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media type="youtube" key="4g5oHKzldmY" width="425" height="350" BUGWHISPERER. (2008). “What is an insect?”. Retrieved September 26, 2010,  from []

** Explanation of resource ** This resource is a brief documentary on “What is an insect?” and is relevant to our unit on Mini Beasts. The presenter of the documentary describes what features make an insect, speaking in general terms, as it provides an overview of insects in general, as opposed to specifically analysing one insect. This resource directly supports the learning of the rich multimodal task, as it provides an example of the semiotic features of a documentary, which in this lesson, the students are to deconstruct. ** Relevance to outcome ** This documentary relates to the focus outcome, as it the presenter and the visuals (photography) describe the structure of insects, which is further explored by the use of scientific terminology of “arthropod”, “exoskeleton”, “invertebrates” and “thorax”. This will also help students achieve the outcome as they use the appropriate terminology to discuss the structure and function of insects’ parts. The resource also helps students’ achieve the outcome as it describes the interactions between insects and their environments. ** Aspects of literacy to be explored ** In the exploration of the different semiotic aspects of the documentary, such as the visuals, the sound, which include the presenter’s voice over, the music, and background noises, and the text (such as the titles, and brief information points shown on screen), the students will be interpreting the features involved in the creation of a documentary and the purpose of a documentary. This knowledge will introduce students to the modes of presenting information and the combining of them in the rich task, which ultimately gives students the multiliteracy skills to discover meaning from multimodal texts that are prevalent in today’s society (Unsworth, 2001, p. 71). In the analysis of the documentary, students will explore the representations of insects through the visuals. The visuals include images (naturalistic modality and conceptual structural analytical images of the insects) and videos, which in the analysis of the visuals during the lesson, show students the interactive meanings of this multimodal text (Unsworth, 2001, p. 95). The resource allows students to explore the four roles of a reader, and although students’ are not ”reading” the documentary, they are viewing and responding to the meanings that are being created through the signs – the visual imagery (photos, video), the sound (music, presenter’s voice) and the written text (titles). When viewing the video, the students draw on their prior knowledge of the features of a documentary in order to find examples in the resource, thus students are text participants as they participate in and make meanings of the semiotic aspects in a documentary (Santoro, 2004, p. 57). By making the connection between the documentary’s semiotic features and the purpose of the documentary, they are actively contributing to their awareness of how to use documentaries, which Santoro (2004) describes as a text user (p. 57). This resource allows students to analyse it in terms of a documentary, in which the organisation of the text is analysed, thus making its purpose clear to the students (Santoro, 2004, p. 58). The subject-specific vocabulary presented in the documentary (such as the terms given above) gives the students the opportunity to be code breakers (Santoro, 2004, p. 54). Whilst students will be introduced to these words from the documentary, they will be explored in more depth in subsequent lessons with other resources. __References__ Santoro, N. (2004). Using the four resources model across the curriculum. In A. Healy & E. Honan, //Text next: New resources for literacy learning.// Newtown: PETA. pp. 51-67. Unsworth, L. (2001). //Teaching multiliteracies across the curriculum: changing contexts of text and image in classroom practice.// Buckingham, England: Open University. (Chapter 3: Describing visual literacies). pp. 71-112. By Mary-Anne Kefaloukos  SID: 307173925