The College Press: Christmas Edition

Looking for that last minute digital stocking filler!? Why not share this year's College Press with a colleague online? Packed full of news, reviews and features on the Christmas Season, it has everything you need. Well done, as always, to Mr Doyle and the entire College Press team, especially our editors Eveanna Sutton and Amy Farrell.

Happy Christmas!

(Animoto) Comparative Videos

This week I tried out Animoto. I had been aware of it for some time and had seen it being used to great effect. However I simply never got around to using it or found a different app to suit the need I had at that time. I found that you only get to create 30 second videos before you have to pay for extra length to your video, which was an initial disappointment. But you get what you pay for in life and I think Animoto could well be worth the money. The video creation interface is really as simple as a company could make it. It's easy to add pictures, videos and even your own soundtrack to your creations. Animoto has a plethora of design templates for your video and I imagine you would be a long time using it before you felt limited by their available choices. Overall I'd recommend it for teachers as an accessible and quick way to create teacher resources or to help pupils create a video project. Here are a couple of quick resources I made this week for a Leaving Certificate class on The Truman Show.

Update: Thanks to a tip off from @MrAbe101 I found out that teachers can apply for a free educational account here. This extends the video length to three minutes and allows you to create 50 videos with your class in a six month period. I applied and was immediately accepted to the upgraded account. I created the video on Casablanca, below, as an example of how to use the extended time.




The Truman Show - Cul. Context


The Truman Show - Cul. Context (2)

Ms Kelly's Class: Poetry Presentations Series

Ms.Kelly’s second year English class have recently been working on unseen poetry. The students worked together to create engaging presentations for their peers on different poems. Students annotated the poems using the STTIFF method. (Subject matter, Theme, Tone, Imagery, Form and Feeling). Over the coming weeks we will be sharing their fantastic work. The second collection in this short series comes from a group of pupils (Caeleen, Lauren, Ellen, Kate, Aine, Aoife, Kate H) and their take on Merrill Glass' But You Didn't. We hope you enjoy!

Macbeth Revision for LC and A Level English

Every year I send my senior class away over the Christmas holidays and tell them to begin revising their Single Text for the Leaving Certificate exam. Instead of just sending them off into the great unknown, I try to give them a digital resource they can use over the long break as a guide. This year we studied Macbeth so I've created this revision Padlet and I was wondering if other teachers would like to contribute? I've placed a number of videos on the Padlet page already. The learning activities can be based entirely on the videos or just used as a cue to start a revision activity on that topic. I've used SkyDrive to attach the files but Google Docs could also be easily used. I'd like to cast as wide as net as possible so if any teachers in the UK would also like to get involved that would be great. I've created two activities already but multiple activities could easily be left for the same video/image. Thanks in advance!

Eoghan

(Double click anywhere on the Padlet wall to bring up the insert box. If you are using a tablet you can edit using the window below. If you are using a Mac or PC click here to see an enlarged window for easier editing)

Created with Padlet

Ms Kelly's Class: Poetry Presentations Series

Ms.Kelly’s second year English class have recently been working on unseen poetry. The students worked together to create engaging presentations for their peers on different poems. Students annotated the poems using the STTIFF method. (Subject matter, Theme, Tone, Imagery, Form and Feeling). Over the coming weeks we will be sharing their fantastic work. The first in this short series comes from a group of boys (David, Peter, Tomas  and Lorcan) and their take on Edith Pickthall's Evacuee. We hope you enjoy!

Robert Frost - A Poet of Sadness?

5th Year pupil Rebekah Scully, from Ms Carey's class, certainly had something to say about the poetry of Robert Frost. She shares her thoughts on Robert Frost as 'A 'Poet of Sadness' below.

Robert Frost - Poet of Sadness

ThingLink Series - A Doll's House

Over the coming months I will be posting a series of 'ThingLink' resources on texts that are on the Leaving and Junior Certificate English courses. ThingLink is a fantastic web based, also on iPad, program that allows the creator to attach online documents, pictures, sounds, links or videos to an image or collection of images. In the first in the series I have put together some images on Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. I used Wikimedia Commons to find the images, then Pic Collage to piece them together before finally adding the content with ThingLink. If you create a ThingLink account I will create the resources in such a way, that anybody can add to or edit them. I hope to, for example, upload my own notes/activities to SkyDrive and then attach them to the ThingLink resource. Try and guess why the images are relevant to the text in class/at home before clicking on the content!