• Writing assignments should teach

• Search engine for social network sites

• Hearing may help struggling writers identify errors

• Writing teachers can use a summer job

• Should there be a website in your future?

Writing Points presents: teaching tip
Writing assignments should teach

Many writing prompts are signals for students to write. Such prompts are a waste of time for the majority of students and their teachers.

A far more efficient and effective use of writing prompts is to require students them to apply knowledge and skills to solving some problem.

When you give students writing prompts, the assignment itself should provide a learning experience apart from any comments you make on the process or product later. That means you need to plan your writing prompts taking into account:

• What students must know before they can do the assignment,

• What they must learn in order to do the assignment,

• What problems must solve in order to learn what you want them to learn from the writing prompt.

Your role is to provide structure. You must make sure students have requisite skills and knowledge before you give the assignment. You must also make sure the assignment contains all information students need to complete it.

Then you must stand aside and let students discover for themselves solutions to the problems inherent in the writing assignment.

Having difficulty writing prompts that teach? Get sympathy and advice at the writing prompts forum.

Writing Points presents: teaching resource
Search engine for social network sites

SearchMotive lets you search popular social networking and user-submitted content sites including Twitter, Digg, Hulu, Flickr, and YouTube. Such searches may turn up information sources that are not readily found by traditional search engines.

Sometimes what you need is not published information, but a person who is an information source. You might try SearchMotive to find individuals or organizations to follow on Twitter, for example, to develop your personal learning network.

Use your own judgment about recommending SearchMotive to students. It is probably not a site you want to recommend to all students. However, it may be appropriate for some students in some situations.

Writing Points presents: struggling writers
Hearing may help identify writing errors

Editing presents challenges for students for students with learning disabilities like dyslexia as well as for many other students who have difficulty associating letters with their sounds. For these students, a text-to-speech program like Expressivo may be useful.

A student can paste a 300-character text into the box at the Expressivo page, click the button, and hear his/her writing read back in one of several voices. Hearing their work read back can help students find wrong words that spell-check introduced based on students' typos.

The short text length permitted in the free product does not allow students to check more than a few sentences at a time; however, working with a small amount of text may be easier for struggling writers than a lengthy passage. They can check their working thesis statement and writing skeleton™ so that they have correct spellings in those basic documents.

Incidentally, the free program is a good way to find out if the full product would be useful for students with various conditions that make traditional online reading difficult.

Writing Points presents: teaching tip
Writing teachers can use a summer job

One of the criticisms of education I hear most often from business people is that teachers don't know anything about what students need to know. As a business owner, I have to say there is more than a little truth in that criticism.

Big-name educators confer with their counterparts in international conglomerates and then tell us ordinary mortals what skills employees need to succeed in the workplace. Unfortunately, those educators don't realize the CEOs are talking about skills needed by the upper level managers who report to them, not about the skills needed by tomorrow's entry-level employees who are sitting in our classrooms.

Although it's only December, it is not too early to start looking for places to get some job experience outside the classroom in the summer of 2011.

If you have a school year teaching job, you could ask for a 2-4 week unpaid internship, which won't take work from someone without any job, but is long enough to provide the employer with some benefit for training you. Depending on your skills, you could write web page copy for the local funeral home or fill in as receptionist at an insurance firm so the regular person can take two weeks off.

If you observe what's going on around you, you will learn a great deal about what your students need to learn in your classroom about subjects like writing, oral communication, reading, and research. You may learn that skills the education reformers say died with the dinosaurs are skills small businesses expect your students to have.

Writing Points presents: a note from Linda
Should there be website in your future?

Just like manga, technical manuals, and sonnets, online writing has writing conventions that writers ignore at their peril. If you don't know how to write for the web, you are doing students a disservice by having them write for the web.

I go a little crazy when I see kids as young as first grade being required by teachers to post to blogs. If you want to put first graders' writing on the classroom bulletin board or family 'fridge, you have my blessing, but please don't encourage elementary students to post their writing in cyberspace.

If you are teaching adolescents or adults, that's a somewhat different story. Don't think, however, that having students put their usual writing assignments on a blog is teaching students skills they need for the Internet Age. A bogus writing assignment is still a bogus writing assignment even if students post their work in a blog.

SBI, the company that hosts this website, has stacks of resources that teach you how to communicate online. You'll find some of them to download from the Writing Points teachers' resource page.

If you are really serious about learning how to use online resources, I suggest you look into starting your own website with SBI. The company has its holiday "2fer" deal through Dec. 25. Split the annual cost with a friend or relative and each gets SBI's phenomenal training and resources, plus the usual thinks like domain registration, site hosting, and the like for about $150. Besides all that you'd learn, you'd build a second income source. You can pay in monthly installments, and SBI comes with a 90-day money back guarantee, too.

If you want to know how SBI worked for me, you can check my about SBI page, especially the updates at the bottom.

The next issue of Writing Points should be released next year on January 15, no providence preventing.

Until then, keep your pencil sharp.

Linda Aragoni