Chapter+4

__ORGANIZATION__ Concept Maps – Tools that can assist students in creating cognitive maps or semantic nets
 * TECHNOLOGY AND WRITING**

[|AXON]

[|Semantica]

Inspiration/Kidspiration

[|Mindjet]

__PRESENTATIONS__ Writing a presentation is an important task that is often overlooked in a traditional K-12 classroom, however it has many real world applications. The amount of writing is not as heavy in comparison to that of a research paper or traditional writing task, but requires many of the same skills. One major tool that can help students create a coherent presentation is Power Point.

Some positive aspects that PowerPoint brings to the classroom is the organizational components. It visually represents wordy texts into key points and when students are involved in this process it teaches many different reading and writing strategies. Some of these include summarizing or identifying important facts, main idea, and paraphrasing. PowerPoint also visually represents content into an outline, for those type of learners.

However, students often are overwhelmed with the amount of options given, and focus important time on minor details such as font and templates. This defeats the purpose of presenting a topic and turns into a waste of time. Some suggestions this chapter offers to engage students more effectively in this software is to set guidelines as to what comes first, the writing. Another great new idea was to allow the students to work on a PowerPoint that has already been created. Therefore limiting the options given and teaches students to work backwards, whole to part.

__CREATIVITY and COLLABORATION__ [|Wikipedia Resources]

Google Docs

[|Collaboration Opportunities]

__PROBING QUESTIONS__

1. How can we increase the use of meaningful writing activities in cross-disciplinary project? How can technology help with these types of activities?

2. Collaboration of ideas has a large piece of enhancing student writing, for example peer editing which is a strategy most language arts teachers incorporate in their teachings. What other strategies can integrate this with technology?