Interactive Lesson - Essay Editing

Our Language Arts teacher is on a technology roll. So here I am, as the school technology integration coordinator, asking if some of you have any online resource that you could share.

Her class is working on editing essays: revisions, spell checking, grammar checking etc. Is there any interactive sites that could be used for this lesson? Thanks.

Tags: editing, essay, skills, writing

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on February 24, 2009 at 3:34pm

I'd try Read Write Think.

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Permalink Reply by Jennifer Perino on February 24, 2009 at 4:06pm

Lauriene...I am an English teacher and a Dir. of Inst. Tech.
My students have blogs and use them as a community of editors, posting parts of their writing and asking for suggestions, ideas, rephrasing, organizational help from the other class members. I check their blogs as they write to offer my own suggestions as a teacher.
My seniors all have Google accounts, so they invite the other class members as "viewers" of their documents and ask for suggestions that way. The classmate offers suggestions in an email.
When I have a whole class in the room, with the student's permission, I throw the document onto my SMARTBoard. Then as a class, we can all offer suggestions, revisions, etc. The class finds this very helpful because they see their own mistakes in the work of others.

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Permalink Reply by Steven Carpenter on February 24, 2009 at 8:25pm

I second Jennifer's suggestion to use Google Docs.

Students can add themselves as collaborators on each others documents, then offer comments (Insert > Comment) or edit the document. Google Docs automatically saves each revision of the document (Tools > Revision History) along with the name of the person who made the changes and a list of the changes that were made. Moreover, you can have Google Docs highlight the changes made between one version and the next by checking two versions and clicking 'Compare Changes.'

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Permalink Reply by Lauriene Tschang on February 25, 2009 at 8:23am

Thanks for all your ideas. I will definitely ask my Language Arts teacher to evaluate them. She likes the idea of projecting it on the WhiteBoard. We do have SMART Board as well. By the way, I found this site too but maybe a bit too "easy" for middle school for proofreading documents: http://www.eduplace.com/kids/hme/k_5/proofread/proof.htm

Again, thanks.

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Permalink Reply by Eric on February 25, 2009 at 8:26am

Wetpaint is an excellent resource. It is a beautiful Wiki provider and ad free for teachers. However, students must be 13 or over to have an account. Check it out.