Gearing Up for a New School Year - Writing

For many of you, the school year will be starting soon, and I'm going to feature some websites focusing on different content areas, with some modification ideas for kiddos with more significant disabilities.

I'm going to try anyway.

So let's kick things off with a great writing website. The internet and new technologies like blogs and wikis are creating exciting, motivating new opportunities for students to write. If you need a place to get started, check out WritingFix.

This website is sponsored by the Northern Nevada Writing Project and the National Writing Project, and based on the 6 Traits of Writing, (Idea Development, Organization, Voice, Conventions, Sentence Fluency, and Word Choice). This website provides wonderful interactive writing prompts, tools for poetry, tools for journaling, tools for writing across the curriculum... I could go on for hours. There is a ton of great material here.

So what about writing for students that have more significant learning or cognitive disabilities? WritingFix provides a great place to start. The prompts and ideas can be very easily adapted to software, like Clicker 5, that would allow a student to write by selecting symbolic representations of words. Or, if the student needs auditory feedback to help detect spelling and grammatical errors, use this site in conjunction with a talking word processor, like Intellitalk 3 by Intellitools, WriteOut:Loud by Don Johnston, or free downloads like ReadPlease! or UltraHal. If the physical act of writing is causing difficulty, perhaps a portable word processor or classroom computer can be used for writing. There are many, many possibilities for accomodating and modifying content to make it accessible to all students.

Click here to visit WritingFix.com.

(Hat Tip: Gamra Zenaidi, TechLearning.com.)