Can you tell me more about My Access? Warm regards, R. Carol Miller (Rowlett) Citywide Specialist Office of Reading & Language Arts Medill Professional Teacher Center GSR #80 "Together, ordinary people can still do extrordinary things." Barack Obama
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Amy Lesemann Sent: Sunday, November 29, 2009 1:22 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [LIT] My Access positives and negatives There are good and bad parts to using My Access to teach writing. It will score your student's writing for you, using the six most commonly used traits of writing, and fairly accurately, in a sense. This is great if you have 120 writing students and you really want them to write frequently and get rapid feedback. If you move into the cpr lab for a couple of weeks and have a few drafts for the kids to type in (quickly - they must have decent keyboarding skills!), and then have them mull over the feedback they get, and then revise their pieces and get final feedback, it can be really handy. It's especially good for average to weak writers. But...and there's always a but... it can't handle your better writers who have really developed their unique voices, which integrate sentence fragments (or the use of But...for the effect!). They will get dinked and they will get frustrated! However, if they need to learn to write to a prompt under a time pressure, some of our more creative souls sometimes need to learn how to rein it in a bit. My 8th grade daughter, a prize winning writer, was very frustrated by MyAccess, but also kept getting low-ish scores on her state tests on writing. It was funny, but it wasn't, so she worked harder on MyAccess to figure out what the faceless bureaucrats wanted, and was grimly victorious when she got all 6's. It'd be nice if this wasn't the way of the world, but it is. She'll have to write for her SAT's someday, so she might as well get the hang of it now. Hope this helps. Amy -- Amy Lesemann, Reading Specialist and Director, Independent Learning Center St. Thomas the Apostle Elementary School _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive
