Presented by

Central Alabama Regional Education Inservice Center

Shawndra T. JohnsonInstructional Technology Specialist

915 South Jackson StreetMontgomery, Alabama 36104

Voice: 334.229.4161Fax: 334.229.4961

Email: stsjohnson@juno.comWebsite: http://technologyinmotion.state.al.us

Resources: http://www.keepbookmarks.com/shawndra.johnson

WORD AND THE WRITING PROCESSCode # 40ThA–Thursday, June 29–8:30 am - 11:30 am

Description: Weaving knowledge into written composition can be a very effective learning strategy. Teachers across the curriculum have turned to a process-oriented approach to writing. While software cannot make writing simple, it can help to overcome some obstacles by providing powerful tools that help enrich the diverse and complex writing processes of your students. Participants in this workshop will explore features of Microsoft Word that will enhance each step in the writing process.

Grade Level: Primary (2-3), Elementary (4-6), Intermediate (6-8), High School (9-12), Administration

Audience: Classroom Teachers, Reading Specialists, LD Specialists, Speech & Language Specialists, ESL Instructors, Administrators

Experience: Beginner

The purpose of this workshop is to assist teachers with integrating technology into the writing process using tools already available at their fingertips.

Participants will… Discuss the steps in the writing process and related instructional activities Explore instructional resources on the web Practice writing activities using features in Microsoft Word

o Freewritingo Outliningo Concept Mappingo Draftingo Revisingo Proofreadingo Publishing

Material adapted from “Word and the Writing Process” by Microsoft Corporation available at http://www.microsoft.com/Education/WordTutorial.mspx

Weaving knowledge into written composition is often a more effective learning tool than listening to a lecture or reading. The integration of thoughtful writing activities in classes across curriculum has often faced obstacles. Many teachers feel they lack the expertise to help their students become better writers. Writing and teaching writing can seem to impose burdens of time that the course of study schedule simply can’t afford. However, teachers across the curriculum have turned to a “process-oriented approach” to teach writing which addresses some of these obstacles.

Hallmarks of the process approach include teaching prewriting activities like concept-mapping and freewriting (freewriting involves generating ideas in prose rapidly and without consideration to formal correctness), the inclusion of organized peer-review activities in the lesson plan, the incorporation of a multiple-draft production cycle, and the use of peer- and self-evaluation assessments after final drafts are complete.

A process-oriented approach has several profound advantages…1. Writing for a meaningful audience of peers2. Students provide the vast majority of feedback and response for one another3. Project deadlines throughout the process helps to spread work over a longer period of

time4. Time-on-task increases5. Student learning increases

Software cannot make writing simple, but it can help you overcome some of the obstacles by providing powerful tools that help enrich the diverse and complex writing processes of your students. We will explore features of Microsoft Word that will enhance each step in the writing process—prewriting, composition, revision, and publication.

Some of these features include: Outlining Version Control Readability Statistics Tracking Changes Adding Comments

To create a document

1. On the Start menu, point to Programs, and then click Microsoft Word. A new document opens in Normal View.

2. If the Task Pane does not appear automatically, on the View menu, click Task Pane.

3. Click the Print Layout View icon located at the lower-left corner of your screen. Double-click in the upper right portion of the document, about 4.5 inches from the left, and then type today’s date.

4. Click the left margin, on the same line as the date, to select the entire line.

5. Select Arial from the Font drop-down list.

6. To create a title, double-click the center of the page, about one third of the way down from the top, and type the title.

CONCEPT MAPPINGYou can make concept maps using the Diagram feature. In order to insert an organizational chart, pyramid diagram, target diagram, radial diagram, Venn diagram, or cycle diagram into your document, following these steps:

1. Click the Insert menu and click Diagram.

2. Choose the diagram yype to insert and click "OK".

3. A diagram will now appear in your document.

Teaching Tips for the Writing Process: Document CreationFor many writers, and particularly for many inexperienced writers, getting started is the hardest part of the writing process. Consider making a list of prewriting activities like concept mapping and freewriting which help writers get language flowing onto the page.

* To add text, click the area labeled "Click to add text".

* To add another picture to the diagram, click the "Insert shape" button. For diagrams supporting multiple shapes, click the down-arrow next to the button to choose the type of shape to insert.

