An Excercise To Help Students Write More Freely

Todd Finley, an associate professor of English education at East Carolina University, shares in this blog post an exercise for helping students write more freely without fear of criticism over punctuation and grammar. In the exercise, students create an autobiographical timeline in five minutes. They then pause to listen to some inspirational poetry before beginning work on a one-sentence, one-page narrative reflecting on an important event in their lives. Students later revise their work, developing it into a sentence-by-sentence format that uses their original narrative.

Improving literacy with technology

In this news article, the writer provides a number of useful website resources that could be used in literacy instruction.

25 Ways To Get Kids Writing

From mad libs to story maps, this piece in the back-to-school issue of Scholastic's INSTRUCTOR magazine offers (just about) everything you need to make writing fun

Want to learn how to write? There's an app for that

More schools are using technology to modernize traditional handwriting lessons, which researchers say are still essential in a digital world. Teachers are using applications for the iPhone, iPad and other hand-held devices that focus on handwriting instruction through educational games. A recent Indiana University study found that handwriting may help students improve their learning, memory and basic skills.

Grammar Writing Site Recommendation

At this content-rich site the main page's links break further down to sentence level, paragraph level, and essay level. The site also contains samples of business writing and research papers, PowerPoint presentations, interactive quizzes, Q&A service, book resource list, on-line resource list, quotes from famous people on writing, and "grammar goofs" gleaned from college and high school writing. The "goofs" page does contain some innuendos. Besides a well-linked index, the site offers its own search engine. (Source: TechLearning.com)

On digital publishing

Over the past few years, learners have been granted new opportunities to tell and share their own stories. Students who write and publish, hone their communication skills and contribute their emerging creative voices to our world. We can nurture young writers by providing them the tools they need to create and share.

Teens will use formal writing skills as needed

Young people communicate in instant-message conversations much as they do when speaking to each other, says Sali Tagliamonte, a professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto, adding they seamlessly blend slang and short forms -- just as adults do -- with the more conservative, formal language one might expect from their parents or grandparents. Read more here.