Library

Holidays!

Spring has sprung and the holidays are nearly upon us.  The library is looking forward to having no books on its shelves because they will all have been borrowed by students wanting to read whilst lying down underneath cherry blossom trees.  It’s a nice image.

VCE students can borrow texts and other books from the VCE collection for the duration of the break – these are usually overnight loans only.  In the case of VCE students, looking wistfully out of a study window at a younger sister reading underneath a cherry blossom tree is about as nice an image as I can realistically muster.  Sorry.

Is your family going on a long car trip?

If so then please do ask your daughter to get the eplatform Audio book app and you can listen to books instead of local radio.  https://kilbreda.wheelers.co/  Just make sure that you download the audio books somewhere with internet as they are large files!  I have spoken about how beautifully some of the narrators sound, regardless of the story they are reading! You can share the downloads over several devices and so family members could listen to different stories through earpods if family reading tastes differ.

Issues in Society

I would like to highlight a specific Kilbreda Libguide which deserves a wider audience.  The ‘Newspapers and Current Issues” guide provides links to a wealth of resources for finding information on contentious topics and is used primarily by the debating teams and senior students who have to present oral arguments as a part of their English course.  However, it would also be of interest to any thinking person who wants to see how issues have risen and fallen, and the arguments provided from all sides. 

In this libguide you will find links to the Australian and New Zealand Reference Centre database which has all of the printed articles from all major (and many local) newspapers and which is therefor a wealth of information for every subject.  Links to foreign papers are also provided which can give a very different slant on the news we read here in Australia – many of these are written in English so you do not have to rely on “Google Translate” to help you out – although their results can provide hours of entertainment if you have some spare time!

With regard to contentious issues, there are four major resources provided.  Two databases “The Australian and New Zealand Points of View” and “ECHO” provide specifically Australian issues as required for English by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority. Both databases provide students with guides on how to assess and write arguments as well as providing background information and the pros and cons for the topic being discussed.

A free site well worth looking at is “The Conversation”, which is an Australian issues and news service created by various University and academic organisations. It has more journalistic talent than many newspapers! As an example you may remember Michelle Grattan’s political articles in the Age – well, she is just one of the many journalists and academics writing for them.

The last – but not least – of the four major resources listed on the libguide is a series called “Issues in Society”.  These come in both print version and as a pdf file which students can open from a box in the guide.  As with the two databases mentioned above, the books / files cover all sides of issues and many topics are updated with new editions as the issues remain unresolved in the public sphere.

As with all of our databases, the “Issues in Society” files are protected by the super secret password known only by Kilbreda students. 

Wishing you all a wonderful and ‘Issue Free’ holiday.

Angus Pearson

Library Coordinator