Writing for others beyond the classroom

Perhaps it is familiarity breeds contempt, or maybe it is just familiarity breeds a giving break. Either way, we do know that students will work harder on their writing when they know that what they are writing is going to be read by more than just their teacher, their parent, or the student next to them. So as the school year is ending and you are thinking about what to do next year, think about having your students produce and publish their work and put it out to the world. Below are two articles about how teachers have gotten their students to activity publish their work either as books or magazines. If you want to try some book publishing yourself (or with your students), you might want to start with a tool like StoryBird (https://storybird.com/), there you can write your story, then have it published into their digital library, and if you really want to you can even buy a printed (soft- or hard-cover) copy of the book for your shelves - or the school library's collection.

Ill. preschoolers develop literacy skills by creating books Preschool students at an Illinois school have written and illustrated two storybooks as part of a two-month project about story elements. After studying author Mo Willems' books, students wrote the books, learning about characters and plot to develop stories using Willems' character, "Pigeon."

Morris Herald-News (Ill.) (4/29/2016)

Ideas for using zines to teach communication skills Having students publish zines, or mini-magazines, gives them a creative project to develop visual and written communication skills, middle-grades writing teacher John DePasquale writes in this blog post. He shares several ideas and templates for zine projects.

Scholastic.com (4/29/2016)

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Auto Summarization

In dealing with textbooks and students with disabilities, one of the most common things that we would do is to get the textbook in a digital format, as an ebook. By doing this we were able to use a number of tools based on the need of the student. I've had students who could not lift their physical printed textbook, but would be able to access though a laptop installed in their electronic wheelchair, for students with vision issues we could boost the font size or use a text-to-speech tool to have the book read aloud to them. One tool that I used with a number of my students who had issues was the Auto Summarize tool in Word. The tool works well with textbook, but wouldn't work for other texts, such as novels. I used this to reduce the amount of text that they had to read, the "cognitive load" of the text, but would still enable be able to get the information. Word did a great job, and depending on the student I would reduce the text to about 66% for facts and support...

Ebooks as Textbooks - Part 2 - Highlighting

Highlighting can be a very effective tool in reading and learning no matter the kind of text being read: from novels to textbooks. Most textbooks or other forms of information text will usually used text features along with graphics to help organize information presented in the text. These elements are done to help focus attention on important or key concepts and provide additional information. The text organization itself can include structural elements such as heading, subheading, index, glossary, paragraph spacing, bulleted or numbered lists, sidebars or side boxes, italics, underlines or bold for words or even sections. Graphic content can include the use of symbols, colors, illustrations, pictures, diagrams, charts, and graphs. Poor highlighting design - too much text has been highlighted. The act of highlighting is less time consuming and much easier than note-taking ( to be discussed in an upcoming posting). To be ...

StoryBots - free for early childhood teachers

Pre-K and Kindergarten teachers can have free access to StoryBots from http://www.storybots.com/educate . StoryBots Classroom offers an expansive new suite of classroom-ready activities and resources,including: Math Skills – Common Core-aligned kindergarten-level math games Learning Videos – a library of 110+ animated musical videos that explore a wide range of topics Starring You® and Learning Books – 90+ eBooks that help kids practice reading Starring You® Videos – offering fun, quick and personalized reward for the classroom and can be used for brain breaks Activity Sheets – 20 printable books and 350+ sheets for teachers to use in their classrooms Teacher Tools – including Class Roster, Lesson Planner, Group Builder — to help educators manage their classroom and create custom plans.

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