All Blog Posts Tagged 'writing' (37)

A concerned parent asked me about a project her son had to do in which he had to research Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural style.…

Essay writing is one of constant problems for every student. To help them deal with it, educators try plenty of methods and techniques, including the usage of various technologies and mobile applications that have been developed to ease the process of academic writing and make it pleasant for young people. Most of them work good of…

Staying focused while writing academic papers isn’t something that comes easy for students. Academic curriculums become increasingly challenging as the students advance in their education, and professors not only require them to do well on the exams, but to write excellent papers as well.

When you have an academic paper to write, everything seems more interesting than focusing on the topic, contents and referencing rules of your assignment. Working on a computer with Internet…

This graphic is from a YouTube video created this month by one of two college students from South Korea who were working with me in Chicago. 

And this graphic is from a Prezi done by a second intern. You can view all six of their presentations here.…

My Carnigie's story maker is an excellent tool that can be used for teaching creative writing to your students. With this tool, students will be able to create a story in minutes, with animation if desired, and then share their story with somebody else or even create a print…

Today in class, I guided students through the steps of creating their own introductory wikipage for my Language Arts class. On this page, they included a welcome greeting using a “cool” text generator, uploaded a favorite picture using Morguefile.com, and added a favorite quote from a quotation site. These pages will be linked from a Student Pages site on our class wiki, and students will be responsible for maintaining them throughout…

Since reading Bill Ferriter's post on whether or not true formative assessment is possible, I've been wondering how I could make my own formative assessments more efficient. This post features a screencast of me looking at student work for the purposes of formative assessment.

Formative assessment is continuous assessment. In the context…

I shied away from tech productions projects. I was a scaredy-cat. Why? Whenever I gave my students a video project, the products demonstrated fun and engagement, but little learning.

I needed to learn how to help students create quality productions.

Over the past three years, I've discovered a system that helps me help students create media productions that…

I happened across the Twitter 25 Word Story writing experiment and challenge a few days ago and thought this would be a great idea to share with my 6th grade gifted class. The goal is to tell a story in exactly 25 words. To introduce them to the concept, I shared Kevin Hodgson’s Prezi  titled “Sixty 25-Word Stories”. I really didn’t do much more than that and hoped that some of them would take interest.…

• My first goal is to build classroom community, making all students feel comfortable and successful.
• My second goal is to establish routine.
• My third goal is to formatively assess students'…

Like it or not we are constantly judged by our writing skills. Whether we are writing a term paper for a class or research report for our boss, the quality of our work will be determined in part by the quality of our writing.  This may not be fair, but there is something we can do about it.

Writing is important because it’s a communication tool. Imagine you had a great song on your MP3 player that you wanted to share with your friends, but every time you played it there was mainly…

While working withAdobe Captivate, if animation and the demonstration do not play in sync, what can we do to resolve this problem?

Let me share the solution I got while exploring many options in the tool. When you insert animation in the form of SWF file in to your captivate project, many a times it loses its synchronization with the rest of the project. Even if you have created the animation in flash in sync with the voiceover, the pace difference in playing the slides is…

Authentic Practice with the Writing Process

Scholastic's Kids are Authors Contest is an annual contest for grades K-8 designed to motivate young authors to use their reading, writing, and artistic skills to create and publish their own books. Students are encouraged to work in teams of three or more to write and illustrate their own fiction or…

K.I.S.S.

This ico-term carries two connotations with it.

Keep It Simple Stupid.

Or

Keep It Short and Simple.

This term is normally applied to marketing and engineering type situations but with all the innovation and…