TCBoston 12/8/2006
Meeting Notes

In attendance: Ralston (Notre Dame), Desmond (Randolph Comm Partnership), Wenjun (YMCA),
Esther (Blue Hills), Joel ( BPS), Delores (CLC), Suzanne (JVS), Jac-Lynn (St. Mary's)

-Discussion of Using Technology for Teaching Writing
What do people do? What are the other possibilities?
Email, Web pages, blogs, discussion boards, packaged software
applications
what works?

The majority of our discussion focused on getting students comfortable first with the computer. It seems that a big focus for people was more around getting students familiar with the mouse and keyboard and basic use of Office Applications.

We brought up using PowerPoint as a presentation and organizing tool. PowerPoint has a nice outline feature that can help students organize their thoughts in a hierarchical order:

Hierarchical is like this:

Civil Rights Struggle in the 1950s and 1960s

1. Rosa Parks and the famed Bus Ride

a. The incident
b. The aftermath

2. Malcolm X vs. Martin Luther King Two approaches to Equality

a. Armed Struggle
b. Non Violence Protest

We talked about making MS Word more friendly for low level learners.

Also talked briefly of the benefits of making web pages out of student writing. To summerize they are:

1) Instant world wide dissemination

a) students get to view their work from anywhere, this gives them a greater sense of accomplishment.
b) relatives in foreign countries can view the material instantly
c) allows for long distance email correspondance with images and text being shared with larger groups

2) Material can be edited and change over time. And updates become available to anyone with internet access.

Didn't really get to touch on other things like Blogs, Discussion Boards, or other kinds of packaged software. All of which have useful applications for students learning writing. You can see some information about using blogs here.