November--Publishing Electronically

November-Publishing

     In November, my students were spending a great deal of time publishing on the EEEs.  One surprise for me was when I saw students doing some things in electronic publishing that I had not seen them do in their pencil and paper publishing.  For example, I had several students that were no longer capitalizing proper nouns (like "I"), most students were no longer indenting, capitalizing the first letter of each sentence, or using ending punctuation.  

     I ended up doing some minilessons to connect the things that they were already doing with respect to grammar and conventions in paper publishing, to how do those things properly in electronic publishing.  After our half day meeting for Inspired Writing, I got some more ideas about how to use the reasearch tool in Google and using the microphone on Google's search site.  Essentially, these became my minilessons.  For example, I showed students how to start at the beginning of every sentence, make sure that there was  beginning capital and then track to end of the sentence to find the punctuation.  Initially, I had them highlight these, but now most students are checking these things without the highlighting.  The minilessons were short enough that I used them as my midworkshop teaching point, so I didn't need to spend several entire sessions on convention and grammar targets.  I am now very pleased to see that they are demonstrated their understanding in their electronic publishing, as well as their paper publishing.