Stephanie,
     My university has a subscription to the OED, so we are able to access it free from university computers (or by going through the library site.) Tracing the history of a word (or construction) is fun for students and leads to predictable and unpredictable insights.
   The Urban slang dictionary is lots of fun.
    One teacher using my book asked if I would be open to an online discussion, and I was happy to say yes. For a two or three day window (I forget how long), they had a "talk to the writer of the book" thread. I suspect many authors would be happy to say yes to that.

Craig

Beth Young wrote:

[log in to unmask]" type="cite">

Hi Stephanie,

I think you have all my "grammar voyeur" ideas . . . those would work well as in-class activities, I think.  Have students search (individually or in groups) and make a contest to see who can find the most examples of passive voice, sentence adverbs, or whatever you're studying.  

You could also have students research "peeve" sites and then you could check to see what credible reference works say about those peeves.  Or you could have students explore/compare different reference sites during class & report to the whole group: Merriam Webster's regular dictionary compared to its open dictionary, or different dictionary sites, or some of the other sites that students may not know about: visual thesaurus, wordnik, etc.  

Stephen Colbert's website has a "word generator" that is fun for a morphology activity--you put a base word in, and it adds a bunch of crazy suffixes.

A computer classroom is also a great setup for anything requiring writing or rewriting.  e.g., Take punctuation out of a sentence--leave that unpunctuated sentence on the screen--switch computers and try to put the punctuation back in to the sentence on that computer.  

David West Brown has written what looks like a fabulous book filled with grammar activities & lessons.  I'll bet that some of these could be adapted to your situation.  In Other Words: Lessons on Grammar, Code-Switching, and Academic Writing. Heinemann, 2009. ISBN-13: 978-0-325-02188-1

I hope that you'll share your successes with us as the semester continues!

Beth

"Schlitz, Stephanie" <[log in to unmask]> 09/07/10 8:24 PM >>>

Dear Colleagues, 

I was assigned to teach my English Grammar course (text: Morenberg's Doing Grammar 4th ed) in a computer lab this semester. While in the past I've found no need for my grammar students to use computers during class, since we do have computers this term, I'm greatly interested in any ideas others may have for leveraging computers/internet access during class. 

Thanks very much for any ideas you can offer. 

Stephanie
--------
Stephanie A. Schlitz, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Linguistics and English
106B Bakeless Hall
Bloomsburg University

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