Free Recipes for Writing

StudentPublishing.com offers free story web, autobiography, plot, and biography worksheets along with lesson plans and a place to share ideas with other educators.

If you are looking for a way to publish a professional-looking class book or individual student books, StudentPublishing provides some of its services free as long as you send home materials to parents about the books in case they wish to order any.

Online Plagiarism Checker

WriteCheck, by Turnitin, is a great way to help your students avoid plagiarism. Using WriteCheck, student papers are scanned for plagiarism against over 200 million student papers, 90,000 publications, and over 20 billion Web pages. Once they submit a paper, they’ll usually get their results within five minutes, but not longer than ten to fifteen minutes. The results also include a check for grammar, style, and spelling errors.  Papers are returned in their original form, which allows students to better understand what changes need to be made.

Fees for the service run from $6.95 for a one paper credit (papers 5000 words or less); $24.95 for five paper credits, and $59.95 for twenty paper credits. With each paper credit comes three resubmissions per document.

Our Students Can’t Write

In the writing portion of the National Assessment of Education Progress, girls scored better than boys, as did those students whose teachers required them to use word processing and editing on computers for their assignments. BUT, the results were not glowing, because out of all of the eighth and twelfth graders who took these tests, only 27 percent scored at, or above, the proficient level. Even more disturbing was that at the twelfth grade level, only 9 percent of blacks and 12 percent of Latinos were at or above the proficient level.  Most students tested were unable to write “well-organized stories with strong details, precise word choices, and varied sentences.” The results suggest that there needs to be a focus on writing skills beyond the basics and that, with greater use of word processing, students will understand how this tech tool can help them improve their writing.

Writing Needs Inspiration - Maybe from Cat Burglars?

Sometimes, all it takes is a clever idea or a unique story to prompt students to get moving with their creative writing. This week, someone sent me a link to a video about a cat burglar—a real feline burglar.  His nightly escapades have been documented, and it’s reported that he has lifted over 600 items. Nicknamed Klepto, Dusty the cat, is sure to trigger some hilarious creative stories from your students. Let them get to work on word processing, perhaps, about a night with Dusty, why Dusty has taken to burglarizing, or a story about a different pet or different scenario. Encourage them to use their own experiences as they write and to build upon and exaggerate upon real life. Two of the funniest stories I’ve ever read were by high school students. One wrote about her driver’s education class and the other redid the old story of the cat and the mouse, telling it from different viewpoints. Do what you can to get your kids started writing every day; get them so they want to write and believe that they can. With practice and with your help, they’ll become highly proficient writers.

Using a Plagiarism Prevention Service

If your school uses a plagiarism prevention service, such as Turnitin or Safe Assign, you may want to think about whether you want the service to assist you in grading papers or if you want it to assist students in learning how to write papers. Do you want the service to serve as your own private detection center or do you want the service to show students what parts of their work may not be original and/or may not be cited properly? Plagiarism prevention services suggest that you use them as a learning tool for students and teaching tool for you.

When to Teach Research Skills?

Although no one expects an elementary school student to write a research paper, even primary students should be learning that copying something from a book or online isn’t the best idea. The “copying is okay” mindset causes problems with their writing in middle school and beyond. As Carolyn Jabs tells us in Preventing Plagiarism, “Ironically, teachers often introduce this bad habit” as they encourage the use of Internet content and cutting and pasting, which causes “many kids to quickly jump to the conclusion that the best way to complete a report is to assemble a collection of quotes from other sources.”

Suggestions for helping young students begin to understand about research writing are: teaching the difference between fact and fiction, giving assignments that encourage students to use their own ideas, insisting that students explain where they found the information for their reports, asking students to describe the content in their own words, helping students locate reliable information, and helping them to understand how they can take and organize simple notes and source information by using their computers.

Follow Curiosity’s Scavenger Hunt

The Mars Rover Curiosity is sending back all kinds of information to help us discover more about our neighbor, Mars. Your students will enjoy going along on the trip as they watch videos uploaded to YouTube and information available at NASA.gov. Focusing your students’ attention on Curiosity through studies that cut across the curriculum may inspire some young scientists to pursue careers in the STEM subjects or in writing. For your students who love science fiction, ask them why the landing site is called Bradbury Landing.

Do Fonts Make a Difference in Essay Grades?

Some of you may remember when students first discovered that they could change fonts, along with their sizes and colors. Essays, papers, and especially reports, resembled colored eye charts or Modern Art as students printed their work in an effort to show teachers that they knew how to use just about every font option available. Rules were soon set, and students realized that teachers preferred black ink and a readable size 12 font. But, does it matter what font? According to research related to a quiz in The New York Times, fonts make a difference in what people believe. They may also make a difference in grades students receive on their essays and papers. The winning font—the most believable font—was a surprise, since Baskerville came out on top. Here is Baskerville. It is not much different from other traditional fonts, but it outscored Georgia, which the Times uses for its online publications. Comic Sans had the lowest believability of the fonts in the study. It looks like part of teaching how to write essays and papers, should include font selection. It may mean the difference between and an A and a B, according to one college student. (Note: Only a few fonts were used in the study; you’ll need to read the article to discover if your favorite font was tested.)

Teacher Favorite: Publishing on the Web

Tech 335 Publishing on the Web is a 30-hour PBS TeacherLine course. It targets the way the iGeneration learns. Teachers taking the course find that publishing through Web sites, blogs, learning portals, wikis, and social media is not as difficult as they expected. TeacherLine notes online educational publishing helps “both students and teachers develop a positive online presence . . .” Although the course is professional development for teachers, the content helps teachers lead students to do their best in publishing online as they learn to organize, present, connect, and learn.  See the course syllabus for additional information. This could be useful in using the new iTunes initiative which allows teachers to put their course work online.

Ten Types of Plagiarism

Turnitin surveyed 879 instructors in high schools and colleges to learn what types of plagiarism teachers frequently found in student writing.  The result of the survey was the white paper, Plagiarism Spectrum, which summarizes the types of plagiarism and gives them clever titles. These titles may help your students to be more careful in their writing. You can find out more about this paper at the Turnitin site. In the meantime, see how many of these types of plagiarism that you can figure out: Clone, CTRL-C, Find-Replace, Remix, Recycle, Hybrid, Mash-Up, 404 Error, Aggregator, and Re-Tweet.