"4th and 5th graders show how NOT to conduct a peer review. Show this video to your class to help them make better use of peer review opportunities. Please visit http://www.timbedley.com for more teaching ideas. I understand that "real" peer review is done by the scientific community. However; in my elementary school class we stole the term to refer to a one-on-one critique of each other's writing."
"The Colorado State University has a rather wonderful set of online resources designed to help people become better writers. Most of these materials are offered right here on the Writing at Colorado State University website, where visitors will find ten different thematic guides. These guides deal primarily with writing in engineering, and they include Communicating as a Civil Engineer, Engineering Proposals, and Environmental Policy Statements. On the right-hand side of the homepage, visitors will find sections like Writing Processes and Writing Documents. These areas have more detailed areas like Starting to Write, Revising & Editing, and Publishing. Taken as a whole, these sections offer a broad range of specific guides to becoming a better writer. Finally, the site contains links to other relevant sites from university and college writing centers."
"Patricia Polacco has long been one of my favorite children’s authors. I’ve led author studies of her works with my former students in both reading and writing workshop. I have used books like Mrs. Katz and Tush and The Butterfly in my consulting work. She an author whose books take up a good deal of space in one of my bookcases. Knowing that she’s a very busy woman, I was hesitant to approach her publicist about doing a Q&A with her. (What if she didn’t have the time? What if she didn’t want to do it for another reason? Either way, I knew a “no” wouldn’t feel good.) Fortunately, her answer was yes!
Polacco’s newest book, The Art of Miss Chew, is yet another masterpiece. Like many of her books, this story comes from her own life so it’s idea for use in a (personal) narrative unit of study. You can read more about the book and view interior spreads by clicking here. Many of my questions revolve around The Art of Miss Chew, but some are about Polacco’s revision process and her thoughts about school budget cuts as they relate to the arts."
"[With]every new smartphone subscription we take another tiny but discrete step towards a networked world dominated by powerful corporations that can not only ‘regulate’ the system in their own interests, but also control the speed of technological innovation to a pace that is convenient for them rather than determined by the creativity of hackers and engineers.”
A writing wizard to guide students through becoming familiar with the attributes of the classic story form of the hero's journey. Based on the work of Joseph Campbell. -JL
Storyrobe is an exciting new digital storytelling application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Storyrobe lets you tell create digital stories using images and video from your camera or photo library. You can use the built in microphone, or any 3rd party microphone to create audio recordings with photos and videos. Use Storyrobe to tell, share, and add to others stories creating a Storyrobe™
(Thanks to onlinephdprograms for sending me this post).
Before hunkering down and hammering out the agony and the ecstasy that will launch you to literary stardom (and probably a Nobel Prize), it might be a good idea to try and see what your predecessors have to teach about the craft. Not everything they share will necessarily stick, given the nature of writing, but opening yourself up to the possibility of inspiration can only improve your output. Explore some of the following quotes, and, of course, the context from which they hail, and see where they might take your art.
"These charts are posted here because I’ve received countless requests for them. Please note - the point of an anchor chart is to anchor the teaching and learning that is happening in your classroom, so they should be reflective of the work that you and your students are doing. Don’t feel obligated to use the same wording or even the same charts that I’ve shown here - these are just examples of charts that I’ve used and/or seen. Also, these charts come from a number of sources - professional books, workshops, curriculum documents, fellow teachers, and the need to solve a problem in the classroom! They will be updated as fast as I can get pictures taken and uploaded. With that said, please enjoy! :)"
Write a letter to your future self and have it delivered on a specific date; or read the public (anonymous) letters of others. Young writers can get really creative with this. -JL
Learn to teach and assess writing with the 6-Traits of writing:
(voice, ideas, word choice, organization, sentence fluency and conventions). Learn to use the 6-Traits with the writing process to teach revision strategies. Help learners meet higher standards and improve test scores.
"Caroline, who is just about to finish sixth grade, looked through all the writing prompts and picked out her favorite fifteen. I was super impressed with the list and asked her permission to share it. So what follows are Caroline’s favorite fifteen prompts, in no particular order. Most of the words are her descriptions of the prompts. Thanks, Caroline."
"I’ve recently experimented in my composition classes with an assignment I call the Twitter-essay, in which students condense an argument with evidential support into 140 characters, which they unleash upon a hashtag (or trending topic) in the Twitter-verse. Tweets often attempt to convey as much information in as few words as possible. A tweet could be seen, then, not as a paragon of the many potential horrors of student writing, but as a model of writerly concision. In composing their Twitter-essay, I have students proceed through all the steps I would have them take in writing a traditional academic essay, including brainstorming, composing, workshopping, and revising. I also have them consider and research their audience, the Twitter members engaged in discussion around a particular hashtag. Finally, I have them work dynamically with the Tweets of their peers, responding to them on Twitter and close-analyzing them in class. I ask the students to consider their word-choice, use of abbreviation, punctuation, etc. To model the activity for them and to give them a sense for the shape of a Twitter-essay, I compose my instructions for the assignment in exactly 140 characters and post them to Twitter." Jesse Stommel
A beautifully written post in which Jesse shares details and illustrations of the assignment she set for her students. Worksheet provided.
