but do I have to write it?

my practice glog

This is a useful tool for all of you visual people out there. You can create posters that you can use to decorate your projects, you can collect a series of ideas to give your inspiration for your writing, the list is endless (ok, maybe not endless, but you get it)

If you have an i-phone or an i-pod touch (and can get to the free wifi at maccas or your local library) you should get some great apps to help you with your studies. You can download study guides from LitCharts, Cliff Notes and Schmoop on popular texts, as well as your other subjects if you have to!
You can also download a timetable app to help you stay organised as well as the obvious Facebook and Twitter apps to help you keep in touch with your study friends. This really is a great way to use this fantastic device and then at least you can tell your parents you are working while using it! I even have a QuickOffice app which allows me to create and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files as well as read PDFs. Of  course you can get these apps and more in the i-tunes store.
If any of you have found any more great apps please share.

As we are reading Robert Drewe’s The Shark Net we need to consider the Context ‘Whose Reality?’. We need to analyse the story that Drewe tells in terms of the Context and some ways to do this are to look at the descriptions of events and places as told by the adult Drewe who is trying to imagine the child Drewe’s responses to these events and places. How does the child percieve things? How can we be sure that Drewe, the adult, writer, is telling us his story accurately? Even more contentious is the way that Drewe imagines the reality of Eric Cooke, the murderer who terrorised Perth during the 1950s. There is information about the real Cooke here. Do you think that Drewe portrays him accurately and does Drewe’s vision of Cooke fit with the person who we can see would later claim ‘he just wanted to hurt people’?

Cooke has also been mentioned in Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet as the Nedlands Monster and his story has been in the media recently since two other Australians were convicted of crimes that it was later found that Cooke had committed. ABC TV’s Australian Story covered the case in 2002 when John Button, one of the accused was attempting to clear his name and show that Cooke committed the crime for which Button was convicted.

IT is also worth looking at some reviews of the text to help you to see how other people have percieved it. One review by Ruth Starke, an Adelaide author and critic, can be found here.

The Age reports that IMAX are showing the latest film in 3D and fans are queueing around the block. The article is here.

Even though I am not a fan I will see the new film. My year 11 students are trying to convince me to read the books (all of them) and I am weakening. When I tried before I found that they were not my thing, but I will give them another go.

OK year 11, are you happy now?

The Schmap website is basically a travel guide to various cities. I am very excited that one of my photos has been included in the Newcastle Upon Tyne page. This is my hometown and I took a photo of Grey’s Monument when I was last there. I then uploaded this photo onto Flickr where the Schmap people saw it and asked to use it. If you  have taken any fabulous photos that you would like to share with the world then Flickr is a good place to host them. You can decide who sees them.

The link to my photo is in the widget bar to your right.

Google Lit Trips are a great way of exploring new books (or old faves for that matter). You can browse through hundreds at their site.

The one pictured is of Voltaire’s Candide, but they have ‘Into the Wild’ by Jon Krakauer, Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini as well as many others that are more general reading.

There is a Macbeth one for those of you in year 10. This is highly recommended.

Those of you creative types who like to make everything look pretty, especially the work that you are going to hand in to your favourite English teacher, you may like to use Wordle. You can create fantastic clouds of text, using web sites, word docs, or just text you type in. They end up looking really spectacular.

Some of mine are here, feel free to have a look and leave a comment.

The following website has a list of all of the media articles published on the bikie gang fight at Sydney Airport. This would be useful for your file of articles. While we need fo focus more on the language than the issue, if you understand the issue well and are well versed in the arguments you can then read the persuasive langauge more clearly without worrying about spending time understanding the background. When you are in the SAC you will need to focus on the language used to persuade and the ways in which it works on the reader.

Mrs Hicks’ useful list of websites for this issue can be found here. You can open and view the document and save it if you wish.

Here is a practice annotated document, the hard work is done for you in this one

Here is a  site that I found in my travels that introduces students to Shakespeare. It is a flash animation of Shakespeare who tells you about his life. This will be a useful resource if you are new to Shakespeare as it goes through the plays and categorises them as well as giving an overview of his life and times.