Strengthen Your Students' Writing Skills and Significantly Reduce Your Assessment Time by Using Powerful Digital Writing Strategies (Grades 6-12)

Presented by Joel Clements
Outstanding English/Language Arts Teacher and Presenter

Specifically Designed for Educators Serving Grades 6 12: English/Language Arts Teachers, Classroom Teachers, Content Area Teachers, Literacy Specialists, Special Education Staff, and Administrators

Practical, ready-to-use strategies and techniques for using digital writing to strengthen and increase student writing while significantly reducing your take-home grading
Powerful, innovative ways to integrate technology into your assessment and instruction to help your students meet your state standards for production and distribution of writing
Utilize highly effective, accessible digital resources to create consistent, meaningful feedback on student writing
Specific, step-by-step methods to incorporate innovative teaching and assessing strategies to ensure a greater amount of quality student writing in multiple genres while decreasing your assessment time
Highly potent strategies using a variety of multimodal tools to increase your students’ understanding, assessment and utilization of resources in an age of technology

Practical Ideas and Strategies

If you are looking for quick, proven and practical ways to enhance your writing curriculum in creative ways, and to incorporate powerful digital writing strategies in your English/language arts classes, you won’t want to miss this outstanding new seminar. The focus for this fast-paced day is on providing innovative, ready-to-use strategies for using digital writing in conjunction with giving your students authentic writing experiences, enabling them to see immediate growth in their writing, and using your teacher time in the most valued ways.

Joel Clements, a secondary teacher who works closely with technology in middle and high school classrooms, will share a wealth of lesson ideas and strategies to help all students write to a clearer audience with meaningful evaluation, while enabling teachers to focus on other tasks besides grading essays. From your struggling students to your more advanced writers, these digital tools work! Throughout this valuable day, Joel will demonstrate and model lessons you can use in your classroom, complete with student writing samples and a wealth of proven digital assessment programs, tips and tools that will save you time.

Whether you are an English/language arts teacher, a content-area teacher or an instructional coach, you will find Joel’s ideas to be innovative, easy-to-use and extremely helpful as you begin implementing digital tools for you and your students to assess their writing in your secondary classroom.

Each participant will receive an extensive resource handbook filled with specific lesson ideas, model materials, and proven strategies for incorporating outstanding, timesaving digital writing strategies in your classroom.

Ten Key Benefits of Attending

Strengthen Your Students’ Writing with 21st-Century Strategies
Learn practical strategies for using digital writing to teach your students to work more efficiently and effectively on writing tasks … Ensure a greater amount of quality student writing in a variety of genres
Significantly Reduce the Time You Spend Grading Student Writing
See how to use digital writing and the electronic sphere to teach your students to create meaningful assessment of their own and each others’ writing … Proven ways to increase your teaching time and spend far less time grading!
Provide Highly Effective Feedback to Improve Students’ Writing
Move beyond the traditional, time-consuming essay grading structure with minimal learning-curve … Techniques for re-thinking how we teach writing in a way that maximizes student learning, decreases grading and utilizes digital resources to increase student ownership and facilitate the effectiveness of your feedback
Empower Students to Critically Navigate and Utilize Writing with Current Technology
Utilize research-based approaches for teaching students to utilize databases and online resources and to see the power of writing in the digital age
Increase Students’ Understanding of Purpose and Audience in Their Writing
Discover proven ways to use a variety of multimodal tools to heighten purpose and audience for the student writer … How to effectively use classroom time for creative processes and more meaningful conferencing
Determine How to Best Implement Digital Writing and Assessing in Your Existing Writing Program
Look at multiple strategies to select and implement digital assessments that will work best for the classroom and style you’ve already developed … Learn key steps to most effectively use digital assessments to enhance your current writing program
Discover Outstanding Resources to Implement Digital Writing Strategies
Learn about powerful Web 2.0 resources that support your effective implementation of the writing standards … Dozens of highly useful assessment resources and excellent tools that will save you time and motivate your students
Use Innovative, Creative Ways to Digitally Assess all Genres of Writing
Discover new, effective ways to teach students how to produce and critique narrative, persuasive, informative/explanatory, and creative writing
Develop and Strengthen Student Writing Using Technology
Utilize technology to produce, edit, collaborate, publish, and update individual or shared writing products in response to ongoing feedback … New strategies for students to discuss, organize and convey their ideas and information
Substantially Increase the Time You Spend Actually Teaching!
Receive extensive ideas that will allow you to immediately spend less time grading and more time in creative instruction and productive conferencing … Yes, less time grading and more time focusing on innovative ways to engage students in much higher levels of writing proficiency

