National Writing Project Technology Initiative

Here's a link to a fine National Writing Project resource on how blogging and blogging projects can make writing the real, vital, and motivational experience we seek to foster in our classroom. Blogging can also be a personally transformative experience for teachers. We can all use a source of renewal once in awhile!

From the website:

"Blogging in Place: Writing That Explores New Neighborhoods"

Publication: Edutopia
Date: January 7, 2009

Summary: Teachers with the National Writing Project are combining place-based learning, project learning, and blogging to connect classrooms, provide an authentic audience for student writing, and prompt students to explore the world outside the schoolhouse doors.

http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2791

Great ideas and great advice!

Also see on the NWP's Technology Initiatives: http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/programs/ti

I hope this helps!

Den

SAT Word Videos (and a contest too)!

Brainy Fix SAT Video Contest

Contest Rules

* Make a video about any SAT/ACT vocabulary word of your choosing from this list. On that list, we’ll show you how many videos have been submitted for each word. Please choose one without any videos submissions. :)
* 1 video for 1 word, but you can make as many videos as you want.
* Anyone can enter the competition! Just remember that part of the prize money has to go to a U.S. high school or middle school of your choosing.
* All voting will happen at BrainyFlix.com, so make sure your video includes the following text: “Vote for this video at www.BrainyFlix.com/words/xxxxx”. And substitute the “xxxxx” with your vocab word.
* Important contest dates:
o Video submission opens: 1/1/2009
o Video submission ends: 3/16/2009
o Voting opens: 3/23/2009
o Voting ends: 4/5/2009
o Winners announced: 4/13/2009

Sample videos for SAT Words on School Tube

How to Introduce the 6-Traits

"Writing taught once or twice a week is just frequently enough to remind children that they can't write and teachers that they can't teach. They are both like athletes who never get in condition, yet have to play the game before derisive spectators."

-- Donald Graves, Writing: Teachers and Children at Work


I'm happy to report that the The Writing Teacher has just published my article on How to Introduce the 6-Traits. I'll be using this article in my online 6-traits writing class.

Click on over and give it a read!

You'll also discover rich resources for all who love teaching writing.

From The Writing Teacher:

• How to Introduce the 6 Traits
• Teaching Writing by Creating a Website
• Teaching Beowulf to Vikings Fans by Liz O'Neill
• The Art of Teaching Writing by Alan Gibbons
• A Few Principles of Writing Instruction by Michael Hebert
• The Tips and Techniques Contest @ The Writing Teacher
• Teacher Shannon Snowball Discusses the Impact of Automated Essay Grading on her Students' Writing
• Writing Lessons that Made the Biggest Impact on Teachers
• Teaching Writing in the Diverse Classroom: An Interview with Barbara Friedlander
• Research-Based Best Practices for Teaching Writing: A Discussion with Steve Graham on How to Effectively Teach Writing
• Virtually all US Students Proficient in Writing

I hope this helps!

~ Dennis

Teaching and Assessing Writing with the 6-Traits: Still time to join!

Final Call for the Spring Semester at the University of Wisconsin Stout!

Courses are completely online.

EDUC 744 920 Teaching and Assessing Writing with the 6-Traits - (Elem. (PK-4)
3 graduate credits begins February 16, 2009
http://www.uwstout.edu/soe/profdev/traits.shtml

EDUC 744 909 Teaching and Assessing Writing with the 6-Traits - (Middle School/Adult)
3 graduate credits begins February 16, 2009
http://www.uwstout.edu/soe/profdev/traits.shtml

Online Writing Resources: Very Cool Tools

• 10 Digital Writing Opportunities You Probably Know and 10 You Probably Don’t | ICT in my Classroom

  I've seen the connection between information fluency and writing since my early work researching in the field. Here's a strong blog post chock full of interesting tool recommendations. Just a few are detailed in this post. Click through to ICT in my Classroom for a real treasure trove of online writing resources.
  

  Tags: web2.0, writing, tools, digital_storytelling

  • On Thursday I finally had some time to sit with our Key Stage 2 (junior) literacy coordinator and talk about how technology can support writing outcomes for the Primary Framework for Literacy.
  • 10 - Myths and Legends Story Creator 2 - a free online version of Kar2ouche that focuses on a specific story type. Classes can have unique logins and they can record audio and build scenes from a set of graphics, their own images can be imported. A great alternative to Kar2ouche and perfect for the Myths and Legends unit.
  • Wordle - I thought this little tool would be great to analyse written stories in the same way Steve Kirkpatrick has done with his class. A Wordle could be a great way to introduce a text - exploring what is emphasised to help understand the type of writing it is taken from. Is it instruction, explanation - how can you tell? Another idea is that the children create a poem as a Wordle, it would certainly be challenging the form of conventional poetry.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Information Fluency group favorite links are here.

