Hi folks! I don’t do the guest post thing here on NCS-Tech but I decided to make something of an exception for Jennifer, who contacted me a while ago asking to promote her blog tour. One lucky, random commenter on this post will receive a free copy of The Best of Leading & Learning with Technology! So read on and comment away!

I’d like to thank Kevin for hosting me here as part of my virtual tour to promote The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology. Leave a comment at the end of this post to enter to win a copy of the book.

Jennifer Roland

How Can You Use the National Gallery of Writing in the Classroom

The National Council of Teachers of English has created the National Gallery of Writing to gather writing from kids and adults from all walks of life, whether or not they consider themselves writers.

How can you use this resource with your students?

1. Writing

Anyone can start a local gallery and post their students’ writing. Students who know that their writing will be viewed by a wide audience will take more care with their writing, and the lessons they learn from that activity can help them be better writers in the future.

The Gallery of Writing has created an online permission process for minors under age 13. The privacy section of the site also includes a printable form for parents who do not use computers at home. Read more about the privacy issues here.

2. Audience

You can set up a gallery with a focus on a specific age group or topic area to teach your students to shift their writing style for different audiences.

Having older students write fiction stories for younger students could be the easiest way to teach this skill, and it allows you to encourage creativity as well as the writing process.

3. Reading Comprehension

With fresh, freely accessible writing available for your students to read, why not ask them to pick a story, read it, and write three comprehension questions for their fellow students to answer?

By focusing on the details and deeper meaning to create their own questions, your students will learn reading comprehension skills in a much more interesting and authentic fashion.

4. Critique

The National Gallery gives you access to writing by people with different educational levels, backgrounds, and topic areas. You can use these samples to provide your students with fresh writing to analyze and criticize.

Try asking them to pick from a pre-selected sample of writing and write a review of the piece. Or you can assign small groups to review a piece of writing individually and then compare their critiques to see which issues they found.

You can also model effective writing critique by displaying a piece of writing from the gallery for the whole class and going through it line by line.

Visit the gallery at http://galleryofwriting.org/, set up your gallery, and design some activities.

What type of activity will work best to use the gallery in your classroom?

How have you used online tools to provide authentic reading and writing activities for your students?

Do you have a plan to participate in the National Day of Writing on October 20?

Answer one of these questions or ask a question of your own to be entered into the random drawing to win a copy of The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology.

About Jennifer Roland

Jennifer is a writer living in the Portland, Oregon, area. She holds bachelor’s degrees in magazine journalism and political science from the University of Oregon. Her education also focused on history, economics, linguistics, and educational policy and management. Before embarking on her freelance career, she was a staff member at ISTE. Follow Jennifer on her blog tour at http://edtechjen.com; each tour stop includes a chance to win a copy of The Best of L&L.

About The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology

ISTE’s flagship magazine, Learning & Leading with Technology, is where the organization’s members and industry experts share and discuss the latest and greatest in using technology to enhance education. This collection includes the very best articles from 2003-2008. Along with the articles as they originally appeared in the magazine, the book includes commentary and context introducing the articles as well as short essays from the original authors, who further discuss the issues and topics of their articles and how they’ve affected the ed tech world.