Blog Post #12

One of the assignments that I think we should have been assigned to do this semester is to
 1) watch the video "The Importance of Writing Skills: Online Tools to Encourage Success",
2)give your opinion of the video, as well as what you learned about the video.
3)to explain the purpose of this video
4)do you think that this video will be useful to you as a teacher.
The purpose in watching this video is to show students how blogging can increase your writing skills as well as show students how much they actually need to know how to write. As a future English teacher, I think that writing is very important for someone to know how to do. I have proofread numerous papers on college levels for my fellow classmates and I have been surprised at their quality, or lack thereof, of writing. It is sad to me that grown adults don't know how to write. I am in no way trying to sound arrogant, but it is easy for me to write papers, but I try to find sympathy for students who can't write as easily as I can.
In this video he states that blogging can greatly improve your writing skills. Using it in the classroom is a great way to do that. He encourages teachers to give it a try. He also talked about something called student interactives, which is a website(read, write, think) where students can go and it gives them things to use to help them work on their writing skills. One of the examples he used was the bubble tool for writing. This is where you group ideas that are similar in bubbles and this helps you construct each paragraph. He also talked about a note taking skills tutorial.

This helps students take good notes so that they can organize them into a paper at a later date if needed to. It shows them how to outline things, which is helpful while writing a paper. There are many tools that are available on this link. His last example was a "model bank", which was a website with interactive versions of of successful writing in common High School and Middle School formats. I think this is an excellent source of help for students. It gives an example of the paper, and then off to the side it gives examples of what is going on in different areas of the paragraph or essay. This is great, because many students don't know how to put a just a paragraph in chronological order, much less a whole essay.
This video was great. I was very interested in it, of course, because I am a writer. I enjoy writing down information for others to read. Writing papers isn't a big deal to me. I thought that this was a very informative video to show students what the benefits are of blogging, as well as what it means to write well and it gave some successful tools to use for students who aren't good at writing papers.