* To remove a shape, right-click on it and select "Cut". The diagram will change automatically.

* Depending on the chart, right-clicking on a graphic may pull up other options, such as the ability to change shape types, shape colors, or sizes.

FREEWRITINGYou can freewrite more easily by turning off the computer screen, so you cannot see what you type. This prevents you from try to make spelling and grammatical errors and helps you to concentrate on your thoughts and ideas.

OUTLININGYou can either use the Bullets and Numbering feature or you can use Styles and Formatting to create outlines.

To change to Outline View

7. On the View menu, click Outline.-or-Click Outline View in the lower left corner of the document window.

8. Your document will be shown in outline format. The outline can be expanded or collapsed by double-clicking on the plus symbols next to the major headings. The outline is based on the styles and indents that have been used in your document.

To display the Document Map

9. On the View menu, click Document Map. Clear the selection to hide the map.

After the map is displayed you can click anywhere on the map to move to that location in the document. Think of it as a clickable index of the entire document.

10. To create a table of contents from the document map, on the Insert toolbar, click Reference and then Index and Tables. You can also create footnotes, captions and cross references this way as well.

In addition to organizing writing, managing the overall content of the prose is an important part of the writing process. For example, students might need to develop a document with a minimum number of words. To encourage students to increase the complexity of their writing, you might need to ascertain the reading level of a document. You can use readability statistics to track the complexity of sentence structure and ascertain the reading level.

You can also use the Outlining Toolbar to make creating an outline much easier!

Just click the View menu, Toolbars and then Outlining.

Teaching Tips for the Writing Process: Organizing WritingThe most important thing to consider as you take a process-oriented approach to teaching writing is your strategy for helping your students understand the organizational expectations that are entailed in a given activity. Also, help students understand that adherence to a preset organizational format during composition can be a straight-jacket which stifles the writing process; many student writers try to begin writing with the first word of the introduction and end with the last word of the conclusion because they have been taught that the writing process begins with outlining and then consists of writing into the strictures of that outline. Help students see that even a formal organizational format is merely a destination and that the journey through the writing process will likely be very recursive and cyclical.

To view document statistics and reading level

11. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Spelling & Grammar tab.

12. Select the Show readability statistics check box, and then click the Recheck Document button. Click OK to close the dialog box.

13. This turns on the readability statistics. Viewing the statistics is accomplished by invoking a spelling and grammar check on the document and the last part of that process reveals the statistics.

14. On the Tools menu, click Spelling and Grammar. If you have any spelling or grammar errors, you’ll need to skip them by clicking Ignore or resolve the issues by correcting them as they are presented.

15. After the entire document is checked, a dialog box appears that shows both document statistics and reading level.

You may want to give your students great educational websites to find information to include in their writing. There are numerous resources online such as…Alabama Virtual Library - http://www.avl.lib.al.us/Blue Web’n - http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/bluewebn/index.cfmFactMonster - http://www.factmonster.com/The Internet Public Library - http://www.ipl.org/RefDesk - http://www.refdesk.com/

You may want to help students with the documentation of sources using some tool like Citation Machine available at http://citationmachine.net/, EasyBib at http://www.easybib.com/, or RapidCite at http://www.rapidcite.com/.

Don’t forget to give them a rubric to work by using RubiStar at http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php and to inform them of Copyright and Fair Use Guidelines using http://www.cyberbee.com/cb_copyright.swf.

Note: If you do not have any formal sentence structure (such as an outline) the Averages and Readability sections will be all zeros. Obviously, if there isn’t substantial prose to evaluate there won’t be any useful information obtained.

Revision is an activity that takes place throughout the writing process. Most authors are continually reviewing what they have just written and making large or small changes all along. Versions are “snapshots” of a composition taken at various stages of the writing process. Saving Versions of your composition as you write enables you to retrieve information that you subsequently may have revised out of a document and to manage multiple drafts of a document for different audiences and purposes.

To use Versions

1. On the File menu, click Versions.

2. Click Save Now to save a version of your document. The Save Version dialog box opens.

3. You can add comments for the version you are saving. When you are finished, click OK.

4. After you have at least one version saved, you can also double-click Versions on the status bar.

5. When you want to work with one of the versions, on the File menu, click Versions.-or-Double-click Versions on the status bar (This is located on the right side of the status bar. It resembles a series of folders.)

