Revising Your Message
Lesson 4 of 5
Objective: SWBAT reread their writing critically to revise for clarity and persuasion.
After students have had a few days to draft the messages that will go on each page, we will work on revising them to make them more persuasive. I remind students that we are still using the writing process and will now begin to revise our writing. Before the lesson, I took some time to review each group’s draft. I’ve made some comments for improvements and give them to each group. I start the lesson by asking students to tell me what we do when we revise. After some redirection, I get students to understand that when we revise, we look at our writing to see if we can make it clearer or more appealing to the reader. Now, I explain to the class that we need to revise our messages before we begin to add them to the web site.
I want to model this for students and then allow them to take a practice run before letting them work on their own. I use the sample advertisement from the Drafting Your Message lesson we completed previously. I tell students that this is not a bad advertisement but I think we could make it better so that we can get more customers. I post the advertisement on my smart board and begin thinking out loud of changes I think would be good to make. Then, I tell students to take a look at the sample and come up with ways we could make it better. After calling on some students to share, students work with their group to revise the rest of their pages.
Students work collaboratively to revise the rest of their pages as I circulate the room. I work with each group helping them make adjustments where needed and guiding them to revise effectively.
In order for students to be able to build the website, I give them a training session where they play around with adding images and typing text to the website. I chose to use Weebly because it’s free, user friendly, some of the students were familiar with it. It also allows you to have up to 10 free sites on your account. This allowed me to give each group their own site to build. I pull up a sample site to build on my smart board and show students how to find images and upload them as well as type text onto the site. Next I give students time to play around with discovering other features and abilities the site has.
Building Your Site
After students have had some time to play around with the site, students go to work with their revisions and typing them onto the sites. In my classroom, students have a desktop at each working station. This allows students easy access to doing collaborative work on the computer. As students are working, I circulate the room working with each group one on one. As students begin, I remind them of the rubric and what I’m looking for from them individually. I also remind students to look back at their drafts and their outlines of the website. This part of the lesson had to be carried on for several days before each group was completely finished.