I Don’t Feel Like Writing (2008)

Raising Boys’ Achievement and Interest in Writing – Regional ICT Conference Presentation by Spencer Cartwright 2nd July 2008

Today I spoke at the Regional ICT Conference at UWE on the subject of Boys’ Writing and offered ICT based strategies and resources to help motivate and engage boys more in the writing process with the aim of raising attainment.

The Regional Conference is always a wonderful event and I always come back buzzing with new ideas and inspiration. We’ll endeavour to post a full report on here in the next week or so. The aim of this post is to provide support material and quick links to resources I used in the presentation.  A ’stripped down’ version of some of the presenation slides is available from the SWGfL’s Conference page, along with the other presentations from the day.

Raising Attainment

Following the last available SATs analysis, there are several key features of writing that can be developed further in order to achieve a higher level of attainment. I suggested that these could be arranged into three broad headings -  Sentence Structure, Sentence Content and Paragraphs.

Visual Literacy

There has been a number of projects and initiatives using visual literacy as a way of bringing another dimension to working with texts in the classroom. With the presentation technology of projectors, speaker systems and interactive whiteboards, the modern classroom is a great environment to make the most of what the rich and diverse material available has to offer.

I’m suggesting that the cinematic techniques and visual shorthand that is used in film and television production, can be used to support children in the structuring of their writing. After all, children are very media aware and are immersed in this rich visual world every day. The language of visual literacy is a language that they are already familiar with and seem to pick up almost intuitively.

For example:

Film Technique	Writing Style		Film Technique	Writing Style
Close up	More detail and description		Reaction Shots	Character viewpoints & emotions
Shot Composition	Place adverbials		Special Effects	Word play
Establishing Shots	Settings & time connectives		Slow motion	Sentence length & structure

Resources

AVS DVD Player – free DVD software that has a capture frame tool (also see Wendy’s post on capturing screen shots from Windows Media Player)

DVD Ripper – trial version of AOA DVD ripper which allows up to 10 minutes of a DVD to be converted into a file format to use with PowerPoint or other software. Please respect copyright.

PhotoFiltre – free image editing software that has a range of tools allowing photographs to be manipulates. Also see this post.

Photo Story 3 – Microsoft’s animated sideshow software

Comic Book Creator, Comic Life and Kar2ouche can all be used by children to create alternative to written texts while exploring characterisation and settings.

The BBC’s Dr Who site has a Comic Maker and also the Trailer Maker. Blue Peter have a Comic Book Maker too!

Anasazi - Free Stop Frame animation software. A great tutorial can be found here from Brickfilms.com. Also take a look at Cleoflics from the Cumbria & Lancashire Grid.

Teachers’ TV – great programs on Boys’ Writing (1 and 2) and Story Starts (1 and 2).

See our Helpsheets page for advice on creating mulitmodal texts and extracting elements from photographs and replacing backgrounds. There are also related posts on our blog here, here and here!

Finally, a version of the PowerPoint that I used today can be viewed here. Please note, this isn’t the full multimedia animated version due to size and copyright restrictions.

I would love to receive any feedback and in particular how you used any of these ideas or resources with children. Please leave a comment below or if you prefer, please email me.