Destination: Online Grammar Exercises

Foundation

When we assign grammar exercises from a handbook, we end up with a stack of papers to grade. Wouldn't it be nice to assign a grammar exercise and then on the due date look online to see the student's score--already graded?

Whether we assign grammar exercises to an individual student for special work or to a whole class, having students work these exercises online provides a number of advantages to you as well as the student.

Advantages:

1) Depending upon the site, these exercises can provide immediate feedback to students as well as additional review materials if needed.

2) They also tally the grade for you, the teacher, saving you time.

3) Most sites have a large number of exercises, so it is easy to point your student to additional exercises if necessary.

Practice

Exercise Central (http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/exercisecentral/index.htm) from Bedford/St. Martin's is an excellent site. It offers exercises related to most all their composition texts and handbooks. For students to use the site, they must register by providing their email as well as your email address. Instructors, if they wish to receive reports of student activities, must register also. Registration provides instructors with a passcode for accessing student results.

Exercise Central is an excellent resource, but you probably will want to walk your students through using it the first time. It has many options for exercises to choose from, so it can be easy to get lost. Also, the quizzes are composed in Question Mark Perception, so exact answers must be provided or an answer is marked wrong (i.e. typos result in an answer being marked wrong).  As an instructor you have many options for how you view student results.

Guide to Grammar and Writing http://cctc2.commnet.edu/grammar/index.htm is essentially a handbook online. Written by Charles Darling from Capital Community College in Connecticut, it is one of the most used and linked to grammar sites on the web. Many pages on grammatical issues are accompanied with PowerPoint presentations as well as quizzes. These quizzes provide immediate feedback for students, but the site is not set up to track or report student's work.

Sentence Sense (http://cctc2.commnet.edu/sensen/index.html), written by Evelyn Farber and prepared for the web by Charles Darling, is an excellent and interactive site for students to actively learn and test their knowledge. Although the site is not a comprehensive handbook, it covers most all the major writing and grammar topics that you might wish to cover from sentence fragments to combining sentences.

This site would be particularly useful if you wished to focus on an issue like sentence fragments or fixing run-ons. It has a complete chapter on these topics with multiple pages reviewing the topic. Accompanying each tutorial are "application" exercises that are not tracked or reported, but students will receive immediate feedback on how they did. In addition, each chapter has a Mastery Test at the end which is reported to the instructor. The authors have included a 72 page study guide with guidance to instructors for how to use the site. Instructors must register with the site and receive password protected access to view the Mastery Test results.

Starting in the Spring of 2005, SAC should have PLATO available for teachers to use with their students. More later.