Write-able: helping students to write inside and outside the classroom with technology.

Presenter Details

Alex GrevettJinbu High SchoolEmail: alex.grevett@gmail.comBlog: http://breathyvowel.wordpress.comTwitter: @breathyvowel

Please feel free to get in touch, or subscribe to my blog and Twitter feeds.

Presentation Details

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Why should we use technology?

Understandable

Most of us access technology every day for communication, learning, entertainment, work as well as many other things. It is a part of our lives and we do understand it well enough to use it for education. Even so, our students are the experts when it comes to technology, and giving them the power to use it to shape their writing will be motivating. It is now likely to be the medium by which most of us communicate.

Communicable

The beauty of technology is that we can share everything with everyone (this is not always a good thing). What this means for us as language learners is that we can reach out to and establish dialogues with native speakers, who can help us to experience the ‘real’ language. It also means that we can make connections with other learners who can provide input at our learning level, and help keep us motivated.

Saveable

Students work is difficult to keep track of, and in class ‘accidents’ happen. Technology helps us to keep students work safe to use again, and makes it far easier than using paper.

Editable

Trying to edit with pen and paper is boring, time-consuming and messy. Using technology, students and teachers can make corrections to work neatly. In addition, other students or anyone else can make comments, corrections and suggestions without spoiling the work. Finally, the work can be easily rearranged through the use of mind-mapping or sorting.

Extendable

One of my favourite things about technology is that it can remove classroom walls. In fact, I ran a short writing course without ever needing a classroom! Students can access their work from anywhere, anytime, and the teacher can help them when they need it. Sometimes it can even take away the need for a teacher completely. I’m not so keen on this!

Inevitable

Technology is becoming more and more prevalent in schools. Reports in the media suggest that by 2015 (that’s just 4 years away!) tablet PCs will replace textbooks in South Korean schools (Source: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-07-20-south-korea-tablet-pc_n.htm). Even closer than that, the new NEAT will be internet based (as is the TOEFL). If the examination is technology based, we have a duty to our students to help them learn using the same technology.

The process writing model

This workshop assumes a familiarity with the process writing model. However, you do not need to know about it to participate. If you are interested in learning more about it, the following resources may be helpful:

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/approaches-process-writinghttp://www.dailywritingtips.com/the-writing-process/

Preparing students to write - brainstorming

If we are going to help our students to write well in any language, we first have to help them to organize and develop their ideas. For many of my students, finding ideas to write about is as difficult as writing in English. Technology can provide us with some help to brainstorm in class, especially with sharing the ideas of a group of students.

Twitter

Twitter (or any other messaging program) can help us to instantly, efficiently and neatly collect ideas from students, and to put them into an electronic format that can then be worked with further.

* Note: Twitter can be a great educational tool for teachers and students. It is also a wonderful resource for English teachers professionally. Most of the ideas in this workshop have been inspired by other teachers sharing their work on Twitter. For more information on Twitter as a professional development tool see the following resources:

http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/twitter-for-professional-development/http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2011/01/18/twitter-chats-for-eslefl-teachers-how-to-participate-in-them/http://jeffthomastech.com/blog/?p=9250

Working with ideas

Once ideas have been collected, they need developing. This can be done in a number of ways:

Organizing: Separate ideas into categories. The divisions can then form the basis for essay paragraphs in any kind of essay. This is easily done using online noticeboard or mind-mapping tools.

Mind Mapping

https://bubbl.us/http://mind42.com/http://www.xmind.net/ (Download)

Online Noticeboards

http://www.wallwisher.com/http://www.whiteboardblog.co.uk/2011/09/8-online-noticeboards-wallwisher-and-more/

Agree or disagree: This is a good activity for planning persuasive or evaluation essays. It can be done orally, or once again using online noticeboard activities, or students can respond to each other on the Twitter feed.

Grammar or expression ideas: Even at the brainstorming stage, teachers and students can review each other’s comments and make suggestions for improving grammar, but especially appropriate vocabulary and expressions.

Follow-up questions: Teachers and students can ask follow-up questions orally or through Twitter, aimed at developing or challenging students’ ideas.

Sharing: Ideas developed during brainstorming can be shared through Twitter, blogs or wiki sites. These can then be commented on by other students, teachers, parents or anyone else. Here are some useful sharing resources:

http://www.wikispaces.com/http://wordpress.org/http://edublogs.org/

Spending some time developing ideas puts students in a much better position to write. The thinking part of the writing process is as important to learn as the technical skills involved in writing.

Solving Problems

Technology can really help us in the classroom, but it also comes with some difficulties. Here are some common issues with technology, and some suggestions for overcoming them.

Accessibility

Getting one student to a computer is difficult in most schools, unless you can get the keys to the computer room. However, it is not necessary to have one computer for each student. In fact, I prefer to have two students per computer as they can then support each other. Three or even four students at a computer can be OK.

Many students have smartphones these days, and enjoy using them in class. Carefully controlled smartphone use can be beneficial.

Finally, if you really can’t do it now, wait a year or two. As the tablet PC reports suggest, we are in an era of rapidly increasing access to technology. Store this handout in a safe place and get it out again in 2013.

