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Welcome to the Collaborative Research Project! This is a unique repository of the thinking, ideas, insights and interests of teaching professionals concerned with the teaching of writing. Teachers will discuss in small groups a topic in writing instruction with which they are concerned and about which they are interested in learning more information. The end result of the this project will be a collection of research based instructional strategies for students in grades K-12.

The Navigation on the left side of the wiki page is organized by group. Under each broad group category are individual's who are in the group. Your wiki project will be structured like this: Together your group members will work on providing general information about your main topic. Individually you will provide information about one aspect of your broader, main topic. You should work together with your group members to figure out the exact content of each page.

Task for Feb. 11th:

What is a wiki?
==A wiki is a collaborative website; several authors write content for the site at the same time. Designing and adding content to a wiki does not require that you know how to write html code or have a strong background in web design. Instead, adding content to a wiki is much like creating a word document. Students and teachers use wikis in order to facilitate collaborative writing and research projects.==

Check out creative ways teachers and students have used wikis:

PreK-3 http://ece-prek-kindergarten.wikispaces.com/ http://earlywiki.wikispaces.com/PreK-3WikiList http://wikiwonderful.wikispaces.com/ http://rogers1st.wikispaces.com/ http://schoonoverclass.wikispaces.com/Writers

Grade 4+ [] http://terrythetennisball.wikispaces.com/ [] http://mrsibrahim.wikispaces.com/ http://soar2newheights.wikispaces.com/ http://ral221-writing-project.wikispaces.com/ This is a great article to teach you a little more about wikis: Burger, S., & McFarland, M.A. (2009) Action research and wikis: An effective collaboration. //Library Media Connection, 28,// 38-40.

Getting Started
1. Accept email invitation to join. 2. Remember to save your password and bookmark this site. Once you log in you can start editing.

Play Around: 1. Figure out how to write and save on your page. Write a brief outline of what you hope will go on your page. Remember to SAVE! 2. Figure out how to change the font size, color, style. Figure out how to center text, align left/right. 3. Figure out how to put an image on your page. 4. Figure out how to insert a link to an outside website. 5. Now, figure out how to link your page to the group page. 6. Post a response to the discussion question I posed in the discussion section. 7. Figure out what is posted under the “history” section.

Work with Your Group: 1. Brainstorm a possible structure for your group and individual pages. For example if you are working on instructional techniques -what will you include on the group page (rough outline) and how will individual pages expand upon or provide a more in-depth discussion of these areas. 2. What articles with you share? 3. How will you divide the tasks for your group page? Who will write what? 4. What articles will you use for your individual page? How will you structure it? How is it connected to the larger group page?

Below are some fun resources shared by the class to get us jazzed about teaching writing! [] This site is sponsored by NCTE - The National Gallery of Writing. The Gallery is an online collection of writing that people all over the world do on a daily basis. It includes writing for different purposes, in different mediums, and by different age groups (K-80+). You can even start your own gallery of writing for your class or school here. Your student's work will be published online and copyrighted. [] This site includes a writing contest for kids. Students create their own sports star. The winning creation will be featured in a Sports Illustrated Graphic Novel for kids. [] This is a unique world-wide collaboration among classrooms. Classrooms are paired. Classroom A draws a picture of a monster and then writes a description of it. Next, classroom A sends their description only to Classroom B. Classroom B must draw the monster based upon the description. Classroom B sends Classroom A their pictures and Classroom A has a discussion about the differences between monsters (inevitably the monsters look a little different). This will lead into a discussion about what could be added to the description to make it clearer for an audience. This activity could be done in a school or within a classroom as well.