Hemingway – like the author, like the app

Hemingway is an easy to use editing site which helps make your writing simpler and more direct. Much like its namesake, author Ernest Hemingway, the site champions simple verbs, short sentences and no adverbs at all.

Cut and paste the text you want to edit into the website home page and hit the edit button to see your work highlighted in different colours. Yellow for hard to read, red for very hard to read, blue for adverbs, pink for complex verbs (with suggested simpler options) and green for passive phrases.

Although it can be frustrating when your best efforts don’t remove the highlighting, the app shows you what to look for when you’re editing. It would be a great tool to use with groups of students to model the editing process and how decisions about language can change the impact of your writing.

At this stage, the app doesn’t let you save and seems designed to gauge interest in a paid desktop app. But in the meantime, Hemingway is an interesting tool for writers at any level.

PGSC Reading wiki

A wiki suggesting alternative ways to respond to texts has been developed by Preston Girls’ Secondary College.

PGSC reading wiki 1

The idea behind the wiki is to show both students and teachers creative ways to respond to texts. The wiki includes examples of how students have responded via tools such as:

PGSC  reading wiki glogs

A big thank you to @thenerdyteacher Nick Provenzano for sharing his students’ Prezis on The Great Gatsby. You can view more student responses (including YouTube clips) on his excellent blog.

PGSC reading wiki prezis

Hopefully students will be excited to show teachers and parents their understanding of texts through creating and publishing presentations. Schools could use the presentations on their websites and/or parent information night.

ReadCloud

ReadCloud is a fascinating free site that may be useful for teacher librarians and English literature teachers.

readcloud

ReadCloud offers free eBooks to either read online or to download and read later.  All books are those out of copyright, so expect classics like Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations and War and Peace.

ReadCloud also offers online reading groups, and enables teachers to manage groups of readers, who can be added by invitation and kept private. Groups can add comments and make reading interactive and therefore more engaging and collaborative. There is also the opportunity to change the font of the text, search a dictionary and search the internet. This makes ReadCloud ideal for student use, however it could also be used for staff book clubs and private book groups.

This presentation explains more:

ReadCloud from LeBard on Vimeo.

ReadCloud is an Australian development and well worth investigating.

Online resources for teaching Shakespeare

English teachers are always looking for new ways to support teaching Shakespeare. Here is a site that provides just that. Provided by the UK’s Department for Children, Schools and Families, Powerpoints, Word Documents and Smartboard files are available for anyone to use.

Enjoying Shakespeare homepage
Enjoying Shakespeare homepage

With strategies that incorporate ICT into teaching texts such as Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as more specific information on teaching Romeo and Juliet, this is a site you should share with your English teaching colleagues. They’ll thank you for it!

ANZ LitLovers: Lisa Hill’s personal book blog

As readers of Bright Ideas, you are probably already familiar with Lisa Hill. Lisa Hill is the Director of Curriculum and teacher librarian at Mossgiel Park Primary School in Endeavour Hills and has been the feature of two previous Bright Ideas posts: the first about her school library blog and the second focussing on her professional learning blog. Lisa is now kindly sharing her personal reading blog.

Having set up my professional LisaHillSchoolStuff blog in March last year, I found it wasn’t long before I wanted the same sort of space to write online about what really matters to me: reading books.  I am a voracious reader, and have been since childhood. My family travelled a lot but wherever we lived in the world, my father’s first task was to join us up at the nearest library so that we could resume our Saturday routine: a weekly walk to the library where we borrowed as many books as we were allowed, followed by loafing on our beds with a book until late in the afternoon when we were shooed out to play by my mother.

 In 1997 I began journaling my thoughts about the books I read, and I wish I’d started long before that.  When you read about a hundred books a year as I do, the details fade as the years go by.  Although it can be a pleasure to re-read a book, it’s chastening to have to do this when you don’t really want to, in order to join in a conversation about it.  My journal entries range from cursory dismissals of books I didn’t like to long reflections on more complex books such as The Masterby Colm Toibin.  Sometimes my response is deeply personal because the book relates to something in my own life; at other times it’s like an impersonal review.  I wrote pages and pages about my journey through Proust and almost as much again about Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memorybecause it helped me to clarify my thoughts about them.  I still do this journaling, often late at night in bed, even though most of what I read now ends up as a blog post on my ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

ANZ LitLovers home

ANZ LitLovers home

Back in 2002 I had set up ANZ LitLovers as an online reading group and developed a website as a resource for members – but it was always a pain to update it.  When I bought a new computer that didn’t have the necessary software, it seemed to me that a LitBlog was a much easier and more flexible alternative, and I would be part of a growing international LitBlog movement, celebrating Australian Literature in my own little niche.

In the beginning I had ambitious ideas about other members of the group joining in and posting, but this hasn’t happened.  My group members write fluently and with great perception in the privacy of our online group, but they don’t seem to want to publish.  The one exception is a journalist, as comfortable with public writing as I am, but after posting her BBRLMs (Best Books Read Last Month) three times, she hasn’t done so since.  So it has become, by default, my personal LitBlog, a place for me to post my book reviews, and ramble on about book-related topics. 

At the time of writing, it has nearly 9000 hits, and is linked to other LitBlogs around Australia, the UK and the US.  ClusterMaps tells me that I have readers all over the world, but I think the ones in Slovenia, Myanmar and the Maldives must have stumbled on the blog by accident LOL.  However, there have been nearly 2000 viewers in Australia and over 1500 from the US – and these would translate into healthy sales if my writing were a book and not a blog! A growing number of people are commenting on my posts – which now number around 145 and that’s an average of thirteen posts each month since July last year.  I think it’s popular because I’m not a professional reviewer and my style sits somewhere between academic and general reader.  I take care to add the titles and authors as tags, and I categorise my posts to make them easy to find.  And I write often – usually every weekend – so there’s always something new to read if they’ve subscribed using RSS.

