Super Snappy

Alice's School Report

ALICE IN AUSTRALIA

Mash up your own Alice stories with ESA’s super cool tool

Alice Down UnderWelcome to a set of new narratives

based on the Inanimate Alice series.

Over 12 brief adventures in Season

1: Alice in Australia, we will meet

Alice at home in Melbourne and join

her in travels around the country as

well as to other countries nearby.

For the first time, these stories have

For teachers in Australia the creation of a new set of Alice narratives, set in the land down under, is a very welcome addition to existing material.

Students until now have delighted in

watching stories about Alice that have

taken them to countries like China,

Italy and Russia, but the idea that Alice

might have had adventures in our own

backyard gives the whole story new

relevance for us.

STUART TAIT Program Director Education Services Australia

been assembled on a super-simple

authoring tool Snappy such that

students can mash-up the stories with

materials relevant to themselves and

their lives. We are hoping that these

new stories and the easy-to-use tool

will encourage students of all ages to

create original stories of their own.

Snappy suggests that the prospect of

students creating their own ‘remixed’

stories about Alice in Australia is now

tantalisingly within reach. I can’t wait

to see what students come up with...

welcome to Australia, Alice!

Alice Down Under

When I first saw Episode One of Inanimate Alice a

few years ago it blew my mind! I had only just started

thinking about multimodal texts and digital stories, and

here was a perfect example to share with my students.

Since then I have remained an avid fan, watching

Alice grow and change in each Episode and

encouraging other teachers to delve into the related

resources.

The Education Pack and Starter Activities have

helped a lot of teachers I know to feel more confident

approaching a story that is digital, multimodal and

interactive – teaching Inanimate Alice has certainly

enabled me to develop my expertise in these areas!

KATE PULLINGERWriter, Inanimate Alice

Since the first episode of Inanimate Alice was published

online, our readership has continued to grow and change.

As the writer behind the project, it’s been a pleasure for me

to be able to return to writing stories about Alice and her

peripatetic family with this series.

In story terms, there’s a two year gap between episodes

one (when Alice is 8) and two (when Alice is 10), so writing

a series of photo-novella stories that fill that gap has been a

great opportunity for me to create new characters and

explore new places with Alice.

KELLI McGRAWVice President of ETAQ

Get Snappyat using Snappy

In this magazine our Creative Developer Andy Campbell

takes us through a step-by-step approach to mashing up

the existing assets and inserting new pictures, words,

music and sound effects. Literacy Adviser Bill Boyd

provides guidance on how to address learning objectives

and get the most from the stories.

Pretty obvious: Make sure you’ve downloaded and installed Snappy from the inanimatealice.edu.au website!

Before you load the program up, think about what’s going to happen in your Alice story and what pictures and sounds you might need. Visit the Resources section of the inanimatealice.edu.au website and check out what’s there for inspiration.

Create a folder somewhere on your computer and name it Snappy Story. Download some of the Alice photos and sounds that you want to use directly into your new folder.

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4Nice. Now load up Snappy.You should see a white boxlike the one below. Click onNew Project and give yournew Alice adventure a name.

5OK. You’ll probably have noticed that on the following screen Snappy is tell you to import your folder containing pictures and sound files. So, go ahead and do just that by clicking on the Import button in the top left corner. Find your folder and click OK.

Once students start mashing They will be creating stories from scratch IN NO TIME

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Drag any of your photos or sound files from the top of the

screen onto the square blank space in the middle.

You can add text to the top or bottom of your pages.

Just click on Enter some text here and start typing.

Make more pages for your story here.

To delete a page, just click on it and press the DELETE key on your keyboard.

Change Snappy’s page layout,colours andstyles here.Or take a photo of yourself with your webcam!

Snappy is amazingly easy to get the hang of - there’s even no need for a save button, it just saves as you go along. Experiment with the layout options on the right hand side to enable more than one picture to be dragged on to each page.

When you’re done, click View or Print to share your new Alice adventure.

“Cool!”

Learning Objectives

BILL BOYDLiteracy Adviser

TBCI first discovered the wonderful world of

Inanimate Alice a couple of years ago, when

a teacher in my native Scotland brought it to

my attention. From the minute I saw it I realised

the huge potential of this apparently simple tale

of a young girl and her journey through life, to

provide teachers with a vehicle to transform

their classrooms.

