i) to help students engage in close reading, by inserting questions or explanations into textTech Tips #6, Volume 2
· 6+1 Writing Rubric
· Word’s Record Comment Feature
· eBooks Used in Literature Class
· Insert pictures as graphics by default
· Set up Outlook to automatically empty deleted items
6+1 Writing Rubric
Perhaps you are already familiar with this description/rubric of writing traits, but I only came upon it recently:
http://www.nwrel.org/assessment/pdfRubrics/6plus1traits.PDF
Scroll down in this document to see the rubrics.
Word’s “Record Comment” Feature
Some examples of ways to use this feature:
i) to help students engage in close reading, by inserting questions or explanations into text
ii) to “hide” information for review within a document
iii) to comment on student’s work
iv) to insert dictionary definitions into foreign language poems
v) to annotate difficult text
Comments can be inserted as text or as audio recordings of your voice. Simply
position the cursor where you would like the comment to be. Then:
For text just click “Insert à Comment.”
For audio, use the reviewing (commenting) toolbar. If the toolbar is not already showing,
bring it up by clicking “View à Toolbars à Reviewing.” Click the tiny triangle next to the
“New Comment” button to get the drop-down menu, then click “Voice Comment.”
eBooks for Literature Class
“The University of Virginia has an amazing archive of classic texts in e-book form that can be downloaded for free at their website: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/ebooklist.html Some of our literature teachers in middle school have used these classics to augment the printed anthologies that they use. For example, we have had teachers use e-book versions of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Romeo and Juliet." All students in the class downloaded the text to their laptops and read it in Microsoft Reader (a free download: www.microsoft.com/reader). Reader has some great features (dictionary lookup, annotation, even pronunciation) for the type of analytical reading required in these courses.“
-- John Phillips, Director of Educational Technology, Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart.
Also see the Project Gutenberg site: http://textual.net/access.gutenberg for many more free downloadable texts.
Insert pictures as graphics by default
When you insert pictures into a Word document they are initially treated as text and are inserted “in line with text.” This makes them difficult to position – you can’t pick them up and position them independently. In order to do so, you have to set picture formatting options and choose to wrap-text around the picture “tight” or “square.”
I prefer to always treat pictures as graphic objects. Word has an option to set this as the default. In Word, click on:
“Tools à Options,”
then choose the “Edit” tab,
and choose to “insert/paste pictures as”
‘Square’ or ‘Tight’ instead of ‘in-line with text.’
Voila!
Set up Outlook to automatically empty deleted items
Dom suggested I remind everyone that you can set your Outlook email options to automatically empty the deleted items when you exit. To do this in Outlook (not when in an email message), click on: “Tools à Options,” choose the “Other” tab, and check the box for “Empty deleted items upon exiting.”