I recently learned about the GiggleIT program from Patricia Carmichael of The International Association of School Librarianship (IASL). This is a global collaborative publishing project hosted by the IASL, working in partnership with the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL).
The media release for the project states:
Designed to help children around the world improve their English language literacy skills, the GiggleIT Project encourages students ages 10-14 to contribute their writings to an online book (eBook) celebrating stories and humour from their culture. Humour, just like tragedy, is a vehicle that can be used to promote cross-cultural understandings and collaboration for children and young adults around the world. Children’s work will be published internationally and will identify their culture through literature.
Written by children for children, the eBook will contain children’s stories, jokes and poetry. The project will inspire children to be creative and make cross-cultural connections with other children from around the world as they learn about humour from other countries, while improving their literacy skills.
A range of competitions, and teaching and learning packages, will motivate and stimulate reading and writing skills whilst supporting the teaching and learning with examples and worksheets which can be downloaded into handouts for the class.
Patricia uses Giggle IT in her integrated English, Social Science and ICT and library lessons in the middle school. She mentioned that it is very effective for grades 5 - 8, upper primary and lower secondary students.
Please consider visiting the site. Here's a sampling of the resources the GiggleIT team has created to help you get started:
I hope you will register your class to participate in GiggleIT 2011.
Cross posted at ThumannResources.com
