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Any of these “offline ideas” can easily be transferred to an online option. You can use Canva https://www.canva.com/graphs/graphic-organizers/to create your own graphic organizers. Or, we’ve also linked a blog https://www.techlearning.com/tl-advisor-blog/9736 that offers 10 site suggestions for making your own graphic organizers. You can allow your students to plan out the frames of their stories or transfer their found research using the panels in StoryboardThat. https://www.storyboardthat.com/storyboard-creatorFree apps are also available that allow students to contribute collectively and enable the entire class to benefit from shared research. One app, PADLET, https://padlet.com/ can be used in similar manner as using Post-it notes. With this app, students individually submit short posts online onto a predesigned form. This form could be a K-W-L chart, a research board organized by topics, or individual boards focused on specific questions to be answered. The app, SMORE, https://www.smore.com/ offers another format for sharing research. To use this app, the teacher would set up a classroom newsletter format. Then, each student would be able to add his/her research information along with photographs, images, or videos into one section of the document. Working collaboratively, the end result would be a class research online newsletter.
I is for Interest.
Teachers typically want to have control...even to the point of giving students writing assignments and topics around our own interests or simply because it is what comes next in the curriculum sequence. However, when we allow our students to write on topics of interest, there is usually a BIG payoff! There’s an increase in both intrinsic motivation and in engagement. They are writing about their passions and what they truly care about or that concerns them. They take ownership and persist through the process. Professional literature supports the benefit of this: “When learners feel a sense of ownership, they want to engage in academic tasks and persist in learning” (Bray & McClaskey, 2015, p. 198).
There are many ways to capitalize on the interests of students. Some offline options include conducting interest inventories, choice boards, menus, and tic-tac-toe boards. While each of these could be used in conjunction with Writer’s Workshop, they could also be used as stand-alone options. Interest inventories provide opportunities for students to think about topics of interests along with personal strengths and weaknesses. With this information, students can choose what they want to write about from a variety of options while also setting goals for growth, thus promoting autonomy. Choice boards, menus, and tic-tac-toe boards provide additional topics that can be revisited by students throughout the year as they seek to discover new formats and subjects to keep their writing fresh and authentic. These options support student ownership in their writing while also providing parameters to keep them focused.
Teachers can utilize many of these choice assignment options as culminating projects or as part of Passion Projects. For example, one teacher at our local intermediate school had her students conduct research for a “choice assignment” based on interest culminating in sharing with the class three varied ways of showing what they had learned. The author’s daughter did a project on Jesse James after visiting the home in Missouri where he met his demise. Her three ways of presenting included a Wanted Poster, an Obituary, and a Jeopardy game show of facts she presented in a Google Presentation to the class. It was a fantastic learning opportunity because she used the game show to assess her classmates!
Additional ideas that provide a more tangible method for writing are also available. Using the story starter dice or Writing Idea Grabber (p. 2 of the linked document) allow opportunities for kids to get up and moving while simultaneously helping them generate ideas for writing. For example, when using the Writing Idea Grabber, students first think of three things that represent or interest them personally. Next, we ask them to get up, find a friend across the room and share their three writing ideas with their partner. Then, the pairs swap roles to share their ideas. We invite our students to consider whether any of their ideas sparked thoughts that interested them, and if so, to write them down! With these ideas collected, students are able to add more writing ideas to their passion page or heart maps in their writing journals. These interest ideas can later become writing seeds or stories.
Online options for a good kick-start for story writing ideas based on students’ interests are also available. Scholastic offers a fantastic and fun way to generate story ideas using Story Starters or the Story Starters Junior for younger writers. In these online applications, students pull a lever to switch up the format, description for the selected main character, and offers a plot idea to get the writer started. If the writer doesn’t like what was selected in any of the four categories, he just spins again to generate a new idea that aligns more closely to personal interest. The story cubes we mentioned previously are also available in an app for IOS and Android. Additionally, this linked blog helps more advanced or middle school writers with MANY writing project ideas that can be created, shared, and assessed using Google tools.
T is for Types of Publications.
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