Teaching Kids to Write on the Internet (FREEBIE)

With the beginning of school upon us, many of us are introducing Internet literacy activities and websites to our students. After introducing my kids to Edmodo and letting them make ToonDoos last week, I realized that we needed a lesson on appropriate grammar and usage for writing on the Internet. After some thought, I came up with this anchor chart:

The goal was to help students see that an author's purpose for writing and the people who will be reading the writing determine the rules for what and how they compose. I did this lesson before ever having students begin posting on KidBlog, and it was a huge help! It was really great, because instead of ME telling them it was unacceptable to use symbols or lower case letters on a blog post, they came to that realization themselves! Here's a picture of what our classroom chart looked like:

You would not have believed the shocked faces I saw when my kiddos realized that their Internet projects and blog posts could be seen by anybody. That really started to put things into perspective for them. Once they started writing their first blog posts, they were very conscientious about spelling, punctuation, and capital letters. These were probably the BEST (most correct) first posts I've ever had! This is something I will definitely repeat year after year.

Now, on to your FREEBIE! I created a file for you to use to teach the lesson in two formats: Promethean flipchart and PowerPoint. I also included the PowerPoint file I used to create the words and pictures for my anchor chart. Feel free to change and adapt as needed! (Just link back if you post about it).

You can download the entire zipped file here.

How about you? Have you done something similar to this? I'd love to hear your insights.

You can find this post and other Common Core lessons here: