Exploring a question online
From High School Online Collaborative Writing
Blogging in the Classroom really began with an email request. About a week before the first day of the institute, Paul asked participants to reply to this prompt:
- Ask three questions. Please respond to this email with 3 questions you have about anything in the world... but these need to be burning questions, questions that are real, questions that you would really like to have answered. They don't have to be about technology or education or anything! Just 3 questions.
On the first day we plan to get to know each other and to use one of Peter Elbow's freewriting excercies from Writing Without Teachers (pp. 19-22. 1973, 1998) to generate more ideas and writing about a burning issue or question. We'll use this generative writing to settle in on a topic for a personal online inquiry. In addition, we'll add to Elbow's suggestions for the focused sentence by asking you to compose tags, find and insert an image, and collaborate with a partner.
Here's our agenda for the first day:
- 9:00 - 9:30 Introductions:
- Ken, Paul, and Nancy's history with the NYCWP
- What is the NYCWP and the National Writing Project?
- Who are you digitally?
- 9:30 - 9:50 Writely Case Study and introduction
- 9:50 - 10:50 Freewrite One: From 3 burning questions to a focused sentence with tags
- 10:50 - 11:00 Break
- 11:00 - 12:00 Freewrite Two: From tags to an image - using flickrlilli.org.uk
- 12:00 - 1:00 Lunch
- 1:00 - 2:00 Freewrite Three: From image to collaborative writing
- 2:00 - 2:30 Process writing: How did you:
- access and manage information
- create content using multimedia
- connect and collaborate with others
