Response to "Why Use Digital Writing to Engage Students?"

As this chapter points out, Web 2.0 applications serve as a powerful tools to motivate writing and improve critical thinking. One of the most motivational pieces is that online writing makes their writing public or "published". Authentic writers publish, or share their writing with their intended audiences. Too often, we teachers skip over this part of the writing process because it takes too much time or it doesn't seem valuable, when in actuality this is one of the primary purposes for writing. This helps our students become authentic writers. Further, the statistic that 78% of our students believe more digital writing for the classroom would help them improve their writing skills is pretty overwhelming. Coupled with the fact that self-initiated digital writing leads to more writing, it is clear that teachers need to take advantage of this powerful tool.

I also appreciate that online writing takes advantage of the social connection and collaboration. Each year in my ISAT English classes (I teach a new group each semester), I have students complete a learning inventory based on Gardner's multiple intelligences to determine which of the 8 intelligences most strongly inform their preferred learning styles. For the last five years almost without fail, their strongest intelligences are social and kinesthetic. My personal belief is that the students who wind up in my class find themselves there because they are never--or rarely--taught as social or kinesthetic learners. Digital writing helps them be more collaborative and social learners.

A concern I have about using more digital writing in the classroom are the need for more resources and access to computers and the internet. I teach in a fairly rural school setting, and many of my students do not have computers at their homes. The authors of this text suggest encouraging children to use the public library, but for many of my students this is simply not a possibility. Digitally speaking, I need to limit my assignments to what I can give students access to during the 55 minutes I have them in the classroom. This does pose a challenge.

A second challenge is that, as Clay Burell points out, we need to make sure blogging doesn't simply become another way to turn in homework. Blogging needs to be purposeful and students need to be able to use its unique features to critically engage in inquiry and writing.

I agreed with the comments that students need to understand the purpose behind using web 2.0 tools as learning devices. For example, we need to help them understand when we are using an online debate as a means of furthering persuasive writing. I also agree with the authors that an online presence can sometimes blur distinctions between private and public, education and entertainment. We need to be careful to communicate expectations to students.

As I read, I found myself wondering if there is a saturation point for students with online writing. For example, one of the projects described the use of class-based wikis, where knowledge could build from a previous class. I wonder if there is a point at which this would stop being useful, as students might simply run out of information to add or topics to research. I also found myself wondering if an online persona that is different from a student's actual personality is necessary. I can understand the usefulness of adopting another viewpoint in an online debate, for example, but the author added this as one of the key advantages of online writing, and I'm not certain it's necessary...

I appreciated the list of tips to protect online safety for children. It would be nice to get a list of netiquette practices to distribute to students.

In all, this chapter has set me up to look forward to reading the rest of the book.