Poetry Pathfinder with Diigo & Thinkfinity

• Teaching Poetry with Thinkfinity

  Some activities to support poetry teaching with Thinkfinity, a remarkable archive of lessons and other resources. 
  

  Miquel Guhlin shares poetry resources using the slide share capability of diigo a social bookmarking service. He creates an effective stand alone learning object, a slide show of poetry pages from Thinkfinity. Many librarians would call a 'path finder'.  Each page screened by the slide show can be searched, clicked, or simply read. I'm sure the readers of this blog will find Miquel's work useful!

  Guhlin is one to watch on the educational uses of diigo... he's digging deep into diigo. 8-)

  tags: poetry, thinkfinity, 6-traits

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

30 New Ideas That Work (From the National Writing Project)

New 30 Ideas That Work

Publish at Scribd or explore others:

National Writing Project: Letters to the next president

Letters are a great way to teach voice. The audience is focused on a single person. The writer is having a conversation with words with an audience of one. The Letters to the Next President Project began with a specific audience of two possible presidents. Now the audience is a little more defined! This great idea is sponsored by the National Wrtiing Project

Check out a short video on the topic: Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future

Let's keep writing!

Conventions in the ESL Classroom

At the end of each 6-traits online class I ask participants to revisit their weekly reflective journal and assemble a refection that covers the full span of the class. In this excerpt, Tim D. synthesizes his insights about Grammar and English. ~ Dennis

When I was teaching at a middle school in Asia the administration decided it would be a great idea to break up "English" into two categories: Grammar and English. While I was teaching short stories and poetry in my room the teacher next door had these thick text books full of sentence diagrams and editing worksheets. What really struck me about this is that the grammar portion was never utilized when the students wrote for my class. They knew how to do the diagrams and edit sentences but when it came to their own writing it was still full of errors.

I didn't handle this very well and took to marking up papers with red ink. The truth is most of these students had only been speaking English for a couple years. Their parents had pulled them out of the local school and plopped them into a sub standard "American" school. Not only were we dealing with middle school students, but we were dealing with second language learners as well. Honestly I think listening to American music and watching American movies was as helpful as anything. It allowed them to "hear" English.

Spandel offers a lot of very interesting ideas in this lesson. The ones that struck me were teaching the editing marks in the beginning and then having them use them on progressively more difficult work. Instead of using worksheets she suggests using others' work. This is brilliant. Especially if its done in front of the class because it allows students to see things that they might not have caught on their own. Finding errors in everyday samples like newspaper, ads, and mailings is also a great idea because it teaches them to look for those things. (I would suggest the Dunn County News as a great resource for this…)

Comments: This lesson really solidified in me that I need to combine teaching conventions with other material because it allows me to point out examples within good writing instead of using arbitrary examples that the students aren't familiar with. Actually, reading the posts by the other teachers was very enlightening on how they weave grammar into their programs.

Resources for Young Writers

This list of links was lifted from the always interesting WordSwimmer blog.







Claremont Review
Giggle Poetry
KidPub: Where Kids Write!
Lightening Bug
Merlyn's Pen
NaNoWriMo's Young Writers Program
New Moon Girls
Ralph Fletcher's Tips for Young Writers
Skipping Stones
Stone Soup
Teen Ink
Write It
WriteGirl
Young Poets (Canada)
Young Writer (UK)
Young Writers Online
Young Writers Society

New 6-Traits / Writing Process poster available

New product from the NWREL: Help support their great work!

Get your poster here!

Here's a question for you all to ponder! Where do Web 2.0 concepts and tools like information fluency, blogs, wikis, and e-learning environments fit in the dynamic 6-Traits / Writing process landscape?

Information Fluency Skills (the ability to efficiently search, evaluate and ethically use digital information) certainly fit in the Ideas/Pre-writing area. This is particularly true for modes of writing like the expository, persuasive and research.

What about Blogs, WIKIS or Google Documents?

Where do you see these 21st Century tools fitting in the diagram above?

Anyone willing to take a stab at creating a poster with Web 2.0 integrated into it all?

Let us know?

