Editing and Conventions

An interactive lesson using the Promethean board and activstudio software.

By Katie Madsen

Objective and StandardsLearning Objective: Students will learn about

the editing process and will be able to correct errors in written drafts.

Standards: Language Arts Standard 8: Writing-Students write daily to communicate effectively for a variety of purposes and audiences. Objective 4: Edit written draft for conventions. Indicator a: Edit writing for capitals in names, first word of a sentence, and the pronoun “I” and correct ending punctuation (i.e., periods, question marks).

My lessonMy lesson was given to a first grade class

Following the stated objective, I wanted to teach my students how to edit by looking for mistakes.

I focused on the conventions of using a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence, capitalizing names, and using correct punctuation at the end of sentences.

In order to provide several different writing samples I used the promethean board and activstudio to create a flipchart.

I created writing samples based on topics they were learning about and topics they would connect to.

Promethean board basicsThe Promethean board is like an interactive

whiteboard.

Activstudio is the software used to design lessons on the computer. This software is very similar to power point.

The computer is hooked up to the projector and promethean board and this allows the user to work from either the board or the computer.

Special pens are used to create text or annotate on the promethean board.

Technology Choices

I wanted to use several different writing samples in a short amount of time.

I needed to be able to show the students a corrected version after they had corrected the mistakes on the prompts.

I wanted the students to be able to edit over the text so they wouldn’t have to worry about making mistakes.

I wanted the students to be the ones using the technology.

I chose to use the Promethean board for the following reasons:

This is the first slide I started with and I used it to model how to do the editing activity. The screen cover in activstudio allowed me to hide parts of the flipchart I didn’t want the

students to see yet.

This is what the slide looks like when I revealed the corrected version. This provided a way for the students to check themselves and to see how it

would look with the corrections made.

This is the next writing sample. The red lines are the errors identified by the

students.

This is the full screen with the corrected sample below.

This was sample the students liked the most because more than 50% of them speak another language at home. We spent extra time talking

about this topic and they shared some great things!

Here’s an example of a student coming up to underline a mistake.

This is a picture of me reviewing why we made the corrections we did. I would ask for a volunteer to

explain and then fill in anything they left out.

This was the last writing sample.

A success!Overall this lesson was a success. The students

were the one using the technology but the focus was on the learning task. This lesson would not have been as successful without the promethean board because the samples would have had to be hand written on the board or on chart paper. With the use of technology we were able to cover a lot more material and all of the students had an opportunity to come up and identify one of the errors.