

Eulogies are usually about someone who has recently died and are often delivered at a funeral service.  Write a eulogy for one of the characters that dies, or who is already deceased, in your book.  Write this from the point of view of one of the other characters you read about.  The eulogy should include personal anecdotes and information to show how important the deceased character is to the person giving the eulogy.

(Not to be morbid, but I really love this idea. It can see it working quite well for Shakespearean plays and this format could really encourage students to think deeply about the role and impact of key characters in a text.) 

15.  Resume’ – Create a resume’ that highlights the skills of one of the main characters of

your selection.  Research on line resume’ formats and choose one the works for your character.  Be creative, but arrange the information clearly: name and address on top, job objective, work history, education and special skills and talents. 

20.  Gossip Columnist – Write a column for the newspaper or a tabloid publication concerning a scene from your book.  Research articles in People, The Enquirer, etc…

and write your own “tell all” article about a character in your selection.  Be sure to use headlines, tag lines, and pictures (where possible).

(I think students would have a blast with this assignment if we tasked them to set it in the context of Stomp, 8 Days, The New Paper etc.) 

Themes, Symbolism, Mood & Tone

7.  Song – Find a song that relates to the book.  Record it for presentation and type a handout of the lyrics and why they relate to your selection.

(One of my favourite assessment ideas as I am a musical person. This assignment allows students to find thematic and emotional links between the contemporary music that they listen to and the text. I think they would get excited about an assignment like this as it makes literature so much more personal and relatable for them. Furthermore, the experience of reading a text can be so much richer when we are listening to music that relates to the text. In fact, I would give students the option of extending this assignment further by creating a mini soundtrack or playlist of 3-4 songs. They would then have to present it to the class and explain how their song selections relate to the text.) 

 

8.  Book Jacket – Design a book jacket to reflect a warranted theme in your book, or the mood or tone.  Include the title and author’s name.  Prepare a one-page handout explaining how the book jacket reflects the theme or mood or tone of the selection.

13.  Symbol Project - A symbol is an object or person that stands for something else, such as an idea or a quality.  Make a directory of symbols in your selection and write an explanation of what ideas are represented by each symbol.   List the symbols alphabetically and include a description of the ideas each symbol represents.

Here are 5 reasons why I like her ideas:

1. They pique students' interest and make literature fun, relevant while encouraging creativity and critical thinking.

2. The diversity of activities/assignments will appeal to a wide spectrum of learners (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, high, middle & low ability learners).

3. Most of her assessment ideas are suitable for group work and collaborative learning. In literature, it is particularly valuable for students to be exposed to a myriad of perspectives and interpretations.

4. The assignments eliminate rote learning and very creatively help students to immerse themselves in the world of the text. This means that they will naturally end up with a much deeper understanding and appreciation for the text. Without having to 'study' too hard for summative assessments, they would also be armed with textual evidence through the preparation work for these assignments.   

5. For schools that only do lower secondary literature, these ideas are especially good for generating interest and appreciation for literature. These ideas also work well for project work or assessing students based on a portfolio of work.

Adrien Alsobrook's alternative assessments are generally more appropriate for formative assessment in the Singaporean school context. They can also be quite time-consuming, so the SoW has to be well planned out in order to integrate these assessments. I think some teachers may find Alsobrook's ideas gimmicky. But with literature on the decline in Singapore, I feel that if we started to integrate some creative alternate assessments into our school system, literature would seem less boring or 'dead' and archaic to students. Shifting away from the traditional cognitive assessments, and assessing students based on a portfolio of work may be worth considering, especially for lower secondary students.

Recreating the Story (Beatrice)

It wasn't really a website that I found but a file that was uploaded onto the web. It's a treasure chest containing plenty of alternative assessment ideas from a teacher to his students. I am unable to upload the link here because when I click it, it just opens. 

The Idea of Recreation

Turn the Familiar into the Sinister 

Idea number 23 in the list given by a certain Adrien Alsobrook to his students was to turn a familiar narrative into a sinister one. I can see this being done in formative assessments over a few weeks where students first get familiar with the style of the text through analysis and then get exposed to the elements of Gothic tales, perhaps through a few short stories. 

Here's my brainwave (spontaneous and still in need of adjustments) 

Step 1: Present selected text to students and teach them to identify the style of the writer.                    This could be done in a simple table form, with columns for observations and              

             evidence.  

Step 2: Students to question author's style. 

             E.g. How does the style contribute to the effect that the writer conveys? Is it effective                for the genre that the writer is writing for? 

             Students could present this in an oral presentation - they dramatize the text to show 

             the effect given by the text.  

Step 3:  Students are presented with a de-composed version of the text. The style has been                    changed and students would have to study the difference between them. Students                    are to then write their own de-composed version of the text. 

