Is it possible to have a crush on a Web site?
I just discovered NoRedInk.com — thanks Jeff & Kristin!! — and I am smitten.
Kids online, logging in hours of practice with spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Oh my!
I was fortunate enough to get to listen/watch a recorded Webinar with the founder of the company, so I got to hear a little about the evolution of the site. I understood him to be saying that, as a teacher, he was looking for a better way of dealing with the time-consuming effort of "low-level"grading (vs. working with students on their ideas, arguments, etc.), as well as how to see improvement in student performance with the mechanics of writing, which, despite the repeated marking of errors on papers, really needs to be addressed by practice.
It brings to mind that notion that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something.
So now there is a FREE Web site that lets kids do just that with commonly confused words, commas, sentence fragments and run-ons, apostrophes, subject/verb agreement, etc. Did I mention it's free?!
There are so many super-useful features of this site for teachers, such as quiz creation and data analysis, that I would begin to feel as though I'm writing an advertisement if I were to try to detail them. Take the time to check it out for yourself. And let me know if it's not love at first site (ha, ha) for you, too.
And if that were not enough innovation for one person ...
ReplyDeleteThis teacher has created a manual of the mechanics he'd like students to be aware of/work on, and, rather than use comments to explain errors on the students' papers, he circles the errors and writes code numbers next to them that correspond to entries in the manual. Students then are responsible for looking up the errors in the manual, which provides much more detailed explanations, including examples, than is possible on students' papers.
To combat the problem of kids not actually taking the time to read/process the feedback, he makes it an actual assignment that they have to write up a list of the errors they made (in their own words), correct the errors in their document, and highlight the corrected sections.
To make it even more reflective, I got thinking that students could be required to do any or all of the following: recognize patterns of errors as well as what they think they did well on (especially looking for improved skills over time), list out a designated number of things they'd like to focus on improving, etc.