CMIS Evaluation

The Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards Competition opens in March.

This year’s optional theme is ‘Forests, Feathers, Fins and Fur’. The competition is open to school students across Australia and caters for all age groups from Lower Primary to Senior Secondary.

A National Presentation Ceremony will be held in Gunnedah, north-west NSW on Friday 5 September 2008. Travel and accommodation (from the nearest capital city) to attend the presentation is included for the individual category winners and one accompanying adult.

Entry conditions, downloadable entry forms, judging criteria, Teachers’ notes, Poetry Links and Tips are all available on the competition home page.

For teachers wanting to include the competition into their classroom program the CMIS website includes useful resources to support teaching units using Poetry and Verse Novels.

Sharon O’Neill, Director General of Education, is encouraging staff to acknowledge the Australian Government’s formal apology to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians who were forcibly removed from their families and communities as children.

CMIS has a large range of resources recommended for teachers and students in public schools.

Key websites from our Resource Bank include:

• Reconciliation Australia has prepared material to help understand the background to the apology.
• The Apology from the ABC includes links to video and audio files of the parliamentary speeches and community reactions.
• Bringing them home includes all sections of the 1997 report and more recent commentary on the 10th anniversary of the report’s release.
• Racism. No way!
• Schools in action: valuing cultural diversity
• PALS: Partnership, Acceptance, Learning, Sharing
• Indigenous Australians EdNA theme

More

Aboriginal Culture

• Dust echoes: ancient stories, new voices
• Indigenous Australia
• Lore of the land: reconciling spirit and place in Australia’s story
• Message Club
• Roebourne Primary School

Imaginative stories and personal narratives can be an excellent way of conveying the emotional reality of events and supplementing information titles.
Resources for Primary students

• A is for Aunty by Elaine Russell
• Born to run: my story by Cathy Freeman
• The burnt stick by Anthony Hill and Mark Sofilas
• Going bush by Nadia Wheatley and Ken Searle
• Home to mother by Doris Pilkington, a junior version of Follow the rabbit-proof fence
• Idjhil: and the land cried for its lost soul by Helen Bell
• Papunya School book of country and history by Staff and students at Papunya School, with written text Nadia Wheatley
• Tell me why by Robyn Templeton and Sarah Jackson
• Towards reconciliation by Rebecca Steinberg
• When I was little, like you by Mary Malbunka

More

Resources for Secondary students

• Angela by James Moloney
• Barefoot kids by Steve Hawke
• Bye, beautiful by Julia Lawrinson
• Coonardoo by Katherine Susannah Pritchard
• Follow the rabbit-proof fence by Doris Pilkington
• Njunjul the sun by Meme McDonald & Boori Monty Pryor
• The rabbits by John Marsden & Shaun Tan
• A story to tell by Laurel Nannup
• Ten canoes [videorecording] written by Rolf de Heer
• Yolngu boy [videorecording]

More

These are just a few of the resources that may already be in your school library.

Two recent articles may be of interest to those concerned about the fate of printed books in our increasingly digital world.

Peter Macinnis in an ABC Ockham’s Razor interview on the topic Is the book as we know it dead? explains how technology helped him to research and create his latest book. He goes on to suggest that Australia needs better school libraries and more teacher librarians to teach students how to develop the information literacy skills they need to undertake similar research.

Another recent article from the New York Times reports that in Japan “the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it.” Of the top 10 bestselling titles in Japan in 2007, five were written on mobile phones and later published in the traditional book format. Subscribing to The New York Times is free and well worth taking the time.

‘Life Online is what YOU make of IT’ is the theme for

Interested schools can participate in an international blogathon, a Cybersmart Detectives activity or vote to help decide the winning Safer Internet Day Competition Winners.

Make sure you check out the cybersmart KIDS ONLINE site for more information.

CMIS maintains a series of pages for Managing Student Safety Online and other ICT in the classroom issues including:

• Chat in the Classroom
• Combating Net Nasties in Your Classroom
  [Viruses, Hoaxes, Spam]
• Cyberbullying
• Email in the Classroom
• Evaluating Websites
• Image Search Tools
• Search Tools
• Weblogs in Education