Step 4: Students are given 3 Gothic tales and taught to identify the elements  and styles of 

             Gothic tales. 

Step 5: Final assessment - Students will show their understanding of the text by turning the                original selected text into a Gothic tale. 

Thoughts

Recreation of a text as a mode of assessment appeals to me because I like that it does not have a set answer that students can memorise from somewhere. It tests creativity and spontaneity, skills which I think students need to survive in today's world. It would 'force' educators to rethink the way they teach and the curriculum because they cannot teach students to write in a certain way to score that A. I realized from one of our tutorials that students could learn "academia-speak" -  to use certain words in a certain fashion to appeal to the type of answer needed. I don't like the idea that students can learn to be exam-smart in this sense. Then we're testing them on how well they learn exam techniques instead of the knowledge of creativity and the beauty of expression, which to me is Literature. At the end of the day, I would love to know that my students do well in Literature because they can create and write their own literature. 

Twitterature (edna)

This idea came to me when i recalled one of those things i read online about Mrs Dalloway being "Twitter before Twitter", and i thought about the book, Twitterature, which i once browsed briefly at a bookstore.

Travesty, i know.

And i thought, it might actually be an interesting alternative way to do assessment in class. So here's the link for examples of Twitterature online: http://www.twitterature.us/us/ex.htm

For those who aren't familiar with it, Twitterature is a compilation of classic books that have been condensed into tweets from a particular character's point of view. So the Hamlet in Twitterature, for example, would consist of @EmoDanishPrince going about his existential crisis in a series of 140 character messages. Travesty, possibly, but i think it can actually be a great way to teach characterisation.

Blame ICT group project, but it made me more aware of the fact that our students are going to be more well-versed with social media than they are with their books, and they enjoy things like that Shakespearean lyrics Twitter account that "translates" modern day pop lyrics into pseudo-Shakespearean language.

So, why not let students create their own Twitter/Facebook/[insert new social media fad] version of a literature text, where they take the position of a character in the novel/poem/play, and work on coming up with a series of maybe 10 Tweets or a Facebook post complete with comments, all while in character?

It would be entertaining and informal, of course, but it would allow students to engage in characterisation. When i was in secondary school, we used to work in groups where each group would be assigned a character from the text, and we would have to present our findings of our character to the rest of the class. These presentations, however, were quite rigid in the sense that we would look at a character, pick out his/her traits, and given token evidence from the text to support our findings.

Twitterature, however, would mean that students really have to be engaged in the character, because their tweets would have to translate both the character's point of view, and the language the character would use.

This would be particularly useful for analysing characterisation in plays, for example, i can foresee students having a great time working on Shakespearean characters, because the characters are usually really diverse, and students have to rewrite soliloquys. With Tweets, you also get a very concise rewrite of the thoughts and dialogue, so students would have to filter out the most salient points they feel would contribute to a character's characterisation, meaning we can assess how well they have understood a character from what they choose to include in the Tweets.

As with any alternative assessment that students could see as "fun", there are potentially lot of things that can go wrong, so there should be accompanying instructions that restrict and guide what they can come up with, such as "tweets have to be strictly in character" so they don't end up using it as a platform for personal attacks towards another group working on another character when it doesn't happen in the text, just because they have free reign of internet language to use. Or "tweets should not contain vulgarities and obscenities" because some of the examples on the website above (and in the book) do make use of them, and while i am sure Heathcliff would have been filling his Twitter with loads of intense f word tweets if he'd had a Twitter, we obviously can't have that in class for our students.

Finally, a Twitterature project will not consume too much class time, because the point of twitter is for messages to be transmitted really quickly, so the presentation will not be a long one. Students also don't have to make use of the actual online platform to do it, as teachers can provide templates for them to fill in like a worksheet as a group. That way, all they have to do is present their work to the class using the visualiser, allowing their classmates and teachers to be educated and entertained by their work, and minimising potential ICT muck ups.

Of course, teachers can make students write a report justifying why they wrote this and that in their tweets, but if the characterisation has been done properly and students have really thought through their tweets as they are supposed to have done, the tweets should be self-justifying in the first place. (Also, i'm sure teachers will still have to make students do formal writing for formal assessment later on anyway, so let's not make them do it here.)

So, here's a summary of why Twitterature might work as alternative assessment:

1. Students can engage in characterisation through adopting characters' POVs and language.
2. Concise format of Twitter means students have to pick out most salient points --> good for testing students' understanding of characterisation.
3. Informal and familiar platform for students to engage with, as opposed to making formal presentations about a character.
4. Allows for group work, so that (ahem) collaborative learning can take place and students can learn about other characters in a more in-depth manner (and teachers don't have to mark bad handwriting)
5. It's not as time consuming as group powerpoint presentations (theoretically.)

Possible bonus benefit:

Students may or may not be better prepared to take on Virginia Woolf in the future.