Beyza & Andrea

We are both interested in learning new strategies for student collaboration and thought the ideas presented in the articles by Renata Chylinksi and Vance Stevens were interesting and simple to duplicate as word program is present nearly in every computer and it is a basic tool. Andrea had not thought about using the word processor to jumble sentences and categories of words or by having students to replace nouns with pictures. Beyza has some experience in using word processors for jumbling sentences and adding comments to her students’ first and second drafts but using it for replacing nouns with pictures is a new idea for her.

We are French, and English teachers and have some different ideas about how to use word processors with our students. Andrea is going to be working with students on the past and compound tenses and having them analyze the text and associate different colors for different tenses is something she will be using in the very near future. She wants to use green for the imperfect (the continuous past) and red for the preterit (narrative past tense in French). She will need to come up with different colors for the pluperfect (the past perfect). For her novice learners, she wants to use drop down text boxes to scaffold their writing. She believes having the students to select the correct verb and adjectives and then to rewrite the entire sentence correctly gives the students the firm base on which to create their own sentences with the correct sentence structure. Beyza has similar ideas on how implement some of the activities mentioned in two articles... In the future, she thinks she will use it for peer check through track changes option, use color codes for correction and punctuation exercises as she do believes punctuation is not taken into account by most of the students. She also thinks using tasks enabling real communication is also a good activity to be carried out with word processors. She usually uses her class wiki for such activities but she does not think there is a track changes option in it. Therefore, she believes it can be a good idea to use word processors for such activities as the students are more aware of the changes and therefore understand there is some kind of communication going on in such kind of activities.