Week 3: Day 4

Today we revisited the stories the students wrote on Tuesday. Using Word for windows, the students were shown how to highlight a word and insert a comment. I have planned the lesson to focus on editing, but instead of editing their own work they would be reading a friend's story and making notes that will help them improve their writing.

Before we started we discussed using positive feedback, offering ideas on how to improve a sentence or add adjectives, adverbs or better verbs.

As the class doesn't have an interactive whiteboard or projector, I divided the class in two groups and showed them with a desktop computer how to insert comments. This brought about some initial problems as the students waiting at their desks became a bit restless. I also told them once the comments were in place they would have to save the document with a new name so as to not affect the original document.

Of course some students did not really understood all the instructions and when the time to save came around the teacher and I had to attend to many students asking "How do I save?". The task was completed more or less and the students really participated by adding as many comments as they could. However, a more detailed grammar lesson should be planned to make this activity more meaningful. The students loved adding their little comments and fortunately it was a positive experience for all students to receive some feedback about their stories. The task was left as it was, and should be picked up later on next week for more editing. We run out of time for the students to start re writing incorporating the feedback received.

I was quite happy with the outcome of this activity. What I am noticing is that even using simple tools with simple software creates havoc, as students knowledge and problem solving skills are quite limited. When I started my project I have assumed a higher level of ICT skills from the students that what they actually have. This worries me as I think that students in Grade 6 should be able to be more independent when using everyday software tools like word processing.