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

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. The second part of this blog post follows.

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 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.

Story or Narrative Writing Template for Pairs

Assumption: The teacher creates a template for collaborative writing. See below:

The title of this story/narrative is:

Introduction: It all began...

Then...

It seems to us

Conclusion: Therefore ...

Step Four: Using the interactive white board the teacher and a selected student create their own story or narrative. For example they might create a narrative on their exodus from Egypt, the meaning of a text in the Tanach, a midrash, the perfect Shabbat, their imaginary trip to Israel, etc.

Step Five: Students in dyads write their own stories either in the physical or virtual classroom.

Step Six: Each writing pair emails its story to the teacher.

Note: The teacher may want to read each pair’s narrative before it is emailed to other students.

Step Seven: Teacher conducts a classroom discussion on the process of creating a paired story or narrative by using the Type With Me web tool and may pose these kinds of questions:

· How would you describe the process of writing a story/narrative with another person?

· How would you describe the process of writing a story/narrative using the Type With me web tool?

· What was the most challenging part of this process?

· What was the easiest part of this process?

· What did you learn about yourself from this exercise?

· What did you learn about paired writing from this process?

· What would you do differently next time when you are engaged in paired writing?

On the next post we will describe how the members of a class or cadre of mentees can write a story by using the Type With Me web 2.0 collaborative writing tool.