Writing Strand
Writing is one of the essential tools that students need to
develop, so that they can be successful in the future, in regard to their
education and their overall development in their daily lives and routines. Students must learn to develop their thoughts
and ideas and obtain the ability to express themselves in their writing clearly
and effectively. Being an effective writer is extremely important because
writing is relative to many other essential skills that students must develop
at a young age, such as reading and communication. The Ontario curriculum has
for overall expectations for the writing strand that focus on identifying
learning needs for students at all grade levels in their classroom. As
educators, we have the important role of helping our students develop their
writing abilities so that they can communicate effectively and produce writing
material that is comprehensive with original ideas that are critically
thought-out by each individual.
In class we analyzed different strategies and techniques
that teachers could use to assess their students growth and development within
their writing. I really liked the idea of incorporating social media (and media
literacy) into the writing strand for student development. The social media source
that I thought was interesting to use for this task was twitter. Twitter is interesting because it is a
resource that only has a 140- character limit but it is something that can be
used to gather information, generate idea, communicate, and organize a variety
of different outside sources of media.
The website www.teachhub.com/50-ways-use-twitter-classroom
is an excellent resource for teachers because it provides them with different
ideas on how to use twitter in the classroom. Teachers can take advantage of
lesson ideas for their students that range from grades k-12 to incorporate
twitter use in the classroom. One of the examples that I really liked was to
use twitter to write reviews. If the class had to read a particular novel,
teachers could have their students write up mini reviews on twitter and have
their tweets link with the classrooms hash-tag, so that everyone can view the
entire classrooms tweets. This task will build upon many different skills
because it incorporates reading, writing and possibly even editing upon
reviewing other individuals tweets.
[Online Image]. Retrieved from Giphy.com
There are many critics of twitter but I think that it is a very interesting and unique resources. I can envision myself using twitter in the classroom because there are so many different things that you can accomplish with this resource, due to its versatility. There are many curriculum expectations that could be met with this resource but for the writing strand, in particular, I believe that twitter can be an excellent resource for teachers to assess student’s development within the writing strand. The only down side is can see to using twitter is perhaps, students not staying on task while they are working away on twitter but I believe that this could be remedied with careful teacher observation and limited time for tweeting during class. Overall, with these potential problems in mind, I think that twitter is a unique resource that teachers can use to engage students in the classroom, to develop and assess their writing abilities.
[Online Image]. Retrieved from Giphy.com
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