Paired Story or Narrative Writing Using Type With Me: Part One

When mentoring our pre-service and in-service teachers we need to describe and model both research-based and clinically tested best practices, and demonstrate how these best practices can be applied in the real (i.e. physical) and virtual (online) classroom for both teaching and teacher training. Accordingly in this section of the blog we will describe how the internet can serve as a supplemental resource for instruction and the mentoring of pre-service and in-service Jewish educators. In this post we will share how the teacher or mentor teacher can place students/ mentees in writing pairs who create their own narratives by using the web tool, Type With Me.

This is the first part of a two-part blog post demonstrating how this basic collaborative writing web tool, Type With Me, can be used for paired story or narrative writing.

Assumption: The teacher or mentor teacher has an interactive white board (i.e. SMART Board, Promethean, etc.), a Tablet PC (also called a Slate or Blade), a computer presenter or computer with internet access attached to an LCD projector in the classroom. It would be ideal if students or mentees had access to their own laptop computers or Ipads as well.

Note: Although this lesson plan idea is designed for the Judaic Studies classroom, it can be also be used for training pre-service and in-service Jewish educators for professional or staff development. It is our hope that Jewish educators around the globe will form an online community of practice, a CoP, group of people who share an interest, a craft, and/or a profession, to enhance the delivery of instruction and training of Jewish educators.

Note: We will use the word teacher and student in this lesson plan idea. For purposes of staff development training replace the word (a) teacher with mentor teacher, staff developer, teacher trainer or college professor, (b) and student with mentee, client, pre-service or in-service teacher, undergraduate or graduate student.

Step One: Teacher places students into writing pairs or dyads.

Step Two: Teacher demonstrates how each pair can create its own unique Type With Me collaborative writing page or the teacher can assign each writing dyad its own specific url for this web 2.0 tool. See the note below.

Note: The teacher can create a Type with Me collaborative writing page for each writing pair, and assign each writing dyad a specific url on which to create their narrative. Knowing the specific url of each writing dyad allows the teacher to observe how each student is contributing to their narrative because (a) each student’s contribution can be written with a different font or color and (b) Type with me has a playback feature called the ‘time slider’ which replays the evolution of the document.

Step Three: With another student the teacher demonstrates how two people can create their own unique story or narrative by using this story creation template.

On the next post we will share the second part of a two-part post demonstrating how the web tool, Type With Me, can be used for paired story or narrative writing.