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Author Biography: I am so very lucky to be a middle school technology teacher.

My students range from the 6th grade beginners to 8th grade television producers. Though Ive been teaching for over 20 years, and have used as much technology as I could find during those years, the computer lab was new to me. I had little to go on, but was given the freedom to create curriculum that is helpful, inexpensive, and fun for my students. With the rapid changes we are experiencing in technology these days, every day presents a new challenge. Who wouldnt love that? For more information or questions, please see my website: garrisondaily.weebly.com Activity Summary
Students use Google Docs to write and draw a childrens book, collaborate on peer and teacher editing, upload the file to a website, and prepare it for final publishing. Class or subject area: Computer Technology Intermediate Level Grade level(s): 7th and 8th Grade Specific learning objectives: Writing and drawing in Google Documents Creating a positive writing experience Tackling multiple edits Uploading files to websites Reading aloud

Anniversary Book Project

5th

For the Love of Writing


By: Garrison Daily Creative Commons License: CC BY-NC-ND Author contact: msgarrisondaily@gmail.com

I have been teaching tweens for a long time, now, and it never ceases to floor me when they claim to hate reading and writing. What have we done to our little kindergartners who wanted nothing more than to learn to read that first book or write their own words? How have we made them hate it so? I have my theories. At the top of the list is the fact that this crazy era of testing minutiae and insisting on predetermined writing templates has sucked the joy right out of what should be the most exciting part of their education. This whole thing angers me no end, but I teach computers, not language arts. Wait. I teach computers! It took me a year or so to realize that I am sitting in the luxurious position of being able to focus on what I think is broken in our system and to do what I can to help. Enter: The childrens book. Why a childrens book, you may ask? So many of our students in Southern California are English learners and, even by 8th grade, sentence structure and spelling is pretty rough, no matter how fluent their speaking may be. While I agree that the bar needs to be set high, my mission, in addition to ISTE standards for technology, is to bring the fun back into putting words on paper. Writing for a five-year-old is so much less intimidating than writing to impress your core academic teacher. (Cue the fun train.) First, I ask them to think about a young child to whom they would like to give a book for the holidays.

Once they have this child in mind, they find it fairly easy to come up with a topic that the recipient would like. They are to insert the child into the story and dedicate the book to them. Many of them tell me that they chose their setting or plot purely because of their target childs favorite things. My 7th and 8th grade Intermediate students live in a Google world. Their mail is Gmail, they save everything in Docs, they use Google presentations and spreadsheets, and track their due dates on the calendar. It is a beautiful thing, Google. This year, for the first time, they published their book entirely in Google Docs and made their own illustrations with the drawing tool. They even found it to be easier than drawing in Word. The actual assignment begins with outlining the basic plan for their book on a Google Form, which gets submitted to me on a nice spreadsheet for easy checking and grading. I also copy/paste their comments in an email back to them, so they will remember what their plan was. My focus is to get them to start thinking, but not to have to fill in oodles of tedious details that may or may not wind up being included in the story. I just want them to put their initial thoughts down, and then dive right into being creative. Even at a low reading level, I find there is still an amazing amount of editing that needs to be done. This serves as a lesson in not being afraid to alter their original scripts. We are in the computer lab, after all. Deleting and inserting is push-button easy on a computer, so the thought of editing doesnt

need to be overwhelming. I find this is something they have got to come to realize by actually going through the process. I would rather see them jump into the writing and fix it later, than to get bogged down with up-front details to the point where their inspiration has flown the coop. Google Docs is marvelous for sharing and collaborating. All my class has to do is share the document with me, it pops into my documents file, and I can comment on it to my hearts desire. (And I do!) Highlighting punctuation or words makes it easy for them to understand what needs to happen.

Next, I give a quickie lesson in drawing with shapes. Our students have not really had the luxury of doing a lot of art in our public educational system since the onset of test mania, so stick figures are the norm, even for my 13-year-olds. I try to move them away from sticks and into ovals, but we celebrate even the bodiless characters. The art comes in only after the student has completely written, edited based on peer comments, and then edited again based on my comments. Once given the ok, he inserts drawings right into the document. At last, the stories are printed out and we laminate the cover and bind them. After displaying the books on my boards for a few weeks, the authors take them home in time for the holidays and present them to their younger person. Surprisingly, they really do give them as presents. Another little nonstandardized lesson, fulfilled. But wait, theres more! The next assignment is to publish the book on VoiceThread.com, a free hosting site for just such endeavors. They change the format to a .pdf file and upload it to the site; then they record

the book with their own voice as the pages flip by. They need to tackle the steps involved with publicly sharing and send the link with me so that I can add it to a website for the whole school to enjoy. The recipients and the students families also enjoy listening to the stories online. I see a lot of pride of accomplishment in my students eyes when we get to this stage. After all of the edits, they know their work is good and they have had not only their teacher confirm this, but their friends and family, too, (not to mention the gratitude of a young child.) Knowing that the end product was a job truly well done is priceless. This year, we added one more piece to this project, just because a couple of the stories stood out so much, though for different reasons. One had absolutely incredible art and the other was bilingual , because his little sister was Spanish-speaking. I couldnt let these go unnoticed, so I had them published in our first real book of Tiger Tales , through Lulu. com. The books were presented to the authors at an assembly and there is another copy in our library. It even has a barcode! Next year, we will get parent permissions for publishing and copyrighting and get the ISBN, as well. Amazon, here we come! As teachers of technology, we are in the enviable position of being able to teach more than mere facts. We have the freedom to devote more of our time on self-esteem, honest pride, and the mere joy of creating!

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