Community Talk

The purpose of this project is to develop learners' creativity and autonomy. You are the decision maker and the creator. However, here are some tips that can help you make your text more effective and interesting.

CONTENT
Feel free to choose any topic and form of expression you like, provided you respect our Code of Conduct.
In short : do not post anything that would be considered inappropriate at school.

ORIGINALITY
All contributions must be written by the participants themselves. Plagiarism in any form will not be tolerated and will cause ban from this and any future contests. We do not want to have anything to do with frauds.
Your teachers can give you some advice and help improve accuracy, but not to write instead of you. In case of doubt, we may ask you to write a passage within a limited period of time to prove your command of the language.
We encourage your creativity and skills development. You should practice multimedia writing, i.e. combining text with images, videos, sounds, animations, etc.
These too should be yours, not borrowed from the internet. In case you need to use an existent picture, for instance is you are writing about a painter and wish to use their portrait, make sure that the image is not copyright. 

 ASSESSMENT
This Rubric will help you understand what to look at to make your text better.
Here you will see three criteria in the first column, and the description of what will be evaluated as Outstanding, Average or Poor (leaves much to be desired). 
The number under each description is called a "multiplier" and it will be used to determine your score as you can see under the table. 

Criteria	Outstanding	Average	Leaves much to be desired
A. Content  multiplier	Exciting  Informative Funny 3	It's a well-written text, but it does not impress the reader.     2	It's hard to understand the point, there is no idea. Why did the author write this text? 1
B. Quality of the language  multiplier	Free of mistakes,  exact words and diverse structures         3	There are some mistakes, which, however, do not prevent the reader from understanding the message.                   1	The text is hard to understand due to grammar and spelling mistakes, wrong use of words, wrong punctuation 0.5
C. Multimedia (photos, pictures, videos, sound tracks, maps, etc.)	Quality multimedia elements. Multimedia supports the text.  The text explains multimedia. 100 points	The multimedia elements are either of poor quality or do not fully match the text Too many multimedia elements, and not all of them are relevant.  The text has no references to multimedia                  50 points	No multimedia elements          No points

ASSESSMENT EXAMPLES

The score for each submission will be calculated in the following way:

The number of words in each text will be counted and then multiplied by the score gained by Criteria A, B (multiplier) and the score in Criteria C will be added.

Examples:
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1. Zack has submitted a text that contains 130 words. He tells an exciting story about rafting and supports it with a great photo and a video. However, there are several mistakes in his story: wrong punctuation, spelling mistakes and wrong tenses.

So, Zack will get the score of

Criterion A: 130 х 3 = 390
Criterion B: 130 х 1 = 130
Criterion C: 100

Total: 620 - Congratulations! Zack wins a Winner Sticker!
MIND: For adults to get a 5% discount the text should be three times longer, about 350+ words.

2. Joe wrote a long text, 300 words, about the book he was reading. Great job! But Joe didn't make any analysis or evaluation of the book. He limited himself to simple retelling of the plot without adding any value. Why did he write the text? It is not clear – there is nothing to remember from his text. Besides, Joe didn't proofread his text. His sentences are not finished, some words are used incorrectly and make it difficult to understand the message. And Joe didn't upload any illustration. 

So, Joe's submission will be evaluated as follows:
Criterion A: 300 х 1 = 300
Criterion B: 300 х 0.5 = 150
Criterion C: 0

Total: 450 - Sorry, next time Joe will work better and a Winner Sticker will be awarded to him too!

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As you can see from these examples, it is much better to write a shorter quality text than a long and uninteresting one. Think about making a contribution, think about the value you are adding to this project to keep people interested. Leave a good memory in the minds of people.

The moderator will leave a comment under your post and will inform you which bonus you have been awarded. 

You can share your contribution in the social networks by pressing on the icons under the post.

Happy writing!