Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh

Informational Newsletter
Volume 96, Number 4
/projects/ckp/newsletter/v96n4.html

Using the World Wide Web in the English/Writing Classroom

The web brings to the English/Writing classroom resources that are fluid and powerful. The Internet offers full-text version of over 1,000 literary classics. These can be downloaded, saved and printed in sections or whole. Did you want your students to read chapter three of the Red Badge of Courage? Go to Project Gutenberg, download the electronic text for chapter three, and print it as a word processing file from your local computer.

The web site for the National Writing Project (NWP) links its many regional groups and provides pointers to a wide variety of Internet resources. Did you want to link up with teachers in Canada who use the NWP writing process in their classrooms? The web site gives email addresses and locations of all NWP participants.

Locally, the 3Rivers Poetry Forum provides a showcase for Pittsburgh Public School student-writers as well as Western Pennsylvania writers. PPS students and teachers can submit writing for publication to the Forum.

The following web locations can serve as starting points for the English/Writing classroom.

Electronic Books - http://www.usc.edu/Research/ebooks.html Alex allows users to find and retrieve the full-text of documents on the Internet. It currently indexes over 700 books and shorter texts by author and title, incorporating texts from Project Gutenberg, Wiretap, the On-line Book Initiative, the Eris system at Virginia Tech, the English Server at Carnegie Mellon University, and the on-line portion of the Oxford Text Archive.

The English Server at CMU - Graphical View - http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/images/ In 1991 the CMU English Department funded the hardware necessary for a server, to be run by graduate students, for the public distribution of research, criticism, novels, hypertext, and miscellaneous writings from humanities disciplines. Today the Server has 125 members, over 18,500 files in all areas of the arts and humanities, and over 200,000 readers per week.

The National Writing Project - http://www-gse.berkeley.edu/Research/NWP/nwp.html The National Writing Project is a collaborative university/school staff development program to improve the teaching and learning of writing in the nation's classrooms. It is a university-based teacher-centered program. The Project had its start in 1973 at the University of California at Berkeley. Presently there are 161 sites in the U.S. and 5 sites outside in Canada and Europe.

3Rivers Poetry Forum - http://sparta.schenley.pps.pgh.pa.us/user/zinga/rivers/3r.html The 3Rivers Poetry Forum is a local resource for showcasing PPS student writers as well as Western Pennsylvania writers. The Forum has writing from the 5th grade students at Liberty Elementary, the Peabody High School Writing Workshop and the Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop. Coming this spring will be writers from Frick Middle School and Schenley High School. PPS teachers are welcome to submit student writing for publication on the Forum.

Other English/Writing/Reading Resources

enews - The Ultimate Magazine Site - http://www.enews.com/

Shakespeare, Complete Works - http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/works.html

The St. Andrews Science Fiction and Fantasy Society - http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_sa/socs/sff-soc/home_simple.html

Newsgroup: misc.writing - news:misc.writing

Newsgroup: misc.writing.screenplays - news:misc.writing.screenplays

Project Wiretap - http://www.his.se/ida/~di2benli/books.html

Online reading - http://www.csd.uu.se/general/on-line.html

Superlibrary - http://orion.alaska.edu/~asmiw/etextlib.html

Roget's Thesaurus - http://humanities.uchicago.edu/forms_unrest/ROGET.html

Bartlett's Quotations - http://www.cc.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/bartlett/

Dictionary of Acronyms - gopher://info.mcc.ac.uk/11/miscellany/acronyms

Frequently Asked Questions

Question: Is the Internet a good vehicle for collaborative writing activitites?

Answer: It is too early to tell. There are many examples of collaborations accomplished by exchanging files, but the Internet as a tool for "workshopping" a piece of writing in real-time has some missing pieces.

Obtaining Help

Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh maintains a number of email addresses that provide users with online help. If you have an account on the system and would like to obtain answers to common questions, send email to:

resources@pps.pgh.pa.us (curricular assistance)

trouble@pps.pgh.pa.us (technical assistance, Macslip and PCslip help)

info@ckp.edu (information pertaining to Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh)

If you are a PPS employee and would like an Internet account, call us at 622-5930.