Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Adding Technology to a Writing Lesson

This technology extension of the Writing Fix lesson, Unlikely Diary Keepers, was absolutely one of the most successful writing projects that my students did this year. The amount of engagement and collaboration during this project was incredibly high as students learned how to create custom animations and record their voices in PowerPoint. I got the idea from Pernille Ripp and used her students' work to inspire my students.


I followed the lesson as it is written on Writing Fix except that I used this template created in Word for the students to type their diary entries and used this storyboard for students to plan the diary slides. Students published their animal diaries using the Custom Animation and the Record Narration features in Powerpoint. Also, I had students do this pre-research activity for homework and the computer teacher spent time teaching my students how to search for information using search engines as they took notes in this Top Tab Foldable. This is the scoring guide for their product.

You can view more of my students' animal diaries here. I uploaded them to Authorstream so that they could be shown on our class wiki. The students had spent time making the backgrounds around their clip art transparent, but for some reason the backgrounds appeared on Authorstream.

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