Guidelines for Online Discussion Board

NWP eAnthology instructions

Books We Must Have

This is a great way to stay connected to MTWP, one that is not as affected by distance and schedules. Invite all of the teachers you know to join in!

Today is a day to celebrate! On October 8, 2009 Congress passed a resolution officially naming October 20th as the National Day on Writing. Teachers and students across the country are planning celebrations for this day, ranging from writing marathons to guest authors to collaborative writing projects. What will you be doing? Leave a comment with your plans! Is your work featured in a gallery? Let us know! Most importantly, as you plan your celebrations remember to write with your students, allow them to see your passion for the written word.

Sites to check out:

National Gallery of Writing NWP has a rotating gallery featuring the writing of TCs. MTWP TC Heather Adkins’ piece “Falling” is currently featured. You can also create a gallery for your school or classroom for students to post their work.

Webcast of Celebrations Watch the action live from 8-9pm Eastern Time!

NCTE Day on Writing Find ideas for celebrations, as well as links for sharing your work.

In Middle Tennessee, many schools are just returning from Fall breaks, making organizing school-wide plans difficult. No worries! Schedules your plans for later this week or later this month. That we celebrate writing is more important than the day we celebrate it.

DON’T GIVE UP!

Though time is certainly at a premium, this is the time to lean on your like-minded colleagues more than ever. An easy way to do this is through MTWP’s new Professional Chat Series. On the 2nd Tuesday of each month at 8pm, teachers interested in using the space of Writer’s Workshop can join in a discussion on a different topic related to Workshop. It’s a place to ask questions, learn from each other, share your successes and commiserate on the challenges.

Joining in is easy. Simply enter the chat room, type your name in the box at the bottom of the screen, and start chatting. You don’t even have to register for the site if you prefer to skip this step–no login or password to remember! Stay as long as you can, and duck out when you need to. After the chat session is over, continue the conversation over at TC-Connect. We hope this will be a powerful tool to connect teachers in professional conversation without the challenges of time and distance. And of course, invite every teacher you know to join us. We hope to see you there!

Enter social bookmarking.  Social bookmarking sites allow you to not only keep all of your bookmarks in one place, but also to easily share them with others. One popular site for this is Delicious.  You simply create an account, enter links–with a description if you like–and categorize.  This categorization, called tagging, allows you to place a single site in many different virtual folders.  So, you can tag that neat site on modernizing Shakespeare with Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet, English 9…whatever you like.  Not only do you not have to hunt through different computers to track the idea down. but neither do you have to dig through all of those folders in your bookmarks.

Often you will see the Share This icon on a website:

This button allows you to quickly send a link to the website you are viewing to any number of social media sites, such as Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, or to email the page to a friend, or even to print a easy to read version of the site. Look in the top right corner of the MTWP page to try it out.

These web 2.0 applications can make your time on the internet much more effective, allowing you to spend time using the internet as a resource instead of an obstacle that has to be conquered. And while this article simply focused on how social bookmarking can manke a teacher’s life easier, there are many classroom applications, as well.  How could you use them?  Post a comment and share your ideas!

The site will remain open until the Spring as a read-only site, so you will still be able to access and save or print your writings and feedback you received. Don’t forget, though, because once the site goes down you will be unable to retrieve those writings!

And just because the national eAnthology is closing doesn’t mean there is no forum for your writing voice to be heard. MTWP has its own eAnthology set up for our TCs to share writing and to give and receive feedback. Just click here to start using this resource!

Leave a comment on this post or  Contact Us with your accomplishments.  The MTWP has many outstanding teacher consultants, who do great things in their classrooms, schools, districts, as well as on the state and national level.  You are what make this organization great, and we want everyone to know it.

Here’s how you can get involved:

If you are a TC…

• Come to the conference! Support the work of the writing project and connect with old friends.
• Tell your colleagues!  Give a flier to your principal, post one in the lounge, email everyone you know.  In short, get the word out.
• Volunteer to help! A conference of this magnitude requires many people helping in ways you may not have realized. From advertising to clean-up and everything in between, we need you! Contact Shannon; she’ll put you to work.
• Submit a proposal to present! You all have wonderful classroom practices that other teachers could benefit from learning about.  This year we have an online form for submitting the proposals.  The deadline is July 31st.

If you are a principal…

• Tell you teachers!  Please help us spread the word about the Fall Conference and the MTWP.  You can download a flier and registration information by clicking here.
• Send your teachers!  Discounts are availlable for groups of teachers from the same school.  Paying the registration fee for your teachers is money well spent.  With this year’s special focus on content area writing, consider sending at least one teacher from each subject area for Middle and Secondary schools, each grade level for Elementary Schools.

If you are a teacher…

• Come to the conference!  Many of our TCs first became acquainted with the MTWP by attending the Fall Conference.  Not only will you learn much that you can take to your classroom, but you will also learn about the MTWP and the many programs we offer.  Click here to download registration information.

We look forward to seeing you at what we know will be our best conference yet.  Please join us!

Think of RSS as TiVo for websites.  It stands for Really Simple Syndication, and when a website is enabled with it, you can subscribe to any updates to the page.  This eliminates the frustration of visiting favorite sites only to find nothing new, as well as the frustration of missing important updates because you hadn’t gotten around to checking the site again.  When content is updated, it is automatically downloaded to your feed reader, and you can read it at your convenience.

Great, but how do you get started?  Most of the readers of this site use Internet Explorer, so we’ll start there.  See that row of icons in the top right of your browser window?  It should look like this:

See the RSS icon?  If a site has an RSS feed, it will  be orange.  All you have to do is click it, and you will be prompted to subscribe to the feed.  Now look to the far left of the browser.

See the yellow star?  Click that to access your favorites.  You’ll also see a button for feeds.  Anything you subscribe to will go there.  Whenever there is new content the title will be in bold.  You can read the new content straight from the reader, or click through to the live site.  No more missed content!

Why not try it out?  The RSS icon on this page should be orange.  Click it, subscribe to our feed, and never miss important information from MTWP again.  There is also an RSS option on the message boards at TC-Connect.  This is really helpful when you’ve posted something and want to know when someone has responded.  It’s much easier than constantly checking for replies!

Not an Internet Explorer user?  Not a problem.  In Firefox, just look to the right side of the address bar.  Click the RSS icon there and choose “subscribe to RSS”.  Place it in your bookmarks, and you’ll get your information there.

That may seem like a lot of information, but it really is easy to set up, and is a very useful tool.  Feel free to leave a comment with any questions.  And don’t forget to contact us with suggestions for future topics.