Home
Christy Tucker's Library tagged → View Popular
You call this Academic Honesty? | Webb of Thoughts
Great example of why I get so frustrated when I hear people complaining about how terrible it is that students copy and paste content. I'd like to see the teachers and professors stop using uncited content themselves first; I see a lot more problems with people with graduate degrees. This lecturer on effective writing plagiarized content for handouts while simultaneously admonishing students to not plagiarize.
Weblogs and Their Effects on Writing Skills
Case study of blogs used with fifth graders to improve writing skills. In both classes reviewed, blogs improved "both rich content and author's craft" but not grammar and spelling.
Collaborative Blogging as a Means to Develop Elementary Expository Writing Skills
Study on collaborative blogging with third graders that resulted in improved attitudes towards writing, improved quality of writing, and a number of unintended benefits
Writing For Multimedia: Script Guidelines
Tips for writing for multimedia, including specifics for writing audio scripts and software tutorials
2¢ Worth » Working for Value
David Warlick shares stories of authentic assignments and how they motivate learners. Writing & creating for an authentic audience is different from creating content just for a teacher.
-
When writing, let’s say, to the teacher, you are communicated to be evaluated. Assessment is the outcome, based on some set of expectations involving skills and/or knowledge.
However, when writing to an authentic audience, what you are trying to earn is not an evaluation (though there may be one coming in the process). What you are writing for is a response, and that response will be directed toward what you have invested in the work, not just the facts you have included or the skills you have demonstrated.
Writing in the 21st Century
Report from the National Council of Teachers of English with a call to action to teach writing appropriately for the 21st century. Writing now often happens outside school in social spaces where people learn informally through their peers. Includes an overview of how writing has been viewed historically and how that has affected how we teach writing.
"Writing has never been accorded the cultural respect or the support that reading has enjoyed, in part because through reading, society could control its citizens, whereas through writing, citizens might exercise their
own control."
"Writing has historically and inextricably been linked to testing."
"In much of this new composing, we are writing to share, yes; to encourage dialogue, perhaps; but mostly, I think, to participate."
"First, we have moved beyond a pyramid-like, sequential model of literacy development in which print literacy comes first and digital literacy comes second and networked literacy practices, if they come at all, come third and last."
Using threaded comments to build a writing community in your classroom | Reflections on Teaching
A 6th grade teacher talks about the advantage of threaded blog comments for building a writing community. This encourages much more of students talking to each other and makes it easier to follow blog conversations.
-
One of those is threaded comments. This is rapidly bringing my blogs to the level I had always hoped to acheive–one where the students are talking to each other and not just talking to me.
Multimedia Learning » Compliance Poetry
Have boring content you want to make more interesting and memorable? What about putting it in poetry form? This is a creative use of poetry to create memorable summaries of copyright law. If intellectual property law can be made simpler to understand and remember, can't your content too?
Concise writing is best for elearning » Making Change
A concise post pulling a bit of research where the lesson with the fewest words resulted in the most learning. Nice argument for keeping your e-learning short, although look at the original to see what they were actually studying in context (scientific processes with cause and effect, using visuals as well as text to explain).
The Online Communicator: Writing for Audio
How to write scripts to be read aloud, primarily when providing scripts for professional voice talent. A little dated (talking about faxing scripts), but some good things to remember if someone else will read your script
Tips for Writing an Effective Audio Script
Suggestions for writing how people talk and creating audio scripts that don't sound stiff and are clear
Blogging as Reflective Practice | Adventures in Corporate Education
Thoughts on blogging as reflective practice for learning, with benefits in both the activity of writing and the social connections
-
So basically when you blog, you have to think about what you have read, how that compares to what you already know or what you have experienced, and that comparison helps you to construct new mental models that you articulate in written form (your blog).
In the Middle of the Curve: Deeper Instructional Design
Wendy Wickham's liveblogged notes from Clark Quinn's presentation on Deeper Instructional Design. Lots of ideas in this post--create models that actually help people understand the content and recognize patterns, pay attention to motivation and emotion, give learners the least they need to get them to do what's needed, create learner-centered objectives instead of designer-centered objectives, use stories and active practice.
