Yes playing the waiting game for articles to be turned in has been quite frustrating. Right now, I am in the process of reading through the submitted articles just to get a feel of my participants' writing. The level of voice, word choice, and audience awareness varied from participant to participant. Reviewing my previous post, reading through Participant K's submitted article about "Bullying," her article presented a strong voice and awareness of her audience. She opened with questions to the reader and made connections to today's methods of communication (ie: Facebook and Instagram). I was quite impressed :) Participant J's article took a more impersonal and informative route, I felt; nothing wrong with it, it was just different and not as strong of a connection to the audience, but to each his own.
What is to come...I plan to review the submitted articles and grade them based on the ReadWriteThink Rubric that I am using for my research. I also plan to compare each article to the student generated list, of requirements of what makes a good article, to give a more authentic assessment for each participant. I will also have each participant assess their own article, then I hope to compare their assessment with my own.
How are you publishing the newspaper? How are you sharing with the school? I can't remember the answers to those. Didn't you also plan to have a writing sample from each participant from before the newspaper project and after the newspaper project? A classroom sample would be powerful--see if you can get that from their classroom teachers--have them select 2 representative writing samples from before your project started.
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