Thursday, October 4, 2012

noredink.com

Today I watched a webinar about a new free resource for teachers called No Red Ink. It was so interesting! Normally I think anything having to do with grammar is extremely boring, but I can really see this working in classrooms.

To start off, the moderator talked about all the obstacles that teachers encounter when trying to grade papers--teachers see so many grammar mistakes that they feel they must correct that they are not able to address higher order thinking in their students' papers. I really hadn't thought about this before...but it is true. He also mentioned how time consuming it is to correct student grammar, and the fact that it proves to be rather ineffective (because kids see their paper marked up but do not have a chance to practice their grammar skills). Even though I have not graded very many papers in my lifetime (being relatively young and a preservice teacher) I can imagine that it gets very frustrating seeing students making the same mistakes over and over again. This website, No Red Ink, is a space where teachers can send students to practice grammar. Students can go online to practice their grammar and their results will be visible to both them and their teacher. When students make mistakes they have chances to fix those mistakes and/or watch a tutorial that will explain the error they made. Teachers can also use the site to create grammar quizzes. Interestingly enough the site gives student the opportunity to choose interests and the sentences that students see with be about those interests. This is a cool way to keep students engaged.

While the idea is very interesting, I could still see many students abusing it. I could see them clicking through the questions knowingly getting answers wrong so that they could sit through the tutorial and not have to think about the work. I could see students getting off task because the sentences (about their Facebook friends or interests) are silly. I could see students trying so hard to "win" or get through the questions quickly that they do not learn the underlying grammar principles. Of course, these kinds of issues are present in all forms of instruction.

Before, I would have said that this is more relevant to ELA teachers, but I definitely see myself using something like this in my history classes. As we have been told over and over again throughout the summer, teaching literacy is the responsibility of all teachers in all content areas. In my history classes I do want to be able to focus more on cultivating student intellect and helping my students perfect their critical thinking skills rather than correct grammatical errors or spelling mistakes. I am really excited about the opportunity to use new, free, innovative resources like No Red Ink!

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