English News 

Elie Wiesel's 'Night' - Learning about the Holocaust

At the end of last term students took part in an activity run by the Jewish Holocaust Centre to learn more about the Holocaust as part of our studies of Elie Wiesel's autobiography 'Night' at Year 10.  

An interactive Zoom session with museum staff allowed students to take a virtual tour of the Museum, as well as to see and discuss artifacts from the time. In the second part of the presentation students were given the opportunity to speak with a Holocaust Survivor who now lives in Melbourne, Vivienne.  She shared her experiences as a Jewish person in occupied France during the war. 

Students were able to gain a valuable insight into the effects of the Holocaust and what it was like during that period of history.  Even though we were unable to attend the Museum in person, the Museum staff provided an excellent range of experiences to give students insight into the Holocaust.  When circumstances allow, a trip to the Museum itself in Elsternwick would be a great opportunity to follow up the workshop and gain more insight into the experiences of many during the Holocaust and to see the rest of the artifacts housed there.

Students participated well on the day during the presentations, and took advantage of the opportunity to learn and to ask questions of the Museum staff and Viv. 

We received congratulations from the Museum staff to pass on to students and parents: 

“We were all so impressed at the engagement from your students throughout and especially the thoughtful, respectful questions they asked Viv. They are mature and respectful young men and women and great leaders for the future! You should all be incredibly proud of them” – Tracey Collie, JHC Education Officer.

Takeover Melbourne - Writing with the ABC

At various times during Term 2 junior students had the opportunity to work on their writing skills and develop personal stories about their passions and interests with ABC Producers and Education Officers.  This was part of the ‘Takeover Melbourne’ story competition. The ABC producers worked with students, both in person and remotely, to inspire ideas and generate story beginnings.   The first group they worked with were students from the Year 7 and 8 creative writing group run by Mr Gardner and Mr Mann.  This was via Zoom and involved working through stimulus questions designed to spark ideas for writing, and then watching video presentations of some of the inspiring winners of previous competitions.

After this, the ABC staff visited the school to work directly with other groups of students.  Students could elect to attend workshops with the presenters, and a number of LEAP classes also took part in workshops.  Unfortunately further scheduled sessions had to be cancelled due to Lockdowns. 

We wish participating students luck with their stories!

Critical Thinking and online information workshops

There is a huge volume of information available to anyone with an internet connection or smartphone.  Only some of this information is reliable, and online sources need to be carefully considered.

The State Library of Victoria ran a series of presentations for students via Zoom at the end of last semester with strategies they can use to assess whether what they are reading online is likely to be reliable or not. 

A number of our Year 7 and 8 classes were lucky enough to take part in these workshops.  They covered online hoaxes, the effects of misinformation and the impact of bias, and documented examples of people being led astray by what they encountered online.  It was also discussed how the algorithms of most social media apps narrow down the information presented to an individual based on their previous reading, which can mean that what students see in those feeds only presents one side of an issue and never presents a challenge to what they already think about a topic. Students  were encouraged to search more widely, evaluate the sites they are seeing, and consider a range of sources before deciding online information is credible.

One way suggested to evaluate a website is to consider the type of domain name it uses.  The information they wanted students to think about is set out in the attachment below:

Another way to test the validity of information and to assess the intentions of the site creators is to apply the ‘Crappy Test’ to them. 

This test sets out a list of factors to consider about websites, as noted in the below attachment:

Anne Sim

English Domain