Learning Through Written Expression 1

Your WriteToLearn Sales & Marketing Team Here’s the WriteToLearn Team: Sue Ann Towle– Product and Channel Director Jana Bennett– Marketing Specilaist Kathy New: As the newest member of the WriteToLearn Team, Kathy is our  Associate Product Marketing Manager who will serve as a SME to assist the Sales and Services teams in promoting and selling WriteToLearn. Kathy joins us from the inside sales team in Chandler, AZ where she has been supporting WriteToLearn as a Sales/Curriculum Specialist. 

Agenda What is WriteToLearn? CCSS Alignment Built-in Support for ALL Students Resources

= WriteToLearn! What is WriteToLearn? Essay Writing Summary Writing Vocabulary Exercises = WriteToLearn! A complete cross curricular online tool for building writing skills and developing reading comprehension. WriteToLearn was developed and continues to be the only online writing instruction tool developed to reinforce the required interplay between reading, writing, and vocabulary — the bedrock of literacy. WriteToLearn is an innovative web based teaching tool that combines summary and essay writing activities AND Vocabulary Exercises for students in grades 4-12. WriteToLearn, used for both instruction and assessment, provides immediate targeted feedback AND COACHING necessary to develop the reading comprehension and writing skills that are critical for academic and professional success. WriteToLearn is the only program on the market that includes summary writing activities and adaptive vocabulary exercises.

Essay Writing Summary Writing Vocabulary Exercises Automatic evaluation with immediate feedback Scores on 6 traits of writing: Ideas Organization Convention Sentence Fluency Word Choice Voice Nearly 1,000 Reading Passages Across All Subject Areas History Science Social Studies Vocabulary Exercises (CLICK) The essay component within WTL allows teachers to choose from a variety of prompts available in the WriteToLearn library of content. Or, they have the ability to create their own. The essays are immediately and automatically evaluated and scored on the 6 traits of writing. (CLICK) The summary writing component does not only develop good summary writing skills, but we know that when students summarize text they also improve their reading comprehension skills. So we see great growth in reading comprehension through assigning summary writing exercises. WTL consists of nearly 1000 reading passages that are taken from Pearson imprints such as Scott Forseman and Prentice Hall. The reading passages cover Science and Social Studies supporting the CCSS’s emphasis on writing across subject areas. Teachers can choose appropriate passages based on lexile levels, RMM and CC grade band, grade level subject matter, and number of words. With WTL, writing in no longer just taught or practiced within an English Language Arts classroom. WTL allows for writing across the content areas making it a great cross-curricular tool. (CLICK) W2L includes personalized vocabulary exercises for select summary writing/reading passages to help build word knowledge and increase comprehension Personalized/Adaptive Builds Word Knowledge/Comprehension

Aligns with Common Core State Standards Aligns to the 4 key requirements of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects.

CCSS Requirements WriteToLearn Support The CCSS stress writing every day across subject areas (Science and Social Studies) and incorporating technology in practice. WriteToLearn was built to reinforce the importance of practice writing across subject areas in English language arts, history, social studies, and all sciences that engage students in the writing cycle: write, get feedback, and revise. The CCSS stress that students must read increasingly more difficult texts and mandates use of source documents and using student writing to demonstrate the ability to summarize informational texts. WriteToLearn includes nearly 1,000 informational texts appropriate for grade levels 3-12 and supports development of reading comprehension through summary writing activities.   The CCSS emphasize learning academic vocabulary and acquiring these words through reading. Within selected reading passages, WriteToLearn takes students through a series of adaptive vocabulary exercises before they read the passage to help build their word knowledge for better content understanding. This practice personalizes students' development of the academic vocabulary that will support them throughout the curriculum while building their reading comprehension and writing skills. The CCSS writing tasks focus on evidence-based writing to authentic texts and are designed to encourage critical thinking. WriteToLearn supports these changes to the standards by including new types of prompts—including argument, narrative, and expository—and prompts that include source documents.

Learning Through Written Expression Let’s Take A Look ! Learning Through Written Expression Go live into program, or go to www.writetolearn.net for walk through demo(step by step point and click). From home screen of writetolearn.net, click on experience, on the following page click on experience again.

Resources Available (Internal resources - Playbook/NEO)

My Training Connection Training modules for the Administrator, Teacher and Student interfaces are available as well as a product overview and “what’s new with WriteToLearn”. www.mytrainingconnection.com

More Resources www.writetolearn.net

Amazing Outcomes (Internal resources - Playbook/NEO)

Mr. Jeff Pence Dean Rusk Middle School Cherokee County School District; Canton, GA Seventh Grade English Language Arts Teacher www.mrjpence.com jeff.pence@cherokee.k12.ga.us I’d like to leave you with this…..

Outcome with Using WriteToLearn 94 - Number of writing students per day 28 - Number of essay/summaries each student completed 6 - Average number of times each essay was submitted for grading, evaluated, scored, and returned to the student 15,792 – Number of drafts that were thoroughly evaluated & returned to the students with specific feedback & absolute consistency 5 ½ Years – Approximate time it would have taken a teacher to grade In just 1 year……..Jeff said that his essay scores have improved dramatically!

As teachers we know the value of teaching writing and the importance of providing ample amount of opportunities for our students to write. It’s through practicing the writing process that our students become competent writers. The reality however is that many teachers can see up to 160 students a day and it’s not humanly possible to effectively grade that amount of writing assignments with constructive feedback so that the students can revise, edit, and rewrite in a timely manner. This is where the power of W2L comes in. Questions I ask – during this slide How many students to you teach on a daily basis? How long does it take you to effectively grade each student’s paper to the six traits? How long does it generally take you to hand back your student’s papers? How interested are they, after that amount of time, to edit, revise, rewrite….? Teachers usually say average 20-25 minutes per student. 100 Students – 20 minutes per paper – 3 students papers graded per hour – 33 hours to grade 1 class assignment 50 Students - 20 minutes per paper - 3 students papers graded per hour – 16.5 hours to grade 1 class assignment The National Commission on writing is saying we need to double the amount of writing students are producing and write across the curriculum. How are we going to do that? Is it humanly possibly when it already is taking us so much time on one assignment? That’s where the power of W2L comes in!

3 Things to Remember! Complete Literacy Tool Aligned to CCSS Supports ALL Students

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Thank You!