Writing in digital spaces will provide learning opportunities you won’t get from traditional writing assignments.
Read the article:
1) Writing is an integral part in most classes. Which of the four (4) learning opportunities mentioned in the article do you feel is the most valuable for students to experience in your class? Why?
- Digital Spaces
- Real Audience
- Collaborative writing Peer Editing
- Digital Citizenship
2) Which of these opportunities is the most challenging to implement in your classroom? Why?
3) Other classroom connections or thoughts? Do you agree or disagree with the article?
Having my students learn how to write in digital spaces is most valuable in my class. With the growth of technology, history has become much more dynamic and the amount of resources available to teachers and students has grown exponentially. Students need to learn how to access a multitude of resources, cross-reference the information to determine accuracy, use this information to help them support their beliefs, and they need to be able to integrate that information and those resources into their writing. Writing in digital spaces allows students to support their arguments/beliefs with things like primary sources (that they could link to in their writing), videos, and pictures/photographs making their writing not only well-supported, but more interesting and interactive for their audience (me included).
ReplyDeleteThe most difficult learning opportunity to implement will be the “Real Audience,” because I am unfamiliar with the avenues students can utilize to share their information with those outside of Arapahoe. Furthermore, this would provide students with an opportunity to share their information and communicate with the world which is good, but opens up “security” issues I would need to address (similar to the guidelines we use for Blogger-all good skills for them to learn).
The article was concise and did a great job of helping me think about my classroom and how to use technology in a different way. It is information like this that will help me to change the way I think about lesson planning and teaching my classroom. This article demonstrated different and better ways to make writing more efficient, effective, and engaging for the students and I will be well on my way to making the paradigm shift necessary for being a “Connected Learner” teacher.
I would agree with the first comment. The vast majority of the writing that I am doing in my classes this semester is found on google docs. I have had them reference seminar documents but had not thought about linking to them - I plan on doing this in the future. Another tool that I just discovered and most of my students were not aware of was the research tool. As I get more comfortable with the abilities of Google docs I hope to implement this in my assignments and expectations for my students.
ReplyDeleteI also think "real audience" is the hardest aspect of the use of technology. Students are living in digital age and are often sharing their voice in some many different ways that I think they forget about the formality of "school work". A simple example I often find is them writing their seminar/formal writings with several words not capitalized, red error marks throughout their document, slang words etc. I used to think that anything publicized was a big deal and should be my best work... for our students - most if not all of their work (text messages, fb, twitter etc) is all publicized.... I need to stress the difference and make sure they take that into account when they are writing in a educational/formal setting.
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