Alphasmart AS6000 User manual

• Writing Process Guide and
• Writing Activities
by Stephen Marcus, Ph.D.
• Tips and Tricks
• Curriculum Integration Ideas
Teacher's
Guide

Contents
Page
2 Introduction
3 Writing and the AlphaSmart
3 More Than You Bargained For
3 Anything Worth Writing . . .
4 Habits of Mind
4 The Composing Product
6 Writing Activities
6 Sequential Writing
6 Sequential Responding
7 Looping
8 Group Looping
9 Invisible Writing
10 Class Act
11 Tips and Tricks
13 Classroom Integration Ideas
13 Creating New Word Lists
14 Sentences from Spelling Words
14 Activity Journal
15 Names, Nouns and Verbs
15 Questions to Guide the Field Trip
16 Sentence Completion for Understanding
16 Procedural Writing
17 Guided Science Observation
17 Interviewing and Writing a Biography
1 Sharing Your Ideas
AlphaSmart Teacher's Guide 1

Introduction
About Dr. Stephen Marcus . . .
The original Teacher’s Guide for the AlphaSmart was written by
Stephen Marcus, Ph.D.. Dr. Marcus coordinated the National Writing
Project Technology Network as well as the California Writing
Project/California Technology Project Alliance. He was Chair of the
Committee on Future Technology for the International Society for
Technology in Education and was a member of the Committee on
Information Literacy and the Assembly on Computers and English
for the National Council of Teachers of English. He was on the
faculty of the Graduate School of Education at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, where he was co-director of SCWriP, an
affiliate of the National Writing Project.
The writing and ideas shared by Dr. Marcus in the original
AlphaSmart Teacher’s Guide are included in this guide as well. The
writing activities are designed to improve the quality and quantity of
your students’ writing. Following the writing activities, you will find
classroom integration ideas to help you get started using the
AlphaSmart with your students at any grade level and in any content
area.
2 AlphaSmart Teacher's Guide

Writing
and the AlphaSmart
By Dr. Stephen Marcus
More Than You Bargained For
The AlphaSmart is exceptionally well suited for helping stu-
dents improve the quantity and quality of their “prewriting” - the
raw material that will be refined at later stages in the composing
process (more about this, below). Making notes, false starts, and
early drafts (all part of prewriting) doesn’t apply just to assignments
done for English classes. They are the starting points for thinking,
problem-solving, and writing across the curriculum.
One of the major goals of prewriting activities is to build
fluency. Attention to format and correctness are appropriate to later
stages in the composing process.
With this in mind, the activities, tips, and tricks provided in this
Teacher’s Guide are meant to accomplish two related goals.
First, they provide activities that students might use for differ-
ent kinds of assignments in a variety of classes or subject matter
areas - any setting in which the AlphaSmart can support teaching
and learning.
Second, many of the suggestions are designed to help you and
your students break the "Technology 80/20 Rule": eighty percent of
the people who use a given piece of hardware or software make use
of only twenty percent of its power.
As simple as it is to use, the AlphaSmart keyboard has features
that are just waiting to be exploited in creative ways, to add even
more value to its use. You don’t have to use it for long before you
begin to see how you’ve gotten even more than you bargained for.
Anything Worth Writing ...
...is worth writing poorly. At first. That’s what “pre-writing” is
all about. Prewriting is a way for students to begin to give shape and
AlphaSmart Teacher's Guide 3

order to their thoughts. The AlphaSmart is great for helping them
mine diamonds in the rough. The polishing and setting come later.
Often, students spend too much time in early stages of the com-
posing process tinkering with their text, when the working rule should
be “Don’t get it ‘right’ - get it down.” (This is advice once given to
writers for The New Yorker.) The necessary revising and editing can
come later, when the students are sure they’re working on material that
deserves and demands their attention.
After all, prewriting is just a stage in a process that also includes
preparing more complete drafts and letting others comment on the
writing for re-thinking and revising. These stages are followed by
additional editing and proofreading as progress is made toward the
final stage of “publishing". Publishing the writing involves making it
public in some formal way perhaps in a class anthology or even just by
“handing it in”.
The strategies that follow are particularly good for generating
copious notes as well as useful and substantive “mental doodles.” The
activities also help dissolve writing blocks, which often result from
students trying to do their rewriting before they’ve done their
prewriting, from struggling to say exactly what they mean before
they’re even sure what’s on their minds.
Habits of Mind
Students may need to practice the habits of mind inherent in many
of these activities as well as the specific methods. Encourage the class
to talk over what worked, what didn’t and why. Encourage students to
try a technique again after getting advice from you and from their
classmates about how to do a given activity a little better the next time.
Not everything will work perfectly for every student every time it’s
tried; students will find that practice is as important here as anywhere
else.
The Composing Product
We want students to produce clear and effective writing that
demonstrates a command of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. We
want them to be fluent and to be able to write in a variety of “voices”
4 AlphaSmart Teacher's Guide

and styles to suit the occasion. We also want them to value writing as a
means for giving structure and order to what they know and want to
say.
The AlphaSmart keyboard can be an invaluable aid for reaching
all of these goals. It can be particularly helpful as your students engage
in the early stages of the composing process, as they prepare to pro-
duce a product of which you can all be proud.
Notes:
AlphaSmart Teacher's Guide 5

