Technology Reflections

This week my 7th grade reading class read a book in the text book that was a Personal Narrative. We talked about the form of a Personal Narrative, using the story as an example. I pointed out the parts of the story that made it interesting and made it personal. We talked about Plot Diagrams – we had just used one to plot the previous story – and I emphasized beginning, middle and end. They had a Story planner to jot down thoughts about what they wanted to write about. I’ve begun grading the narratives – I’m not sure these kids were in the same classroom as I was last week

Well, OK maybe that’s a bit harsh. I do have to admit that they do have a basic beginning, middle and end, but OMG – the sentence structure is from outer space.

Here are some of the things I’m reading:

• I had gotten (I got, I received), I had been (I went), I had seen (I saw)….had had had….. this is so frustrating!
• single and plurals that do not match: “the reason why it was the saddest days”, “After going on that ride we ate a hot dog and they were very good”
• and then, and then, and then – we need to work on transitions
• not capitalizing Mom, Dad, Uncle, etc
• no paragraphs and/or not indenting paragraphs
• and don’t get me started on dialogue – LOL

Since this is Reading Class and not Language Arts, I’m actually being easy on the grading. It’s not my job to teach writing and I don’t want to contradict anything the LA teachers doing, but I still have to have the kids write in Reading for comprehension purposes.

One final note: don’t plan to have every class complete a writing assignment on the same day – I’m going to be grading these things for days….

As a response to my Writely issues, The Reflective Teacher has suggested Writeboard. I did actually look at Writeboard when I was searching for something to use and I chose Writely because the interface looks more like a traditional Word Processor and there are fun options for fonts – something to hold the students’ interest

Students were supposed to go home this weekend and send me their Writely documents – an essay test we did in class – but I have only received one so far. IF they come in tomorrow and still report problems accessing Writely, then maybe I’ll try Writeboard. With Writeboard they can create their own accounts, but all use my email to sign up.

**there are no links in this post because everytime I linked something and tried to save the post, I got a blank screen. Maybe that is the same glitch that didn’t allow comming yesterday