Students Reflect on Life Online The Examined Life A unit of work designed for Stage 5

‘The value of literature lies in its ability to reflect, explore and challenge the human condition.’

Purpose The purpose of this unit is to challenge and aid each student to develop her emerging values and to encourage her to live a rewarding, valuable and selfless life.

Where we began Brainstorm famous writers through the ages Find a passage from a seminal work and to identify a particular idea or value inherent in the text read the passage aloud and explain the central idea or core value and its impact on the audience.

students were being challenged to analyse the structure and language of the text in order to derive meaning for the responder. Later, the girls were to find a visual image that represented the value embedded in the written text.

Will Richardson In his book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, Richardson helps us understand what all of this new technology means for transforming teaching and learning.  He summarizes these changes as the ten big shifts.

Will Richardson’s Big Shift 7 The Web as Notebook (or Portfolio) How the English Dept are shifting the way we think

Year 9 Examined Life Blog Digital Journals in Literature Circles Opened the conversations, allowing the girls to discuss novels not just within classes but across the whole year