One other powerful feature you will use for revisions is Comments. Comments allow annotations to the text of a document that can be reviewed by anyone accessing it. You can hide the comments (in fact, they are hidden by default) thus, the Comments feature can prove much more convenient than typing your suggestions as regular text in the document.

To add and edit comments

1. Select the location where you want to make a comment. On the Insert menu, click Comment. Or on the revisions toolbar, click the button for new comment.

2. Type your comment in the text bubble provided in the right margin. Notice that your initials for the comment appear in the color assigned to you as the reviewer.

This is an extremely useful feature for any process-oriented writing activity. You will find that it helps writers organize and manage the review process with great flexibility. It also eliminates the need for paper-based editing.

Another option besides saving numerous versions of a document is to make the changes to the document, but keep track of those changes which can be kept or thrown out at a later time. The Track Changes feature allows multiple users to revise a document while retaining the original integrity of the document. When Track Changes is enabled, a reviewer’s proposed changes are highlighted in a particular color (each reviewer is identified in a different highlight color). The originator of the document can accept or reject any proposed changes.

Teaching Tips for the Writing Process: RevisionOne of the great advantages of using a process-oriented approach to writing is that it encourages students to see writing as a recursive activity that consists of multiple sessions where prose is composed, revised, published, reviewed, revisited, revised again, and so on, in many phases over a sustained period of time. Ask students to save a separate Version for each draft of a document that you require in your lesson plan. At the end of the process, ask students to read each version in succession and then write a self-evaluation of their own writing process, reflecting on what they improved, how they approached their work, and what they might do differently next time.

To track changes

1. On the View menu, point to Toolbars, and then click Reviewing to turn on the

Reviewing toolbar. Click the Track Changes icon . You will see TRK in black on the status bar when the Track Changes feature is enabled.

2. Now that this feature is enabled, make a few changes to your document. Also, have a few users who are logged onto the machine under their own names make some changes. You will notice that the revisions of each editor are labeled with their initials and are indexed by color.

3. Right-click one of the changed items and the short cut menu allows you to Accept Deletion (or Insertion) or Reject Deletion (or Insertion).

POWER TIP: Word can also detect differences between two copies of a document. Open the edited document. On the Tools menu, point to Compare and Merge Documents. Open the original document

Teaching Tips for the Writing Process: Using Track Changes versus CommentsComments and Track Changes are similar in the sense that they provide a useful space for peers to review and comment on one another’s work. However, there are some important differences in these features that shape the way you use them in your process-oriented teaching approach. Early in the writing process, you are likely to want your student peer groups to focus on holistic issues—aspects of their compositions which have a deep impact on the way the composition is coming together. At this stage, you would probably rather have students discussing ideas rather than fixing each other’s spelling or grammar. Thus, you might write into your lesson plan that students’ first peer review session or sessions will consist of using the Comments feature, where they are providing discussion or feedback but not correcting mechanical missteps. Later, Track changes can be used for proofreading and editing so that the author can accept or reject suggestions (changes) made by peers.

Creating a Presentation from a Word Document

You can save time and effort by using data that already exists in a Word document to generate the text for PowerPoint slides.

There are two ways to integrate Word data with a PowerPoint presentation:

In Word, click the File menu and click the Send To command to export the document to PowerPoint. For the best results, the Word document should utilize Style formatting to indicate what should be placed on each slide.

o Each paragraph in the Word document formatted with HEADING 1 style becomes another slide in the presentation.

o Each subheading formatted with the HEADING 2 style becomes a bulleted list. Each successive heading becomes an indentation on the bulleted list.

In PowerPoint, click the File menu and click the Open command to import the Word document. In order to select the Word document you want import, you must click the drop-down arrow on the box next to Files of Type and click All Files.

FYI: This also works in the reverse—you can create a Word document from a PowerPoint presentation.

Highlighting: Double click a word Click in the margin for the entire line Triple click a word for the entire

paragraph

Drag and Drop: Text Pictures URLs

Copyright and Fair Use: Text Photos

Templates: Creating forms Saving document templates

Others: