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.