Technology and the Writing Process

Writing is an area I consistently identify as an area of growth. So when I visited Eric Curts' blog, Control, Alt, Achieve, I was happy to see he shared a variety of technology tools that could help students improve their writing. He organizes the technology tools by within the 8 stages of writing: inspiration, planning, writing tools, self-editing, peer and teacher feedback, revising, assessing, and publishing. Below I identify couple stages of writing that I find challenging in the classroom and highlight some interesting tools at that stage. 

1. Inspiration

Several of my students tell me that they don't have anything to write about. When given prompts, they often sit for the entire writing time saying they have no connections to make sure the prompt. The Emoji Random Writing Prompt Generator gives students 2, 3, 4, or 5 emojis that they can use for inspiration for their writing that day. If they aren't happy with those emojis, then they can press control and R to get a new set. Click the link above to get your own copy the Emoji Random Writing Prompt Generator. 

2. Planning

Graphic organizers are a great way to help students organizer their thinking. Google Drawings allows you to create templates for students to fill in or they can't create their own graphic organizers. Curts provides 2 links to graphic organizers he has already created. Those are below. 
http://www.controlaltachieve.com/2017/05/graphic-org-drawings.html
http://www.controlaltachieve.com/2016/01/language-arts-graphic-organizers.html

Additionally, in a recent search, I came across this website that provides more than 100 Google Doc and Drawing templates for free use. 



4. Self- Revising

My students often had difficult seeing errors within their own writing. SAS Writing Reviser provides students with a menu of possible issues to choose from, including sentence economy, sentence variety, sentence power, sentence clarity, and support tools. By choosing a tool, the students will receive feedback in that area and suggestions from improvement. 

5. Assessing

Another issue I have in teaching writing is knowing what assessment tools to use. A rubric tool that Curts suggests is Orange Slice Teacher Rubric, which is an add-on for Google Docs. This add-on allows greater productivity by providing an "easy-to -use format." When previewing this add-on, it was clear that creating a rubric was pretty easy. Your choose the performance level and categories, and then you are prompted to customize the rubric if you see fit. After selecting finish, the rubric is submitted into the doc. If you are Google Classroom user, it can be sent distributed and used to provide feedback.





These are just a few of the tool discussed within Eric Curts' blog this week. Check it out to learn about more tools you can use within your writing workshop.