Online mentors help fourth graders compose original stories

Title: Authors "in Residence" Make Writing Fun!
Author: Chelsea Hagins, Jackie Austin, Raven Jones, and Taylor Timmons

This Article was about an online writing mentor (who is a childrens author) that helped 4 fourth graders with their original stories. The writers would email their stories to the mentor and the mentor would respond with praise, constructive criticism, and ways the children could improve their stories. The children responded well and in the end they revealed that writing on computers and having someone all to themselves to read and edit their work allowed them to enjoy writing and understand how to write better, more creative stories. I felt that this was a great idea but that it would be very hard to hook up with an actual childrens author to mentor kids in an elementary school. I also think it would be difficult to choose just 4 or a low amount of kids to do this when in reality, all kids should get the opportunity to.

Q1: How could I change this approach to include all the kids in my classroom?
A1: I think it would be really interesting to try and hook up with a high school class or even a college class to evaluate and read my elementary class's work. I think we could even use blogger.com for children to type their work and receive comments from upper classmen. I think that by hooking up with another class, the students could have personal mentors and work one on one rather than sharing mentors.
Q2: How could I incorporate typing in my classroom other than doing this program?
A2: When I was in school, we never had to type anything. But since computers are a necessity and a part of everyday life, I think it is important for young children to learn how to type. I also think that typing allows children to enjoy writing more because it is more "fun" and less tiring than writing with a pencil and paper. I think I would just tell the children to type essays or other class writings rather than writing them for homework, or if I had a sufficient amount of computers in class they could even do class work on the computer.