Outstanding Strategies You Can Use Immediately

Innovative ways to use digital writing strategies to help your students increase the quality of their writing to meet your state standards
How to stop taking piles of papers home to grade and start using amazing digital writing strategies that your students will engage with, and learn from
Practical, proven strategies to implement digital writing in multiple writing genres
Tips for using quality, interactive rubrics that require students to process their writing at a more meaningful level
Manageable ways to address the needs of all your students through innovative digital assessments
Outstanding, ready-to-use ideas for integrating digital writing with your current writing programs
Creative ways to incorporate collaboration between students in evaluating and assessing their writing skills
Powerful questioning techniques that challenge students to develop and use higher-level thinking skills in conjunction with their writing
How to get students invested in the process of writing, leading to stronger finished products
Eliminating the battles over tracking and identifying plagiarism using online resources
Outstanding, student-tested digital rubrics that allow an invested audience to provide specific feedback to students in a timely manner
Engaging ways to teach the conventions of standard English, while meeting the demanding needs of our digital natives
How to utilize digital resources to give targeted feedback that reduces grading time and increases student progress
How to increase students’ confidence in writing and focus less on grades and more on achieving substantive personal goals
Where to locate outstanding resources that support the effective implementation of digital writing assessments
How to get students serious about peer feedback
Actual examples of student engagement using digital writing
Techniques that promote effective articulation between students about writing
How to differentiate instruction and assessment in your secondary English classroom
Proven tips for working more efficiently and effectively spending more time collaborating and creating, and less time grading papers

A Message From Your Seminar Leader

Dear Colleague:

It’s Monday morning. You gave up most of your Sunday to grade essays. Again. You handed them back 5 minutes ago, and now you’re staring at them in the recycle bin. We’ve all been there. Teaching writing effectively may be the single most difficult challenge we, as English teachers, face. We find ourselves dumping endless hours of grading and hoping against hope that the students will go through each comment thoughtfully and reflectively. And when they don’t respond as we’d want, it can be easy to question our own effectiveness.

I spent years getting increasingly frustrated – by lack of progress, and by the nagging sense that there just had to be a better way. When I started exploring digital writing tools and creative ways of applying them it was as if things just started falling in to place. My grading got faster and easier, and yet I discovered my assignments and feedback having far more substantive and meaningful impact. I can tell you honestly and sincerely that the strategies we’ll be exploring and the platforms for working within the digital sphere can have a profound impact on the time you can spend working directly with your students. Your students will be more engaged in the writing process, in collaboration and in critical thinking.

My goal is that you will return to your classroom with a wealth of practical strategies and tools for using digital writing to significantly improve your students’ writing and greatly reduce the time you spend grading papers. To achieve this we will answer the following:

What do digital writing strategies look like? Which ones will work best for you?
How can you incorporate them into your current writing program?
How can you enhance your skills as an effective writing teacher and continue to hold students to a high standard?
What are some ways you can encourage your students to be more involved in their writing?
How can innovative strategies and digital writing be used in getting students toward the Common Core State Standards?

I look forward to meeting you at the seminar. The day will be packed with exciting new practices, strategies, and perspectives that will enable you to use digital writing assessments in your secondary English classroom; save you hours of grading time; and significantly enhance your secondary students’ writing skills.

Sincerely,
Joel Clements

P.S. You will also receive an extensive resource handbook filled with practical, proven strategies, outstanding resources and timesaving digital tools you can use immediately.

Who Should Attend

Educators serving grades 6-12: English/Language Arts Teachers, Classroom Teachers, Content-Area Teachers, Literacy Specialists, Special Education Staff, and Administrators.

Special Benefits of Attending

Extensive Resource Handbook
Each participant will receive an extensive resource handbook with a wealth of materials specifically designed for this seminar. Included in the handbook are:

Practical, ready-to-use strategies and techniques for using online/digital writing tools to strengthen student writing and significantly reduce your take-home papers to grade
Timesaving digital, interactive rubrics and ideas for assessments to provide quick and effective feedback for students
Effective, accessible digital resources for helping your students meets the demands of your state standards for writing
Powerful strategies, using a variety of multimodal tools, to increase your students’ motivation, involvement and success as writers in an age of constantly evolving technology
Proven activities that generate active participation in writing and editing, promote higher-level critical thinking and motivate students to grow as writers

Meet and Share
This seminar provides an excellent opportunity for participants to meet and share ideas with other secondary educators interested in strengthening their students’ writing skills and reducing the amount of time spent evaluating student writing.

Consultation Available
Joel Clements will be available at the seminar for consultation regarding your questions and unique needs of your own writing program.

On-Site Training Guarantee

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