-
We can't "create" learning
- We can design environments conducive to learning.
- We design learning experiences. -
Don't design CONTENT, design EXPERIENCES
- Design the "Flow".
- Start bringing in emotions and the actions they take
Why I Blog - The Atlantic (November 2008)
Andrew Sullivan on the value of blogging and how blogging differs from traditional print journalism.
-
It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory.
-
Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did.
- 1 more annotations...
Avoiding the 5 Most Common Mistakes in Using Blogs with Students
The 5 mistakes outlined in this article are
1. "Ineffective contextualization" (not thinking about the best way to use blogs, usually self-reflection)
2. "Unclear Learning Outcomes"
3. "Misuse of the environment" (treating blogs like wikis or discussion forums)
4. "Illusive grading practices" (lacking clear rubrics)
5. "Inadequate time allocation" (both for students to write and instructors to grade and give feedback)
Donald Clark Plan B: txtng (the gr8 db8)
Summary of a book by a professor of linguistics that examines and debunks the complaints about text messaging reducing literacy. Good collection of misconceptions about txtng with counterarguments and research.
-
Annoyingly, just as complaints about literacy multiply, along comes a technology that has promoted a renaissance in reading and writing, yet it is treated with contempt by the ‘pen and paper’ brigade. Children don’t keep diaries any more – oh yeah! Haven’t you see MySpace, facebook and blogs. They’re obsessed by diary keeping.
Innovate: Why Professor Johnny Can't Read: Understanding the Net Generation's Texts
The authors argue that Net Gen students are used to hyperlinked, nonlinear content, so they don't necessarily approach learning with the same kind of linear approach most of their professors do. The premise here focuses on how this affects writing, organizing information, and sense-making. They argue that multimedia projects can demonstrate the same depth of thinking as a traditional linear text. Registration required.
-
As a result, while N-Gens interact with the world through multimedia, online social networking, and routine multitasking, their professors tend to approach learning linearly, one task at a time, and as an individual activity that is centered largely around printed text (Hartman, Dzubian, and Brophy-Ellison 2007).
-
However, these digital texts do not necessarily lack style, coherence, or organization; they simply present meaning in ways unfamiliar to the instructor. For example, a collection of images on Flickr with authorial comments and tags certainly does not resemble the traditional essay, but the time spent on such a project, the motivation for undertaking it, and its ability to communicate meaning can certainly be equal to the investment and motivation required by the traditional essay—and the photos may actually provide more meaningful communication for their intended audience.
- 1 more annotations...
Half an Hour: Finding Time
Stephen Downes, on finding the time to write online by focusing on using content from a closed environment and bringing it into the open.
-
The whole point isn't to *add* online writing on top of everything else you do. Nobody has time for that.
Rather, what you want to be thinking of doing is to gradually migrate to writing online *instead* of writing for those other purposes.
That doesn't mean you become a blog writer and nothing else. Rather, what you'll find is that writing for the website makes writing for all those other things a lot easier. -
The idea is to take the stuff you do for private audiences and to present it (as much as you can) to public audiences.
Blogging and Reading Comprehension Strategies « Classroom Tech Tips
Applying reading comprehension strategies (questioning, making connections, inferring, etc.) and tips for students to improve blog conversations. One of the suggestions is to have a class focus together on one strategy in their comments to each other. I can see how the sentence frames would be very helpful, especially for younger writers.
Reflections on Fourth Grade Collaborations | always learning
Kim Cofino reflects on doing the 1001 Flat World Tales with 4th graders--what the students learned and what she learned about managing these types of projects.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Sponsored Links
Top Contributors
Groups interested in writing
-
copytwitter
Here are all the entries to...
Items: 489 | Visits: 436
Created by: Daniel Smith
-
MindMapping Software for Writing
Mindmapping Software for Wr...
Items: 20 | Visits: 407
Created by: Michelle Thompson
-
Day in a Sentence
This is a list for all the ...
Items: 11 | Visits: 256
Created by: Sheryl A. McCoy
Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »
Join Diigo