Discover creative strategies for bringing novels to life for middle and high school students with this workshop, featuring the words and works of 10 novelists, including Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, J. K. Rowling, and Toni Morrison. Within the framework of real classroom practice, the workshop offers interviews with contemporary authors, literary critics, teachers, and students, as well as film clips from adaptations of the novels featured. In Search of the Novel poses basic questions that can help you examine the genre from multiple perspectives and bring it to life for your students.
Weekly World news takes off modern society, lifestyles, fears and the media - even a browse of the front pages is funny. In the classroom - we could use something of these to have students consider how tho tell if the media is presenting them the truth - and some of those headlines are fabulous for studying word play
'In other words,'' says Dr Sue Thomson, of the Australian Council for Educational Research, ''larger proportions of students can be described as 'strong performers' in the digital medium than in the print medium.''
If anything, what the new technologies will do is provide more opportunities to engage with long-form texts. The distribution mechanism will allow greater access. If you wanted to read almost anything on anything, I can almost guarantee there'll be 5000 words that someone's written about it somewhere, that you can get your hands on in an instant.'
''Everybody's either on a Kindle, emailing, texting, reading the news on their iPads. The digital revolution is not destroying reading. It's changing the shape, the form, the context and maybe how we do it, but I don't think it's diminishing it.''
But does access to more material make us more ''literate''? ''I actually think the evidence shows that most of our children are more literate, if you think of the definition 'literacy' as hugely more complex than it was 30 or 40 years ago and the different sorts of literacies that everyone has to have,'' says Ewing
''At one point of time, if you could sign your name you were 'literate' - and then it was actually a very good measure. Later, if you could do a, say, primary school level of schooling, that was considered to be literacy. Today, I'd say, it's being able to interact with and participate in contemporary society, and in most workplaces these days that takes in having some element of computer literacy.''
BUT many worry that screen-based reading is already changing the way we read for the worse, playing to what has been called the Google generation, people with short attention spans who are prone to distraction and turn into ''skimmers''
''Wide reading, particularly wide reading out of school, has a direct correlation with academic success.''
nd amid all the gloom and doomsaying, it seems we're still doing plenty of that.
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