Reimagine the writing process with Microsoft in Education

Successful writers are not born. They learn by doing. They develop, practice, reflect. They receive feedback and grow. Therefore, teaching students the writing process is as important as the technical components of writing. The process helps students learn how to grow from a good writer to a great one. Because of the proliferation of digital and print, the need for effective communication is no longer confined to the humanities classes. Instead, to be college and career ready, it is important for students to be able to communicate clearly and persuasively with a variety of audiences and subjects.

In this course, you will:

Learn about various Microsoft tools that help students throughout the writing process

Learn how to use Microsoft tools to provide effective and timely feedback to students

Overview of the Writing Process

Finding time for students to imagine, draft, write and revise; finding time for feedback; creating effective collaborative environments for students; providing students proper instruction regarding the technical components of writing - they are pain points that impact every teacher and make writing instruction one of the challenging parts of our job.

This course explores the tools that can help you reimagine the writing process, making you a more effective teacher and your students more effective writers. This infographic shows the writing process and highlights the tools covered in this course.

Step 1: Assignments

Microsoft Teams is a digital hub that brings conversations, content, and apps together in one place.Educators can create collaborative classrooms within Teams.Teams allows you to efficiently distribute and share assignments with your students. As mentioned earlier, writing assignments take time. Instead of one due date, writing assignments typically have multiple check-ins and due dates which students can sometimes forget if they only receive a handout with all the deadlines at the beginning of the unit.

With Microsoft Teams, however, you can share the document with the students digitally AND post periodic due dates on our Team calendar as reminders. Students will see the assignment every time they visit the Team site.

Additionally, within Teams or on its own, you can create a OneNote Class notebook to share with your students. The Class Notebook allows you to share all content related to the course in one place.Anything you can print to a printer you can send to OneNote. Therefore, you can quickly post an existing Word document to OneNote detailing the writing assignment as well as the rubric you will use to assess the student's final product. Additionally, you can send all or a part of your instructions in the content library to every student with the distribute content feature in the Class Notebook add-in.

Whether you post the assignment in Teams or in the content library of your OneNote Class Notebook (or both), you have no worries that students may lose the assignment.They can access it anytime, anywhere.

Step 2: Ideation

Once the students have their writing assignment, they frequently need help getting started. Although ideation varies depending on the type of the writing, Microsoft Education provides wonderful tools to help students begin the magic of putting "pen to paper" and developing their ideas into organized, well-written compositions.

One tool that crosses over both genres is the Dictation feature found in Learning Tools for OneNote. With the dictation tool, students simply speak and OneNote does the typing. Dictation is not only a great way to combat the desperate stare at a blank, white page, but it is also a perfect accessibility feature for students with written expression disorder, dyslexia, dysgraphia, or other learning differences.

Step 2: Ideation: Informative and Persuasive Writing

Once a student has used the dictate function to summarize what he is learning about pollution, he can move his work to Word 2016 and use the Researcher function to gather more resources for the assignment.

(Additionally, students can also use the new app Office Researcher for iPhones to gather resources even before they begin working on the paper on their computer. The feature has also been added to OneNote for Windows 10 so students can stay within the context of OneNote as well!)

Researcher is the latest transformative tool for informative and persuasive writing assignments.Students no longer need to struggle with finding scholarly information or organizing it. Instead, students can open the Reference tab in Word and click on Researcher to get started. In the search box, they type a keyword on the research they are doing and press Enter.

Here, for example, when doing research on the Amazon Rainforest, the student was able to conduct research on this topic directly in Word, select the sources that fit, add headings to the paper, and even select a portion of the article to add to the composition. When the information is added, it automatically adds a citation with the content, which makes creating a Works Cited page extremely easy.

Step 2: Ideation: Creative Writing

With creative writing assignments, visualizing the story students plan to write is a key component of producing a rich story. Two tools that help students develop their stories are Minecraft and Storyboarding with digital ink.

Minecraft allows students to build a virtual model of the creative world they envision. Within Minecraft, students can create the entire scene of their story, as well as the placement of the characters within that scene. In the Baddlands lesson, for example, students imagine their character, along with his or her home. Student Taylor E. shared his building plan as follows:

“My teacher asked me to create a home and farm that is personal to my character in the clearing outside Sawyer’s Saw Mill. I decided my character, Dustin, would live in front of and a little to the right of the Saw Mill. I built Dustin’s house using spruce and oak. I used spruce logs for the framing and spruce planks for a trim at the roofline. I used oak stairs to build a pitched roof and oak planks for the walls of the house. The house has two grand spruce doors for its entryway. I wanted Dustin’s house to look sturdy and be small. He is just a villager, so he wouldn’t have a lot. I plan to create a small garden beside his home with vegetables and create a pen for a few pigs.”

