An introduction and an invitation

[Rob Sbaglia]

Hi,

Thank you for letting me join your community. I'm a Grade 5/6 teacher in Castlemaine, Victoria. I have a particular interest in how technology can enhance teaching and learning, and I'm very much into connecting students using technology.

One of the ways I have done this is through the creation of a Writers' club. This club can be found at http://thenorthschool.com/writersclub .

This site is for students who are passionate about any sort of writing, and would like to share their writing with a wider audience. It may be a site for your strongest writers to gain exposure for their writing and be exposed to the writing of other budding authors in schools around the world. We currently have over a hundred student authors from ten different schools in five different countries all contributing their writing.

The benefits of such a community are:

• Writing is usually text based (though not always). The technological requirements are therefore minimal.
• Because the community is only for passionate writers, the teacher can control how many students are a part of the community, and there are fewer problems with students who don’t want to be a part of the site. Everyone who is there wants to be there.
• Blogging doesn’t require time-zones to align. Students can contribute what they want, how often they want, when they want.
• There is no need to change any curriculum. Students can put up narrative pieces, persuasive pieces, information texts, or any other writing they would normally do in class.
• Students instantly get a global audience for their writing. We are already seeing spontaneous cross-school connections, initiated solely by students.

Participating students will receive a blog to share their work. There is no cost to do this and no advertising appears on our site.

If you are interested in providing your students with an opportunity to share their writing, please contact us at [e-mail], or fill in the form on the 'Join Us' page.

Anyway, thank you again for letting me into your community, and I look forward to learning from you all.

 

[Rob Sbaglia]

Hi everyone,

Since posting this, our community has expanded to 676 student writers from 32 schools in 13 countries. If you're interested in joining us, please email me at the above address or fill in the form at http://thenorthschool.com/writersclub/join-us/

Cheers,

Rob.