August 30, 2007

6-Traits Writing Online: Enroll Now!



Teaching and Assessing Writing with the 6 Traits: Classes are are Filling Fast!

WRITING COURSE:

EDUC 744 909F Teaching and Assessing Writing with the 6-Traits - Middle/High School (Gr. 5-12) 3 gr. cr. begins October 1, 2007

Learn to teach and assess writing with the 6-Traits of writing (voice, ideas, word choice, organization, sentence fluency and conventions). Learn to use the 6-Traits with the writing process to teach revision strategies. Help learners meet higher standards and improve test scores.

Please forward this announcement to teachers in your district.

Earn graduate credits via online courses that support your professional development goals for licensure renewal, salary advancement and advanced certification.

Sign up soon to reserve your spot! Registration closes ten days before the class begins

to allow time for assigning user names, passwords and ordering/shipping the textbook.

Classes are TOTALLY ONLINE. You may participate from your home or school computer. Registration is limited to 20 participants per section.

Syllabus and other details:

http://www.uwstout.edu/soe/profdev/traits.shtml

REGISTER ONLINE
or
REGISTER BY FAX
Fax: (715) 232-3385

August 2, 2007

Text Messaging & Conventions


ttyl, y? bcuz pos
Lost on my subject line?
Allow me to translate...


Talk to you later.
Why?
Because, parent over shoulder


(which means: my mom is staring at the computer screen so don't type anything that will get either of us in trouble)


My daughter doesn't realize I speak "text" (or txt, rather) - I like it that way...I keep tabs and she doesn't realize it. But that's not for this post. This post is about the idea of discussing "conventions" (and presentation, really) with your secondary students. Txt is a language of the young. It is a written language. It is shorthand and electronic. They live, eat, and breathe this language by cell, IM, and email 24/7. It is their native language - we will not break them of it - we must accept that. Obviously not all conventions or presentation problems are texting-based, but it does creep in - the lack of capitalization and punctuation is an acceptable convention of instant messaging and texting as the message box only allows 160 characters total. And capitalization requires several convoluted cell phone key punches. In addition, spelling is phonetic to eliminate excess letter characters and the time it takes to formulate a response. When a teen has 14 friends in a chat room - time of response is highly vital.

I don't write this to excuse the poor conventions of the Gen Wi-Fi writers, but I do want teachers to understand where their students live. Remember when you were listening to "your" music as a teenager and your parents told you it was awful and to turn it down? You simply rolled your eyes and thought they just had no idea what current life was really about...welcome to current life.

Rather than simply stating that it is unacceptable to turn in work with poor conventions - and editing away the texting habits of a generation - open up a discussion (especially with high school students) - about appropriate time and place for different kinds of writing. In the same way that we use a comma after the greeting in a friendly letter and a colon after the greeting in a business letter, the conventions for punctuation, spelling, etc., change for the digital environment one is in as well. See if students can arrive at examples like: An email to your teacher or boss *should* be clean of "txt", but an email or IM to your friend can be filled with it. Also, you might steer the discussion toward judgments potential employers, college admissions officers, etc., might make (first impressions) of the student, if all they had to go on was a piece of writing with misspellings, no capitalization, and no punctuation. If students can understand the authentic reasons for proofreading, editing, and revising, they will be more inclined to voluntarily do it themselves.

Your thoughts?

Lisa@hersoapbox
(Lisa Chamberlin, was taught about the traits by Vicki Spandel. She recently co-facilitated Teaching and Assessing Writing with the 6-Traits)