Sharing the Addiction

This is just a quick post to say that I have put together a couple of instructional pages on how to use the Track Changes and Comment features in Pages (Mac) when doing collaborative writing work in class. At the end of the instructions, there is an editing and proofreading checklist for children to use as part of this process.

I would try to embed the code but I think it won’t work so well due to the size of the window, so here is the link to where I have uploaded this to Scribd. Feel free to use this in any way you like if it is useful to you.

Tags: "collaborative writing", pages, scribd

Yes – this is a kid friendly site despite the name sounding as if it might not be!

It is great fun and would be a great way to encourage writing for children. You can make pictures and cards by choosing a background and dragging on characters which you can resize, rotate and add speech bubbles to.

You can also put backgrounds with scenes on them together in a sequence and make a storybook in this way. When making a movie, each character you add has a number of actions that you can programme them to do. You take one of the available actions and drag it up into the timeline. You can continue building up a sequence of these actions with a range of characters. You can also add special effects. This is great fun and takes perseverance as well. It could be considered a kids way to program (it reminds me of Alice but at a lower level). Like the storybook option, you can add more scenes to your movie to create a longer story.

To get the content off the site, you can print but you can only view the video online.

This is a great tool. You could use it to create the beginning of a story and print it and then children write the middle and ending. This is just one idea – I’m sure you could think of many other uses.