Mrs. Wells' Writing Wall

Mrs. Wells, a language arts teacher, was readying herself for a new curriculum.

Mrs. Wells was excited, but also a bit nervous. This year, she would be responsible for teaching a new area of writing called "writing explanatory texts," which included the use of graphics and diagrams to explain some technical process or skill. She was excited at the prospect of bringing this to her students. Mrs. Wells believed that this style of writing would engage many of her students who avoided writing, particularly male students, and was a crucial skill for their futures. Beginning this year as well, students were allowed to bring "Personally Owned Devices" (POD's) to school and connect these devices to the school network. While the class did have laptop carts available, the additional tablets and smart phones would be a great addition for tasks such as gathering media, quickly researching simple questions, and bringing more of a "21st Century feel" to her classroom.

Mrs. Wells was concerned with student safety as they connected to the Internet through the school network on personal devices. Prior to allowing students to access the Internet from the classroom, Mrs. Wells ensured that each student and their parents had signed the school Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). This policy described both the acceptable and unacceptable uses of the technologies in schools; asked for guarantees from the students that they would follow these policies; asked parents to acknowledge that they understood and supported the policies; and described sanctions that might result from violations.

The new writing requirement for Mrs. Wells' classroom happened to coincide with the school's implementation of a new Web-based environment. This included the school Website, along with parent communication tools, and classroom Websites including blogs, wikis, shared discussion spaces, and more. The principal had been trying to identify some learning resources for teachers, parents, and students to support the new environment. At several meetings, the principal discussed the need for a series of instructional videos and "how-to" guides that might support new users in learning how to use the school site. Mrs. Wells decided to have her student create these resources.

Working with the school principal, the PTA president and, via Skype, a support representative from the company that created the school's new Web environment, Mrs. Wells' class created a comprehensive list of the various functionalities that would benefit from an instruction guide. Working in pairs, students selected one of these processes to document, creating a Web- and PDF-based tutorial to be included in a library on the Website.

AUP in place, Mrs. Wells suggested that students who had tablets or phones download two apps to support the project, which they would need to use along with cameras and other built-in apps. The first of the two new apps was Google's Voice Actions, which in addition to allowing students to control apps such as Web search tools and telephone functions, also allowed students to take notes by voice as they completed the process that they were documenting. The second app was a screen capture app. On the laptop side, Mrs. Wells showed interested students how to use the built-in screen capture capability. This would allow students to create the screenshots of the new school Website that would be used to illustrate their instructional document.

Working with their smart phones or on the classroom laptops, students began gathering the photos, screenshots, and text they would need to create instructional tutorials and documents. Mrs. Wells provided guidance, reminding students to think about the audience for whom the instructions were being written, and the level and language that might be most appropriate. One of the student's mother, a technical writer for a local technology company, joined the class for a couple of days to talk about organizing a technical writing project. She provided the students with a storyboard-style template that helped to organize their development process.

Soon the room was humming with students taking verbal notes and snapping screenshots to illustrate their tutorials. Most students used laptops for the writing, working in Google Docs, where the writing could be easily viewed from any device. As teams finished, laptops were accessed from the carts to pull the final projects together in Weebly, the Web-design software. The students used a Weebly template designed jointly by the art teacher and a small team of tech-savvy and art-savvy students. The site had the look of a wall with sticky-notes labeled with tasks users might need help with as a menu for the help documents.

When presentation day arrived, each pair of students presented their tutorial. Using a rubric app, other students in the class rated the work of each pair, as did Mrs. Wells and the technical writing mom.

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