Assignment One: Introduction

Welcome to Essentials of Writing! We look forward to working and learning with you. In order for everyone to get the most out of the course, please be sure to read and respond to each others comments.Please try to keep your responses within one allotted "comment" space to ensure that the blog remains manageable for all participants.

Also, you may want to type your comments in a Word Document and either copy from Word and paste onto the blog or save it in a folder on your computer and then post it to the blog. I have written a couple of lengthy comments that I lost before I was able to post it to the blog. This extra step may save you some frustration later on this term.

Last of all, we will write our comments to your posts on the blog, so you will need to check back to the corresponding week for feedback (and to make additional comments if you wish.)

Let us know if you have any questions. You can email us, but please put the words "Question for Essentials of Writing" in the subject line so that we can respond in a timely fashion.

ASSIGNMENT ONE: Post your Introduction to the course Blog.

Introduction Post- Tell us about yourself. Where do you teach? What grade do you teach? How long have you been teaching? How many students are there in your class? Do you have instructional support? What does your current literacy program look like? (If you aren’t currently teaching let us know.) What is your knowledge/training in the area of literacy (be specific about your experiences teaching writing?) Does your district provide training in literacy –especially writing? If so, what exactly have they offered? Has your district been bogged down with getting students to perform well on state writing assessments – prompts? How do you feel about teaching? Are you happy at work? Also, let us know a little about you outside of the classroom: Interests/ Hobbies/Family Life? What do you hope to get out of this course? Post your reflection to the blog.

Welcome Spring 2017 Students!

Hello!  Welcome to our Course.

One of the benefits of the blog format for online courses is the discourse between students.  We post only one or two assignments at a time in order to foster communication between the course participants.  In order to make the blog easier to read and more likely that other students will read and reply to your comments, please keep your responses to the one allotted blog post.  

If you do work ahead you will need to post your reflection on the blog when the corresponding assignment is posted.  

If you have a question please email us and put "Question" or "REPLY NEEDED" in the subject line so we can get back to you in a timely fashion.  We frequently scan our inbox for questions but wait to reply to assignments for when we have a good chunk of time.  If there is no notation in the subject line of the email, we assume it is just an assignment.

A couple of notes:

We suggest you save your work in a word processing document before posting to the blog. There have been times where something happens and a post may disappear.  (Having this saved, makes it easier to repost.)

Some students have experienced problems posting using Firefox.  There are work-arounds, but the easiest is just to use a different browser.

Term starts  4/3

All work due 6/12

Grades available online 6/21

We look forward to learning and working with you this term.  :D