"The story generator is a one-trick pony, but that trick is a very good one. How else would kids come up with an assignment where they compose a camping story about a sad pirate who is from Mars?
"The buttons all function flawlessly, and the actual story starters are entertaining. Students would have a good time just endlessly spinning the dials and reading what the machine comes up with. When students are finished writing and electronically illustrating their stories, they can print them in an appealing format."
"One topic that I and many other gamers often find interesting is the matter of the importance of story in games. John Carmack, who knows a bit about games, said that "story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important." Folks who delight in story driven games no doubt disagree with this view and there does seem to be an issue worth discussing here. For the sake of this discussion, I will be assuming that games (specifically video games) can be art. I have argued for this in an earlier essay and hence will not repeat my arguments here."
If you have a LinkedIn account, now's a good time to change your password. Up to 6.5 million user accounts and encrypted passwords have reportedly been leaked and posted to a Russian hacker site.
"This weekend I’m going to learn how to make tofu. I’m not going to take a class, or use a cookbook, I’m going to follow instructions from a new iPhone and iPad application called Snapguide.
"Snapguide, a free application and Web site that became available to the public Thursday (3/29/12), allows people to create a guide, for just about anything using videos, photos and words on a mobile device."
This should be very useful for teachers and students to create directions and how-tos. -JL
The snowflake method of writing a novel is a scientific approach to writing a book and was invented by Randy Ingermanson, an award-winning author of fiction.
"Lists for Writers is a great addition to any writer’s toolbox. Helpful to both novice and expert writers alike, this app delivers list after list for your brainstorming sessions: names, character traits, plot lines, occupations, obsessions, action verbs, and much more!?
"The impetus for the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiative at George Mason University was part of a national media discussion in 1977 about a "literary crisis" in the United States. Three decades later, the WAC continues to thrive, and its website is full of resources for people who teach college English courses and related subjects. The mission of the WAC is to focus on writing as "a pedagogical tool that enables students to develop critical, analytical, and imaginative thinking to address complex social issues."
"On the Program Info page, visitors can learn more about the structure of the WAC and how it operates. Moving on, the Faculty Resources section contains sections such as Teaching With Writing, Guides in the Disciplines, Writing Center Resources, and so on. The Teaching with Writing area has great resources such as handouts titled "Writing to Learn," "Creating Clear Assignments," and "Evaluating and Grading." Further along is the Guides in the Disciplines section, which features writing guides for different subjects crafted by people at George Mason, along with national writing guides from Carleton College, Colorado State University, and Columbia College."
"While reality can be scary, there are plenty of safe sites designed for kids under 13. Still, all the kid-friendly social networking sites in the world won’t help if kids find the adult versions more fun. We researched kid-friendly sites and then talked to kids to get a feel for the fun factor to collect four kid-approved sites."
An exploration of scale and levels of detail. How much or little is contained within the tiniest, most ordinary of moments.
@richardanderson writes:
"Telescopic Text (telescopictext.com) is a fabulous demonstration to children of how to extend their creative writing. From the simple starting text "I made tea", the writing unfolds with each click on one of the "greyed" words to insert new details, adjectives and emotions.
"At telescopictext.org, you can register and make your own unfolding texts."
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Students will get the hang of telescopictext.com quite rapidly...in which a simple 3-word sentence is expanded by clicking on "greyed out" words. Once they understand the concept, they can move on to telescopictext.org. Here students can completely control the process and rapidly and easily develop quite sophisticated writing samples. -JL
Here’s where we left off (way back in March) at the end of Down the Rabbit Hole—Part I: Now, I’ve also heard teachers tell me this (“…to help students conceptualize the trait of ideas is to think of ideas as memories.”) is all great for students whose lives outside of school are filled with activities, friends, and meaningful interactions with parents. What about the students whose lives, at least in terms of experiences, happen mainly while they are at school?
Playfic is a tool for creating text-based, choose your own adventure stories. Playfic is based on Inform7 which use "if, then" logic to allow anyone to create their stories. When authors plan and write their stories they can include multiple paths for readers to pursue as they progress through their stories. Readers navigate through the stories by entering directional commands such as "go north" and "go south."
Teacher Sarah Wessling in a 2 min. video talking about and demonstrating giving audio feedback to writing students using a podcast (dictating into an iPod and then sending to students). Well done video and excellent demonstrtion by Wessling. -JL
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