My all time top post (not counting the page about our reading schedule and our About page) is the one about Google Books, followed by my review of The Slap   which is on the Miles Franklin shortlist and has been featured prominently in the media.  A post about Modernism  got 17 hits in less than 24 hours, which surprised me, but the one I’m about to write about Patrick White’s Voss won’t be nearly so well-received, I bet!  Another very popular page is our ANZLL Books You Must Read list and a Reading Challengespage, but mostly people find my blog when they Google a particular title: although Perry Middlemiss’s Matilda is theAustralian LitBlog, he has more diverse interests than I do, and there’s not a lot of people writing online about Australian literary fiction or classics like me.  (I write about international contemporary fiction and classics, and non-fiction,  too, but that’s not my focus.)

2009 schedule

2009 schedule

Many people blog solely for their own pleasure and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I think that the key to having a blog that others want to read is to find a niche, and to develop a personal style.  I’m a serious reader, and my reviews reflect that, but they’re informal rather than pompous (I hope!) and they’re always my honest opinion.  (The only books I’ve received as review copies are the children’s books I review for Allen and Unwin, and even so I was a bit brutal on one occasion where I really didn’t like the book.) But I don’t just review books, I blog about all kinds of book related things…

 I’ve written about philanthropy for booklovers, about meeting my favourite author Kate Grenville, about rearranging the bookshelves in my library ( that’s the one at home) and about reading by candlelight for Earth Hour. I’ve ticked off a columnist in The Age and suggested Christmas gifts for booklovers.  I succumb to Book Memes (twice), post about festivals that I go to, have a go at predicting who the winners of awards might be, and am not afraid to express my opinion about ‘sacred writers’ who in my opinion are victims of their own overblown status. I jazz up the blog with pictures, maps, videos that tie in with books, book-covers and even an Animoto and I hyperlink almost obsessively so that people can click straight through to anything on another site that I refer to.  These strategies all come courtesy of what I’ve learned from Sue Waters at EduBlogs which is an excellent place to start any learning journey about blogging.

Books you must read

Books you must read

However, the most important point about having a personal blog is that it ought to be something you enjoy.  For me, blogging at ANZ LitLovers is an adjunct to what I already do in my reading journals.  I write for pleasure, at home and online!

Lisa has certainly given so much to others through her blogs and by reflecting on what she has been reading and then writing this for an audience is a terrific skill to have and constantly refine. Once again, well done Lisa and thank you for sharing your passion for books and your amazing amount of work with others. As well as reading Lisa’s blog for personal pleasure, students of English Literature could find some useful and interesting information.

A Pod of Poets – Podcasting by the ABC

Thanks to Nicola Fern, Marketing Manager of ABC Radio National for the following information.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has partnered with ABC Radio National’s  Poetica program and the Australia Council for the Arts to bring listeners of their regular Poetica program ‘A Pod of Poets’. Eleven programs feature Australian poets speaking about their writing and reading some pieces to the audience.

Each of the forty minute podcasts can be found on the ‘A Pod of Poets’  website. The website also contains transcripts, photographs and biographical information on each poet. ABC Radio National is also broadcasting these programs on air on Saturdays at 3pm (repeats Thursdays 3pm) throughout 2009. The first program airs on Radio National on Saturday 14th February at 3pm. Podcasts are available now.

Poets featured include Robert Adamson, Les Murray, Joanne Burns, John Kinsella, Gen X-Y (Josephine Rowe, Craig Billingham, L.K. Holt and Aidan Coleman), Jayne Fenton Keane, Samuel Wagan Watson and Martin Harrison parts 1 and 2, Kathryn Lomer and Esther Ottaway, John Clarke and Jordie Albiston.   

The ABC intend to keep the ‘A Pod of Poets’ website live for an extended period of time.

This is a fantastic resource for students and teachers interested in and/or studying Australian contemporary poetry.

Feature blog – Paisley Senior Campus, Bayside Secondary College

Zlata Matskarofski, teacher librarian at the Paisley Senior Campus of Bayside Secondary College has agreed to share her journey of developing and marketing a blog for staff and students. She describes both how and why their blog was developed. 

‘The primary purpose of the Paisley Library Blog is for both students and teachers to be able to post Book reviews, which then may be read and shared by other students and teachers,’ explains Zlata.   

Paisley's blog

Paisley

 She continues, ‘The ultimate aim of the blog is to create an interest in literature and promote wider reading.   We hope that students will be inspired by other readers through the personal reviews, suggestions and recommendations they post.  Essentially, the blog provides a platform and opportunity for students to share their reading experiences, as well as gain from other readers’ experiences.

‘We introduced the Paisley Library Blog to the staff through a Powerpoint presentation at a staff meeting, highlighting that it may be of particular interest to English and English Literature teachers.  Our presentation outlined the aim and purpose of the blog, as well as the process involved to get started.  The blog has been placed on the school network and is easily accessible to all staff and students.’

Zlata says, ‘The initial setting up of the blog posed its own challenges, which were gradually overcome as we became familiar with the way it was organised and laid out.  Persistence and perseverance paid off. The Paisley Library Blog is the fruit of the SLAV Web 2.0 course, which I found to be an excellent introduction to the various Web 2.0 tools available.’

Congratulations to Zlata for developing the blog and the English and English literature teachers for using it with their classes. Well done!