Safety

The internet can be a dangerous place, and when using it we have to help our students to be safe. This means educating them about the dangers as well as the benefits of social media use. One of the benefits of Twitter is that much of the communication that takes place is public and visible to everyone. This helps to keep our students safe and their communication responsible.

As teachers we should try to protect our students’ identities by publishing work anonymously and avoiding publishing photos of students entirely.

Class Control

Keeping students on task is even more difficult when using technology. There are a huge number of distractions to students using the internet, and they are easier to access while

using technology. There are some ways we can reduce the potential for students to go off task:

Keeping technology use controlled is the key to maintaining classroom focus and discipline. Set strict time limits in class to ensure that students don’t have time to get distracted. In addition to this, clearly marking technology and non-technology times is important. This can be done by asking students to turn off screens, shut laptop cases and put smart phones in pockets when they are not using them.

Finally, having a clear set of rules, and consequences for breaking them, is essential.

Writing as a team: peer correction

Peer correction has a number of benefits:

Students are more involved in the writing process. Students put their grammar knowledge to the test. Students may prefer to be corrected by their peers than a teacher (or they may not!) Teachers have to do less marking!

Peer correction activity: 6 word stories.

This activity is designed to test students’ sentence writing and micro-grammar skills, but it can be adapted for almost any kind of writing from a prompt. The main purpose is to create an atmosphere of peer correction through a fun competition.

Directions:

1. Find a series of interesting or funny photos.

2. Ask students to write a six word sentence (no more, no less) about the picture and tweet it.

3. Display the sentences below the picture. Ask students to vote for the funniest / best.

4. Award 1 point for each vote.

5. Ask teams to provide any corrections or improvements to grammar, vocabulary or meaning. At this point they can use more or less than 6 words. If a team makes a correction to another team’s sentence, they steal a point from that team.

For a full description of this lesson and downloadable files, see: http://breathyvowel.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/lesson-plan-six-word-stories/

Writing as a team: team writing

Team writing is working as a class or a group to produce a single piece of work. This encourages students to pay attention to structure and coherence and cohesion. It also allows a single, lengthy piece of work to be constructed in the space of a single lesson by dividing up the tasks.

Wikispaces

Wikispaces (http://www.wikispaces.com/) is an excellent place for students to write as a team. All students can access one piece of work using a password, and the work can be made public or private. It has advantages for teachers too; changes are recorded so you can see which student has contributed.

Team Writing Activity – Jigsaw Essay

This activity helps students to focus on the structure and coherence of a piece of writing.

Directions

1. Give the students a topic, and a suggested structure and number of sentences for that topic.

2. Randomly assign the number of a sentence to each group.

3. One at a time, groups add their sentences. If the sentences connect, they must use proper connectors.

4. You can use peer correction to edit the essay once you have finished the project.

Team Writing Activity – Communicative Writing

This activity encourages students to read and write, and to construct cohesive pieces of writing.

It works best with stories or narrative essays, and can be just as easily done offline as online. If students are working online, class blogs may be useful. Blog sites can be found at:

http://wordpress.org/http://edublogs.org/

One way to further increase student motivation may be to experiment with writing adventure stories, with students providing a choice at the end of each section. For more information take a look at:

http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2009/05/02/the-best-places-to-read-write-choose-your-own-adventure-stories/

Extending the classroom: Online Journal Writing

I acknowledge Andee Pollard of Kangwon National University for first bringing the potential on online journal writing sites to my attention. Online journal sites allow students to write journal entries and have them corrected by native speakers. The benefits of this are a chance for students to learn from their mistakes, to enjoy writing regularly and to build a community of friends. The other benefit to teachers is, again, no marking!

Online journal sites can be used in a variety of ways. They can be used for short homework writing assignments, grammar practice or, as I think would be most beneficial, simply keeping a journal in English for the student’s own enjoyment. Andee’s research showed that university level students, after some initial encouragement, developed an enjoyment of writing and wrote for themselves every day. The ability to make friends through giving and receiving corrections is also important because it establishes a dialogue between learners which further increases motivation.

I use http://lang-8.com/ to write a journal, but there are many similar sites. One major advantage of lang-8 is that it has a Korean interface.

Extending the classroom: Twitter

Twitter can be used in similar ways to online journals outside the classroom. It can be used for small homework assignments or competitions, especially for grammar practice. It works particularly well for simply having conversations in English with students not in the classroom. In fact, conversations that would be impossible in the classroom are possible through Twitter, where the discourse is genuine communication rather than language practice.

Other useful resources: Vocabulary

Building vocabulary is as important for good writing as it is in all areas of language learning. Two things that we can use for helping students to learn vocabulary are Quizlet and Anki.

Quizlet (www.quizlet.com) is a flashcard set maker, which supports the use of images. Once a set of flashcards is made, there are a series of games to play, which encourage students to learn the vocabulary. Quizlet is particularly strong for practising spelling.

Anki (www.ankisrs.net) is a flashcards program that allows a user to build a set of flashcards. It then shows the flashcards repeatedly when it calculates that the user needs to see them. In this way it builds long-term vocabulary retention, and breaks the cycle of short-term, test-based learning.

Final Note

I hope that you enjoyed this workshop, and that you found out something that you can use in your classroom. If you have any questions that you want to ask after the workshop, I can be contacted through email, Twitter or my blog. Thank you very much for attending.