Connect 2.0

Two of our fantastic elementary classes have recently participated in two different, but equally exciting, writing projects. Both projects involve students from around the world and both projects result in the publishing of a book authored by our students!

Grade 5

Mrs. R’s class used the group instant messaging tool, Twitter, to write a globally collaborative story as part of the @manyvoices project. Twelve upper elementary and lower middle school classes all worked together to create a fantastical fiction story 140 characters at a time, following the protocols of Twitter. Mrs. R’s class wrote chapter 10 (of 12) using their best descriptive language, in just one afternoon. As each student wrote their sentence in the story, they were able to build off the work of the previous author. What a great way to build excitement and enthusiasm about reading and writing! And what makes it even better, is that the finished story is now published as an actual book you can either buy or download!

Grade 4

Mrs. M’s class used a wiki to participate in the globally collaborative writing project, 1001 Flat World Tales, elementary group. Our students used this simple web 2.0 tool to become peer-editors for students in Australia and the United States, while developing their persuasive writing skills. We enjoyed the project so much, that we collaborated just a little bit more to create an interconnected frame story that links all of the individual student stories together.

This ongoing writing workshop involves students and classes from grade 2 all the way up to grade 12 and will continue until the end of the school year (each school division participating on a separate wiki). Once all of the participating schools are finished writing, the top stories will be selected by the students for final publishing in a book! After reading the fantastic stories from our grade 4 students, I’m sure at least one will be chosen for the final publication!

These projects are a fantastic way to engage students in their writing and to promote a lifelong love of writing, reading and learning!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 7:59 am and is filed under 21st Century Literacy, Global Collaborations, grade 4, grade 5. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.