The work done on multimodal documents in this year’s Summer Institute was exciting. I’ve embedded the three files that were shared with me below; if you want yours here, too, shoot me an email and I’ll get on it.

• Avery’s letter to her daughter
• Heather’s sample research project for her students
• Michael’s video for his incoming freshman

A recent discussion on the NWP Tech Liaisons listserv focused on how to get email accounts for students. There are two solutions that have varying degrees of management.

1. Gaggle.net. Gaggle has free email accounts (there are also paid versions) for teachers and their students. The free accounts have ads–somewhat like Yahoo mail, although “appropriate” for kids (by which I take it they are rarely for alcohol, pornography, or tobacco products … ). Teachers can control lots of things, including limiting the domains from which students can receive email (so they could set it up only to receive things from Google Docs, or the class blog, etc.). Email from other sources gets put in a queue for the teacher to approve before it goes to the students’ inboxes.
2. Gmail. Google’s mail service, Gmail, has a way to create “fake” email addresses that you can use to create student accounts for weblogs, wikis, and other online services (but not for Google Docs). It works like this: you add “+studentname” to your own gmail account to sign students up for blog accounts (or whatever). If my Gmail is pkit@gmail.com (it’s not), and I wanted to add an account for a student named Greg Brady, I would use this as the email address when I signed up: pkit+gregbrady@gmail.com. Gmail would send the confirmation info to my regular Gmail address, but the blog (or whatever) would create a unique user account for Greg Brady.

We’ve read, we’ve researched, we’ve written, we’ve presented, we’ve participated, we’ve witnessed others’ presentations–all with the underlying assumption that these activities would help us in our teaching of writing.

Now is the time to get some of your ideas about implementing changes in your curriculum written down. These may be simple notes, or elaborate plans; it depends on where you are in your thinking at the moment. You may be thinking about introducing brand new practices, or adapting new aspects into curriculum that you already have found to be successful. Whatever your approach, think of this as an opportunity to reflect on what you’ve read, discussed, presented, and witnessed, and capture the ways that you imagine employing these in your own practice.

Write your own post that collects your current thinking.

Instead of a single quick-write topic today, we have a series of them. All are related to the writing process, and are an attempt to gather together the collective wisdom we’ve gathered in the last few weeks by being immersed in writing, writing pedagogy, and research about writing. 

So, look at the basic topics listed in the other posts for today, and post replies that show what you think and/or what you’ve found out about the different aspects of the writing process. 

Revision is one of the hardest, and often most misunderstood parts of the writing process. It’s not fixing the spelling mistakes. It’s re-seeing the writing, trying to understand what works in it and what you’d like to change, and then making those changes. 

How and when do you revise your writing? Do you do it as you draft, after you draft, or some combination of the two? What thinking happens to help you decide where to put certain ideas or details? What help do you solicit to help you figure out what could use revision? What do you prioritize when you revise, and why? Post your insights in the “comment” section below.

Anything you do as a writer before you begin to draft is part of your prewriting process. Thinking, taking notes, making mind maps, drawing, free writing, and other similar tasks are some thing writers do as they prepare to write. 

What do you find helpful in preparing yourself to write? Do you have any personal prewriting habits that have assisted you in getting your ideas onto the page? How do you make decisions about choosing which topic to write about? Share your insights in the “comments” section. 

Drafting is the (sometimes grueling, sometimes glorious) process of getting your writing down on the page. People draft in different ways, with some writers spilling out full drafts in short bursts and others laboring over nearly every word choice. 

How do you draft when you write? Do you write on paper with pen or pencil, or do you draft on a computer screen? Do you need certain things to be near when you write (coffee, reference books, monkey chow, etc.)? As you write, do you have any habits you can recognize that are helpful (or, even if not helpful, necessary)?

At some point during writing, you figure out that the “what” of your writing (what it says, and what you want it to say) are pretty close to finished. That leaves final editing–doing a little wordsmithing, maybe, cleaning up unwieldy sentences, figuring out what to do with all those extra commas, and so on. 

What do you do to clean up your writing? Give some specific tips in the “comments” section!

We all know about school lunches. Write about school lunches (in general, or about one particular school lunch) from your perspective.

Write your response to today’s quick write by using the “comment” function.