National Poetry Week: October 9, 2008

National Poetry Day (October 9) (Resources from Annenberg Media/Learner.Org)

Watch beautiful hour-long documentaries about the lives and works of 13 American poets in Voices & Visions <http://www.learner.org/resources/series57.html>. Featured poets include T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, and William Carlos Williams.

Literary Visions <http://www.learner.org/resources/series41.html> offers mini-lectures, dramatizations, and poet interviews to illustrate the most important elements and devices of poetry. See Programs 11 through 17 to explore the role of imagery, tropes, symbolism, theme, character, and much more.

Observe high school English teacher Chris Mazzino teaching about stereotypes by having students interpret and edit a poem in Teaching "The Children of Willesden Lane" Program 12, "Gaining Insight Through Poetry" <http://www.learner.org/series/cowl/ch13-19/>.

See how poetry teaches about American societal trends with "Rhythms in Poetry" <http://www.learner.org/amerpass/unit10/>. This program in American Passages: A Literary Survey features the poetry of Langston Hughes and William Carlos Williams.

The American Passages archive <http://www.learner.org/amerpass/slideshow/archive_search.php> contains artifacts related to poetry and poets such as Phillis Wheatley, Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, and Marianne Moore, as well as poetry related to specific eras and social movements. Search by keyword and/or era and/or ethnic group to explore the archive.

Consider different approaches to teaching poetry with Write in the Middle: A Workshop for Middle School Teachers, Workshop 3, "Teaching Poetry" <http://www.learner.org/channel/workshops/middlewriting/prog3.html>.

Teaching Reading K-2: A Library of Classroom Practices <http://www.learner.org/channel/libraries/readingk2/> presents ways of working poetry into language arts lessons at the early elementary level.

In Engaging With Literature: A Video Library, Grades 3-5, watch a fourth grade poetry lesson based on poems from "Baseball, Snakes, and Summer Squash" by Donald H. Graves and "Hey You! C'Mere: A Poetry Slam" by Elizabeth Swados. See Program 3, "Starting Out" <http://www.learner.org/channel/libraries/engagingliterature/starting/>.

6-Traits Spanish Laguage Resources from NWREL

The 6-traits of writing hold true for all languages. The early research was conducted in multiple languages and found to apply. I did a quick search for Spanish Language resources on the NWREL site. (To see everything click here.)

The Highlights:

NWREL has a Spanish language scoring guide for you right here:

http://www.nwrel.org/assessment/scoring.php?odelay=3&d=3

Here are Spanish language lesson plans:

http://www.nwrel.org/assessment/lessonplans.php?odelay=2&d=3

There is also Spanish language scoring practice at:

http://www.nwrel.org/assessment/scoringpractice.php?odelay=3&d=3

Spanish teachers! I know this approach, combined with a writing process based workshop will work for you!

NCTE's newest policy research brief "Writing Now"

NCTE's newest policy research brief "Writing Now" explores what writing means in our changing world. The brief defines key terms, debunks common myths about school-based writing, outlines our understanding of writing now, and shares research-based recommendations for effective writing instruction and assessment. For the next step, try any of the following ReadWriteThink lesson plans, which all explore ways we write and teach writing now:

Elementary Level Lessons

• Authentic Writing Experiences and Math Problem-Solving Using Shopping Lists (E)
• Once Upon a Time Rethought: Writing Fractured Fairy Tales (E)
• Teaching the Compare and Contrast Essay through Modeling (E)
• Using Picture Books to Teach Characterization in Writing Workshop (E)

Middle Level Lessons

• Cooking Up Descriptive Language: Designing Restaurant Menus (M)
• Fairy Tale Autobiographies (M)
• Leading to Great Places in the Middle School Classroom (M)
• Reading and Writing Workshop: Freak the Mighty (M)

Secondary and College Level Lessons

• Creative Outlining—From Freewriting to Formalizing (S-C)
• Modeling Academic Writing through Scholarly Article Presentations (S-C)
• Persuading Readers with Endorsement Letters (S-C)
• The Children's Picture Book Project (S-C)
  

NOTE: Free access to journal articles mentioned in this INBOX is provided for 21 days. After this free access period expires, articles are available to journal subscribers only. This Inbox Idea was published 9-16-08.

Initials in annotations indicate academic level of the resource (E=Elementary, M=Middle, S=Secondary, C=College, TE=Teacher Education, G=General).

To subscribe to INBOX, NCTE's free weekly e-newsletter, visit http://www.ncte.org/forms/lists/inbox.asp.