With Minecraft, Taylor was able to visualize his character’s home, station in life, and surroundings. He will find the process of creating his story easier now that he can see where and how Dustin lives.

Additionally, in the planning stage of their creative writing, Storyboards can also help students create the visual as well as the narrative for their stories. Using their digitized stylus, students can draw the scene they are imagining and include a written description of the scene next to it. In this storyboard, for example, after reading Dante's Inferno, students were asked to create a new circle in the Inferno based on their thoughts of modern day sin. Students use their storyboards to plan out the new circle they will add to the Inferno, what happens in the circle, and what it looks like.In essence, the storyboards become the students' first drafts of their creative paper, allowing them to sort out the details of the plot and characters before focusing on the mechanics and style.

Step 3: Frictionless Collaboration

If a writing project requires collaboration, Real Time Collaboration in Word is a wonderful tool for students. Finding time outside of class to work on a writing assignment can be challenging, but thanks to Word Online through Office 365 students will not have any problems finding time. One student can work on it right after school, and another can complete his part at 9 p.m. after soccer practice. Because the document is on Office 365, students can access the document anytime, anywhere with their phone, tablet, or computer - even offline.

Even when students are in the same room working on the document at the same time, collaborating can be challenging. Real time collaboration in Word, however, is a wonderful tool that allows students to work simultaneously in the document. When the students are in the document at the same time, they can see where their peers are working and what changes they are making as they happen. That means no more worries of two students modifying the same section differently. They can now divide and conquer based on where their classmates are working.

Step 4: Revisions

Once they have a draft of their composition, it is important for students to step back and reflect on what they have done so far and begin the revision process. One of Microsoft newest tools is Ink Editor in Word. Before Ink Editor, students would type their paper in Word, print their paper to make physical edits on the document, and then type the changes they made. Now, using a digitized stylus, Ink Editor allows students to make those physical changes to their document directly in Word, saving paper and time. You can delete a sentence, or even a paragraph with a stroke of my pen.

Step 5: Review/Feedback by Peers

Once students revise their papers, they are ready for feedback from you and their peers. You can create a specific channel in your class's Teams site to foster peer review. Once the peer review channel is created, students can use the chat feature to give their peers feedback on their writing. A good practice is to encourage students to share three things they like about their classmate's piece and two things they feel their classmate could improve.

Step 5: Review/Feedback by Teacher

Additionally, you can use the chat feature in Teams to provide private feedback to students on their assignment.

For teachers, if students share their Word documents with you via Office 365, you can make suggestions with the track changes and comment features in Word. Track changes is a helpful way to show students how to fix a grammatical error, while comments allows you to explain the grammatical error so that they can fix the same error in other places in their paper, or in the future.

In addition to track changes and comments, inking in OneNote and Word is a useful way to provide feedback for my students. With my digitized stylus, I can provide feedback quickly just as if the students had printed the paper and given me a hard copy. For multiple revisions, inking allows me to provide symbols and notes regarding items to improve without requiring much time on my part.

Finally, a great tool for providing feedback is the Insert Audio feature in OneNote. Without the audio feature in OneNote, to conference with students about their writing, teachers have to meet with each student to discuss strengths and weaknesses in their papers. Not only is the process time consuming (spanning over multiple day), students frequently admit that they forget some of the feedback, requiring a second meeting. With Insert Audio feedback feature, however, you are able to have mini conferences with each student at the same time. When students post their writing to their personal section of the class notebook, you are able to review it and add audio feedback directly on the page. Students then listen to their audio feedback, while you mill around the room and answer questions they may have. Students can also replay the feedback as many times as needed.

Step 6: Proofing

After review and feedback, students will, of course, conduct a final proofing of their paper on their own. Identifying grammatical errors is one of the pain points for non-English teachers when they assign writing to their students. Microsoft has a tool that can put teachers and students at ease regarding this concern. Editor in Word offers students a virtual assistant for their writing. When students see an error on the page, they can accept the suggestion that Editor provides. They can also learn about their error by selecting the "See More" option. When they select the "See more" feature, they learn more about their error and how to fix it. In short, Editor is much more advanced than your typical spelling and grammar checker.

Make a plan of action. 

Think about the writing assignment you will revise, or the one you will create, and answer the following questions:

Which tool is easy to implement immediately?

What writing lesson will you work on this summer to incorporate these tools?Which tools will you incorporate?

How do you plan to use these tools throughout the school year?

Conclusion

In this ever changing world, one of the most important skills we can teach our students is the skill of effective communication. Microsoft Education offers tools that help students with the writing process, making us better teachers and our students better writers.

source: www.education.microsoft.com