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Narrator: Infowriter is a powerful visual diagramming tool.
It addresses the Common Core State Standards by organizing ideas
into broad categories and developing a topic with relevant supporting evidence.
It also helps students to revise their work.
InfoWriter doesn't just make
students better writers,
they become better thinkers. By using powerful ideas about thinking
By using powerful ideas about thinking
like concept, definition, and evidence, students are able to understand
and explain what makes great writing.
Shelby: Hi, I'm Shelby and today I am working
on my science assignment about the American Alligator.
I've already written my first draft using the rubric to guide me,
but before I submit for peer-review,
I need to finish mapping out my whole work in InfoWriter.
I've done some work already.
You can see that I have a definition and a preview and I cover five
main concepts: the American Alligator,
its behavior, habitat loss, and climate change.
I've linked each concept and provided some definitions with examples and evidence.
I use the arrows to trace a thread from the concepts
in the introduction, to the evidence in the body,
and then to the conclusion.
This helps me to organize my thinking write in a logical order.
In the last concept, I have a good example,
but I think I could develop with more evidence.
Maybe I could find a quote
or some statistics that show how much of the alligators' habitat
has been taken over.
I'll write myself a comment
to include this when I revise my work.
Janet Austiff: They physicall have to find what they're looking for inside
the piece of writing. If you had a student
use this paper pencil, they would look at it and they would say,
"oh, it's there," and then they would move. In InfoWriter,
they have to definitely find evidence, they have to find the ideas,
and they have to interactively show
the pieces within InfoWriter.
Drew DeRose: I highlited and I finished my entire thing.
And I would connect the arrows to all the different boxes of literary elements,
and I would read to make sure it all flowed together
and made sense. And so, if I
noticed something didn't make sense, there was another tab straight within InfoWriter
I could go back into my text
and fix it , and I could edit it as I go along.
I did ask some students how they felt about InfoWriter and I got a really
positive reviews and feedback.
The students said it really made them think about their writing,
and I could see them thinking as they were using it. yeah I know
Yeah, I know it helped me
because I realized after I did this and
and made this flow chart that I needed to
add a couple more things to my writing before I did my final draft.
Drew DeRose: And it really helped us to organize our writing,
and it would show us maybe we need a little bit more evidence, or
a better conclusion to it. And it really helped to flow
our writing and organize it.
Tim Van Swol: I really expected them to be a little bit
apprehensive and and worried about how they
went about it, but they really haven't.
They just kinda took to it; they like the idea just clicking on things
and starting to make connections.
It's almost like drawing, I think, like
almost play, but it was productive play for the kids to work
with their writing.
Narrator: InfoWriter has an event time-line.
This records the path students take as they create their concept maps.
See how the bar at the top shows the order that Shelby
followed as she mapped out her writing?
It shows her thinking and she uses InfoWriter,
and how well she understands the structure of an information report.
Shelby: Scholar and InfoWriter are brought to you by world-leading and literacy educators
and educational technology developers at the University of Illinois
and Common Ground Publishing. Scholar and InfoWriter work any computer
with an Internet connection and
a recent browser; no installation needed. Scholar and InfoWriter support learners to
achieve the Common Core Standards and gives teachers to tools to transform
learning in their classroom.