6-Traits Online

Teaching and Assessing Writing with the 6 Traits: Classes are are Filling Fast!

WRITING COURSE:

EDUC 744 920F Teaching and Assessing Writing with the 6-TraitsElementary (Gr. K-4) - 3 gr. cr. begins September 22, 2008.

EDUC 744 909F Teaching and Assessing Writing with the 6-Traits - Middle/High School (Gr. 5-12) 3 gr. cr. begins September 22, 2008.

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.

Please forward this announcement to teachers in your district.

Earn graduate credits via online courses that support your professional development goals for licensure renewal, salary advancement and advanced certification.

Sign up soon to reserve your spot! Registration closes this week!

to allow time for assigning user names, passwords and ordering/shipping the textbook.

Classes are TOTALLY ONLINE. You may participate from your home or school computer. Registration is limited to 20 participants per section.

Syllabus and other details:

http://www.uwstout.edu/soe/profdev/traits.shtml

REGISTER ONLINE
or
REGISTER BY FAX
Fax: (715) 232-3385

Books for Teaching 6-Traits

Looking for just the right book to present a traits concept?

Checkout my Writer's Bookshelf!

6-Traits: Vickie Spandel

6-Traits: Ruth Culham

Great Writing Advice

Teaching Ideas & Content

Teaching Voice

Teaching Organization

Teaching Word Choice

Teaching Conventions

Northern Nevada Teacher In-service Courses Centered around WritingFix

The Northern Nevada Writing Program & Writing Fix (The best 6-traits website on the Internet) are offering in-service workshops. http://writingfix.com/about_us/inservice.htm





Here is a quick description of the workshops they offer:

• Workshop: Using Picture Books as “Mentor Texts” for Writing Lessons
• Workshop: Using Chapter Book Excerpts as “Mentor Texts” for Writing Lessons
• Workshop: Using Literature Excerpts and Classic Poetry as “ Mentor Texts” for Writing Lessons
• Workshop: Song Lyrics, Video, and Podcasts to Inspire Powerful Writing
• Workshop: Writing Across the Curriculum Techniques: Wacky We-Search and Deeper Student ThinkingHere is the current listing for NNWP sponsored In-service Fall 2008:
  

http://www.unr.edu/educ/nnwp/inservice_fall.html

Here are the Spring 2009 offerings:

http://www.unr.edu/educ/nnwp/inservice_spring.html

Do yourself a favor: Attend one of these workshops and improve your craft!

Conferenceing for conventions

Be specific about what is working:

• "You've used some lower case letters."
• "I can see that you know that there are spaces between words."
• "You remembered that I is always capitalized."
• "Look at the capitals at the beginning of each sentence!
• "You ended each sentence with a punctuation mark. That tells me how to read your writing."
• "Wow! Quotation marks! Now I know when someone is speaking."
• "Look at this word. You heard the beginning, middle and ending sound."
• "These words are all spelled correctly."

As questions to extend meaning:

• "What mark would you like to place at the end of this sentence?"
• "How would this sentence change if you placed an exclamation mark here?"
• "Do you know the marks we use to show that someone is speaking?"
• "Which words do you think you spelled close to the dictionary spelling?"
• "Listen as I say this word. What sounds do you hear?"

Jonathan Harris Collects Stories

This piece is about collecting stories and ideas from life and from the internet. Writer Jonathan Harris, in this TED Talk explains his unique vision of how stories can be found in the artifacts left on a street corner, harvested from blogs with with bots, or captured by camera while exploring Inuit whaling camps in Barrow Alaska.

The talk ends with a photo essay themed on happiness and wishes found in the Kingdom of Bhutan. Harris interviewed over a hundred folks found along the paths of Bhutan. He asked each to write one wish on a balloon. The imagery and ideas are good to think about.

This man creates technology generated mind-maps that go way beyond the solo clustering we sometimes teach as idea generation.

Harris is a traveler, thinker, and creator. Spend some time with his mind by watching this TED lecture and then exploring his unique site: We Feel Fine

video: http://ted.org/index.php/talks/jonathan_harris_collects_stories.html

Jonathan's website: http://www.wefeelfine.org/

Huge list of online links to Writing Project Sites

Thanks goes to Bud Hunt (Blogger, Bud the Teacher) for compiling a remarkable list of writing project sites. This is from his delicious social bookmarking account.

http://del.icio.us/budtheteacher/writingproject

An interesting evening of web surfing dedicated to writing instruction awaits!

Enjoy!

~ Dennis