Being born digital, Alice is the literary hero of

the age, and I have yet to meet anyone, young

or old, who is not able to empathise with Alice

and the situations she finds herself in. As the

co-creator of the starter activities which Kelli

refers to earlier in the magazine, I have been

privileged to be a member of Alice’s education

‘gang’ for some time now, and I hope that while

Alice is in Australia I will be able to share with

you some of the ways in which you might use

the text to develop the literacy skills of your

young learners.

Inanimate Alice is the first digital text to be

listed officially as a recommended text in the

Australian curriculum guidelines, recognition

that by introducing it to the classroom,

teachers and their students will be making

significant strides towards meeting the

literacy aims of the national curriculum.

“to develop students’ ability to interpret and

create texts with appropriateness, accuracy,

confidence, fluency and efficacy for learning

in and out of school, and for participating in

Australian life more generally.”

Through the characters of Alice and Brad,

young learners and their teachers are able

to explore and discuss a range of topics,

many of them relating to Alice’s personal

development, and – by extrapolation – to the

personal development of the young readers

themselves. The journey with Alice can play

a significant role in producing confident

individuals with a strong sense of citizenship

and responsibility.

INTRODUCTION

Meeting the needs of Young People and the Curriculum

“Don’t forget

to check out Bill’s

suggested activities

for Story One

on the Website!”

TBC

“Texts chosen include media texts, everyday

texts and workplace texts from increasingly

complex and unfamiliar settings, ranging

from the everyday language of personal

experience to more abstract, specialised and

technical language, including the language

of schooling and academic study.”

Inanimate Alice is precisely the kind of

‘media text’ which young people will be

interacting with in their own lives, and as

teachers we have a responsibility to make

sure they understand how these texts are

created and how the interaction of the

various elements of the story combine to

convey particular messages. The Snappy

tool which Andy explains on the previous

page will provide teachers and students with

the means to develop their own creative

skills as they produce new versions of Alice’s

story in their own settings.

“Students learn to adapt language to meet

the demands of more general or more

specialised purposes, audiences and

contexts. They learn about the different

ways in which knowledge and opinion are

represented and developed in texts, and

about how more or less abstraction and

complexity can be shown through language

and through multimodal representations.”

A close reading of the text of Inanimate

Alice shows that it combines formal and

informal language, dialogue and description,

in increasingly complex ways, allowing the

young learner to develop in a progressive

manner along with Alice herself as she

becomes more sophisticated and discerning.

New vocabulary is introduced when

appropriate, which enables the young reader

to build a word bank for use in his or her own

stories.

“This means that print and digital contexts

are included, and that listening, viewing,

reading, speaking, writing and creating are all

developed systematically and concurrently.”

I have yet to find a better text than Inanimate

Alice for providing the context within which all

these skills can be developed simultaneously.

Whether they are reading the text, discussing

the use of sound, learning new language

skills or planning their own episodes, young

readers will want to be part of Alice’s ‘gang’

too. What better starting point for teachers is

there than that!

*all extracts taken from ‘Literacy: expanding

the repertoire of English usage’ ACARA

Meeting the needs of Young People and the Curriculum

Whenever she sees me, she sighs,

qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq

and says she wishes I was more Chinese

Mum promises we'll stay with Aunt Xui Li for two days only before we travel with Dad to Indonesia,

but I'm not so keen on that either.

Aunt Xui Li lives on the forty-first floor in an apartment made of windows

My mum doesn't like heights so when we're there she mostly sits in the kitchen,

but I like to press myself against the glass and pretend I'm flying across the city...

...with superdog Tilly beside me.

Dog of Steel!

Aunt Xui Li has given me a cheongsam:

‘Authentic,’ she says, ‘from the 1920s’.

When I put it on my mum and my auntie get all excited,

but it's tight and scratchy andit makes me want to roll in the dirt with Tilly. I take it off as soon as they aren't looking.

They settle down to watch tv. Brad gets on his skateboard and travels to Indonesia.

I sit on the sofa with my player.

Brad wants me to write him a new story

so I try to think of one.He hasn't been there since he was little.

His dad's friend, Adhi, drowned in the tsunami.

And his dad misses him a lot.

?

Instead, Brad says he's going to teach all the kids in Adhi's village how to skateboard,

but before he can do that...

Mum calls me and says I need to get ready to go out for dinner...

...and that I have to wear my new

scratchy itchy cheongsam.

So, before I put it back on... The little English porcelain figurine dances out onto the runway...

I take one last flight around the flat and across the city.

and before I can stop – a trillion billion pieces.

CRASH! How can I make it up to Aunt Xui Li?

Not even Tilly the Superdog can help me this time.