Sheri Lenzo's List: Writing

• Glogster is a great creativity site
• Students can combine text, pictures, graphics, video, and audio to create an interactive online poster.
• Glogster is an awesome way for your students to display knowledge.
• for history, math, language arts, book reports, science, social studies,

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• KidsClick! is a search engine for kids
• If you want to learn more about searching select Search Lessons to access Worlds of Web Searching. Links to more search tools, picture search tools and sound search tools are also listed at the top of the home page.
• You can use the alphabetical list of subject headings
• If you use the search box, you can search keywords
• Finally, you can browse the site by subject directories, narrowing by categories until you have an annotated list of relevant sites.

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• Raz-Kids provides a large number of “talking books” at multiple levels that speak-the-text at the same time the words are highlighted. There’s a wide range of fiction and expository text, and is suitable for Beginning and Intermediate readers. It costs $60 annually for one classroom of students.
• English For All is a series of excellent captioned videos and follow-up activities related to life skills. It’s most appropriate to high school-age and above English Language Learners. This is available at no cost.
• the Virtual Grammar Lab to this list.  It has over 2400 grammar activities, and teachers can create a free account so that they can track student progress.
• — PBS Kids Island. Once parents/teachers sign-up their children/students, users can practice many of the literacy activities on the PBS website and parents/teachers can monitor their progress. It’s designed for three-to-five year olds now, and will be expanding to those six-to-eight soon.
• “add-on”– First 55 is a website designed to teach the “first 55″ words someone is supposed to learn to read
• Spelltube is a British site that is implementing a good idea — helping students learn vocabulary through the use of funny videos and online interaction.  It’s pretty engaging, though it does have a decidedly British “bent.” It’s free, and teachers can create virtual classrooms in order to track the progress of their students.
• Kubbu
• Teachers can easily create a number of online exercises for students to complete, and you can easily keep track of how they do. It’s free for one teacher and up to thirty students.

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• Tap Into the World of Comics, presents a series of comic creation tools followed by twenty suggestions for using comics in your classroom.

• • Using the application Text Edit (small word processing app similar to Windows Word Pad) – check out the Services menu.
   
  • Paste source text from a website, online book, or other text into a Text Edit document. Under the Text Edit > Services > Speech > Start Speaking Text. Let the computer read the text. Check out this screencast.
   
  • Take that idea one step further. If your students needs to listen to an article at a later time, create a podcast of a section of a book or an article. Take a look at this article about how it can be done.
   
  • The Text Edit program can summarize a large source text. After a set of text is pasted, highlight it, and then under the Text Edit > Services > Summarize. You can control how short the summary will be. High light a couple hundred words and the computer will summarize it into a sentence. Pretty amazing! Use this strategy to help students with reading comprehension. Perhaps it may also be a way to analyze their own writing. Use the summarize feature to check the message of an essay. Take a look at this screencast.
   
  • Both these features also work with Safari. Safari can read the text of a website as well as summarize a section of text.
   
  • Press and hold Apple+Control+D over any word in the Safari application and up pops a handy dandy Dictionary/Thesaurus.
   

• Word Magnets will take a piece of text and break it into individual magnets which can be moved around the screen, resized, removed, colour coded, grouped, sorted and so on. New magnets can also be added at any point.
• Simply type or paste your text into the box on the opening screen and press ‘Next’. You then have the option of choosing a background before your magnets appear.

• Language Arts - Writing Middle/High

• Rather than practicing writing skills in solitary situations, students acquire writing knowledge through discursive interactions with others, and through these dialogues talk their way into deeper understandings about writing practices.
   _{(Carol Sue Englert, Troy V. Mariage, and Kailonnie Dunsmore, "Tenets of Sociocultural Theory in Writing Instruction Research." Handbook of Writing Research, ed. by Charles A. MacArthur et al. The Guilford Press, 2006)}
• • many organizations today require a set of members or employees to prepare . . . proposals, position papers, or grants, the practice of writing together as a committee or team can provide a valuable experience. A "blended" project might call for members of a team to write individually and then compare their efforts, selecting and revising the best ideas and prose as they craft the final piece together. A "composite" approach might ask students to assign each team member a different task (investigate a problem, research a study, conduct an interview, etc.) or a particular section to write, with the group responsible for smoothly meshing the parts into a whole.
     _{(Jean Wyrick, Steps to Writing Well, 11th ed. Wadsworth, 2011)}
• 
   
  1. Collaboration aids in problem finding as well as problem solving.
   
  2. Collaboration aids in learning abstractions.
   
  3. Collaboration aids in transfer and assimilation; it fosters interdisciplinary thinking.
   
  4. Collaboration leads not only to sharper, more critical thinking (students must explain, defend, adapt), but to a deeper understanding of others.
   
  5. Collaboration leads to higher achievement in general. . . .
   
  6. Collaboration promotes excellence. In this regard, I am fond of quoting Hannah Arendt: "For excellence, the presence of others is always required."
   
  7. Collaboration engages the whole student and encourages active learning; it combines reading, talking, writing, thinking; it provides practice in both synthetic and analytic skills."
   

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