Across the Curriculum

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After observing the way North Carolina is shifting the way that 7th graders submit writing samples from a paper environment to an electronic environment, my interest in assisting students with the research process has been renewed.  In the practice writing scenario, students are given a writing prompt, with which they are supposed to spend a pre-determined amount of time researching.

Addtional Lesson Idea:
This tool could also be used as a class brainstorming activity in which the teacher selects an overarching topic and the class can continue to click on the related topics until they discover a relevant topic of interest for an assignment. 

In the past few weeks I have received several emails asking me to share 7 Things About Myself that others may not know.  At first I dismissed the requests as email abuse via excessive forwarding of chain letters.  It would only be fair for me to admit that I did in fact read each of those forwards before I dismissed them and I found the 7 things about others to be very interesting. 

As a consequence of my voyeuristic reading of the 7 Things About Others, it stands to reason that I must now find my 7…in no particular order:

1.  Writing is one of my favorite activities and I make the least amount of time for it.
2.  I idolized Nadia Comaneci as a child and spent a ridiculous amount of hours watching the movie about her life, until the VCR ate it and then I spent almost the same amount of time trying to locate it on DVD.
3.  In order to overcome my fear of dogs, I got a puppy.
4.  One day I want to rid myself of a mortgage and find a way to drift around the world.
5.  I spend an inordinate amount of time quoting lines from “The Princess Bride”.
6.  If I believe that something is right, I will fight for it as hard as I can, even if it’s to my own demise.
7.  Despite my growing allergy, I still want a horse.

Of course by “them” I mean students!  What are they passionate about?  How do we as educators extract that passion from them?

In another attempt to find ways to engage students in writing across the curriculum, I have discovered the Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future project.  This is a collaborative effort between Google and the National Writing Project to encourage people between the ages of 13-18 to write about issues that they believe are pertinent to their future.  In this project, students compose letters to the next President using issues that they care about as their topic.

Visit the project homepage to see an Interactive map of topics students have already written about.  At the time I wrote this post, 5845 letters from 201 schools had been received.  The tag cloud on the project homepage is a visual representation of the topics students wrote about, the larger the words, the more letters that have centered around that topic.

What fires your students up?

Writing is emphasized in all grade levels and all content areas, often stated as “Writing Across the Curriculum”.  How are we supposed to cover curriculum and simultaneously integrate writing skills?  How are we supposed to develop a continuous supply of engaging, thought provoking writing prompts?

My proposal for developing authentic writing prompts is to use a combination of student choice and authentic material.  Newsmap is a new tool that creates clouds (text visualizations) of current news based on the headlines in Google News.  The larger the title, the more news that item has been generating.

The image below includes all of the news in the following categories; World, Nation, Business, Technology, Sports, Entertainment and Health at the time I wrote this post.

At the bottom of the page, you have the option of selecting which news categories you want to appear in the cloud.

In this image I only selected World News:

Lesson Idea:

Open the Newsmap website at the start of class (preferably using a projector) and select the categories that you would like your content to be generated from.  Students will have to choose one of the titles on the screen as their writing prompt.

Have students write their version of that news item.  This could be based on factual knowledge previously presented in class or can be purely student imagination and creativity.  The length of the writing assignment can also vary depending on your objective.

A follow-up activity would be to have students click on the article title and do an analysis of their news item versus the actual news item.  Again, your objective would dictate the direction of the follow-up assignment.