Writing Activities
Sequential Writing
This activity promotes attention to coherence and creativity.
• Working in small groups, students start their own essays,
poems, descriptions, explanations, or stories, either with their
own ideas or with a common prompt (e.g., “Alone, the last
person alive on earth, he was startled to ear a knock on the
door”).
• Students type 1-4 lines, then pass their AlphaSmart to a
neighbor, who add 1-4 lines.
• Students keep passing the AlphaSmart from person to person
around the group until their own is returned to them.
• The pieces get read aloud, discussed, edited, printed, and
published in a collection.
Sequential Responding
This activity develops students’ skills as analytical readers and
responders. It also teaches them ways to help build and develop other
peoples’ work instead of just “tearing it apart.”
• Students bring to class a printout of a piece of work-in-
progress. The student’s name should be included at the top of
the pages.
• Display on the board (or in a handout) a set of response
categories like the following with modifications for the grade
level and targeted learning. (F1 is kept available for the
author’s comments about the other students’ responses):
- F2: What you wrote. . .
- F3: The way you approached the assignment . . .
- F4: Something you might have mentioned is . . .
- F5: One thing that I hadn’t considered was . . .
- F6: I was surprised . . .
- F7: You’re good at . . .
6 AlphaSmart Teacher's Guide

• Each student’s work-in-progress printout travels with the
student’s AlphaSmart.
• The students read the work-in-progress and select one re-
sponse category and write a response in the designated file.
• The first student to work in a particular file should type the
words as shown above and add his or her personal comment
and name.
• Students trade keyboards after contributing to an assigned
number of files.
• All comments should include the name of the person making
the comment.
• The author eventually gets his or her work-in-progress and
AlphaSmart back to review the comments and use them to
shape future versions of the writing.
• The author can use F1 to write his or her own responses to
questions like these:
- What kinds of comments were most helpful?
- What kinds of comments were least helpful?
- If you only had time to take three bits of advice to
improve your writing, what advice would you
use?
Looping
This activity develops fluency and the ability to focus on a topic.
• For 3-5 minutes students do a quantity of “freewriting” in file
F1 on a topic appropriate to the class. In “freewriting”, they
try to get down a lot of thoughts without worrying about
typing mistakes, spelling, complete sentences, changes of
topic, etc.
• They then review their work, deciding on one particular idea,
sentence, phrase, or word that captures some interesting
point.
• They use this text to begin another short freewriting period in
file F2. They then review F2 and use the text there as the basis
AlphaSmart Teacher's Guide 7

for repeating the procedure in F3, F4, F5, etc. Each new file
begins with a short piece of text from the previous file.
• All the files eventually get printed and reviewed as raw
material for further writing.
• This procedure could also be adapted to the Sequential Writing
activity described above.
• The difference between “sequence” writing and “looping” is
that in the former, the new file picks up where the previous file
left off and continues in the general direction of the previous
file. In looping, the new file takes as a starting point any
portion of the previous file that catches the writer’s interest.
Group Looping
This activity builds fluency, the ability to focus, and the kind of creativ-
ity and collaborative involvement typical of “writing in the real
world.”
• Students work in small groups, with one AlphaSmart per
student. They each start a file in F1 as described above in the
Looping activity.
• After 3-5 minutes, students pass their keyboards to a neighbor,
who reviews the F1 file, deciding on one particular idea,
sentence, phrase, or word that captures some interesting point.
• Students use this text to do another short period of freewriting
in file F2 including his or her name at the end of their writing.
• When finished, they hand the AlphaSmart to a third group
member, who reviews F2 and repeats the procedure, doing a
short freewriting period in F3. This same process is repeated
with each student starting a new file beginning with a short
piece of text from the previous file.
• Eventually (depending on the size of the groups or how much
time you can devote to this procedure), the AlphaSmart is
returned to the original author, who can review the files to get
perspectives, ideas, and quotes for future use in preparing a
piece of writing.
8 AlphaSmart Teacher's Guide

AlphaSmart Teacher's Guide 9
Invisible Writing
Students report that this approach develops fluency and helps them
overcome the tendency to do inappropriate rewriting before appropri-
ate time is spent prewriting. They also report that they’re more inter-
ested in seeing what they have to say. The procedure described below
is one way to practice the technique before it’s applied to actual writing
assignments.
• Students have a large Post-It sticker available to cover up the
text window.
• They spend 1-3 minutes freewriting on the given topic with the
text window covered (see explanation of freewriting in the
“looping” section).
• They then remove the sticker, review the text, and spend 1-3
minutes freewriting “visibly” (they can see the text), continu-
ing to respond to the assignment.
• They repeat this two-part procedure with the partnered
question for the assignment.
• Finally, students spend 2-4 minutes freewriting on how the
two different conditions affected their thinking and writing.
They discuss this in class and print the material for later use.
• Here are some sample topics to help students practice this
technique. They’re designed to provide tasks of equal “cogni-
tive load.” Similar prompts can be generated for a variety of
topics and curriculum areas.
- “I’m typing on this keyboard, and . . .
- “I can’t see what I’m typing and . . .”
- Why do people read poetry?
- Why do people write poetry?
- Why do people read history books?
- Why do people write history books?
- What’s hard about learning chemistry?
- What’s easy about learning chemistry?
- What was hard about being in school last year?
- What was easy about being in school last year?