Technology Use in the Classroom

During this past summer I had the wonderful opportunity to take part in the Yellowstone Writing Project, which is a local site of the National Writing Project. The National Writing Project is a resource and community that I knew very little about during my first two years teaching, but I wish I had known more. While I have visited the main website a few times over the semester, it wasn’t until Collin Gifford Brooke re-introduced me to Google Reader that I have actively been following an online “conversation” between two people as a follow-up to NWP’s Digital Writing Month. As Anna Smith explains, “As two explorers during Digital Writing Month, Kevin Hodgson and I, Anna Smith, have decided to continue that conversation through consideration of digital literacies and contemporary composition by coordinating a multimodal conversation that begins with the idea of Digital Writing Month and then stretches outwards from there” (Smith’s hyperlinks). You can read Anna’s first blog post here, which gets the conversation started, and the video embedded below is Kevin’s first response.

As part of the conversation, both participants are engaging in reflection. As Kevin Hodgson writes, “We also want to reflect on how those platforms inform our writing." Here you can see his reflection on the video. Writing this way, through a variety of digital platforms, is the type of writing we should be striving to include in all of our writing courses.

           

To see Kevin's Post, please click here

Although Jody Shipka argues that multimodality is not exclusively associated with technology, she presents a convincing argument for asking students to create writing that is multimodal rather than monomodal, or straight alphabetic-text. She writes, “A mediated activity-based multimodal framework not only requires that students work hard but also differently, and it does so by foregrounding the complex processes associated with goal formation and attainment” (100). What Shipka is advocating for is inquiry-based learning. She and others see multimodal writing as a way to engage students in their own learning and decision making processes. Rather than passively writing a monomodal, alphabetic-text that answers a prompt, multimodal writing provides students “with tasks that do not specify what their final products must be and that ask them to imagine alternative contexts for their work”, and if this occurs, then students will “come away from the course with a more expansive, richer repertoire of meaning-making and problem-solving strategies” (Shipka 101). Looking back at the digital conversation between Anna and Kevin, we can see this decision making process in action. Kevin chose to do a video for his first post because, as he says, “Video allows us to see and hear each other, which is what I am hoping for. The format will give us an initial connection beyond the Twitter and blog texts, where we imagine our voices” (Hodgson). Even though Kevin and Anna are adults who are choosing to participate in this project, in the context of students, they have had to pick a goal and decide the best means of achieving it. Both participants realized the limitations of just one modality—blogging or Twitter, which are heavily based on written text—and so they are trying to incorporate other modalities to attain the goal of continuing this conversation. Just as importantly, as Kevin recognizes, is the need to reflect on this process in order to recognize the choices being made. As Shipka points out, “The questions comprising the SOGC ask students to focus specifically on the texts they produce in response to a task and to catalog the various rhetorical, material, methodological, and technological choices they made with their work” (118). This, Shipka argues, is really where the learning takes place. It is here that students are truly practicing rhetoric by justifying their composition choices.

However, just including technology in the writing classroom is not enough. As this article indicates, there are better ways to incorporate technology. New media should not be used to just replace what is already being done with traditional essays, but rather the entire way we conceptualize writing and what it looks like needs to be revised. At the beginning of his book Lingua Fracta, Collin Gifford Brooke gives a great example of how just using new media does not necessarily result in re-thinking writing. He argues against MaryLynn Saul’s essay “The Limitations of Hypertext in the Composition Classroom,” by noting that “Her study rests on the assumption that hypertext has little to do with writing, that it is simply a technology which can be added or subtracted from a writing classroom without any appreciable effect on the goals, aims, purposes, or strategies of the classroom or of the writers themselves” (21). In other words, it is not the technology itself that makes good writing or good writers. Instead, it is the use of the technology, the deliberate choices and defined purposes that make using new media in the classroom powerful. For instance, Doering, Beach, and O’Brien explain, “Given this ready access to these broader, even world-wide audiences, adolescents must then know how to go beyond simply creating multimodal texts to knowing how to design these texts using visual rhetoric to effectively attract, engage, and influence their audiences” (41). As these authors are showing, writing teachers need to not only rethink the tools we use in the classroom, but the assignments as well. It is not enough to just ask students to write a traditional paper anymore. Instead, we need to be asking them to compose via new media and our assignments should demand the use of these skills.

Obviously technology has become a large part of our everyday lives, and as I discussed in “Technology Language in the Common Core,” it is making its way into the classroom. There is language in place to encourage teachers to start thinking about how to use technology effectively. Dana J. Wilber explains, “Our students choose from email, text messaging, instant messaging, blogs, Facebook/MySpace and other social networks, Twitter, social bookmarking, Google Earth, digital storytelling, and more to communicate daily. Not everything they do belongs in the classroom. But it makes sense for us, as teachers, to know about these technologies since they occupy so much of our students’ lives and because they are a big part of the ways in which students read and write today” (x-xi). Besides language in documents such as the Common Core, there are organizations, like the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills, that are advocating to “help the U.S. education system keep up by fusing the 3Rs and the 4Cs (Critical thinking and problem solving, Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity and innovation)” (Partnership for 21^st Century Skills). Especially at the primary and secondary level, teachers are being pushed by administrators, districts, and states to include more technology in the classroom. Generally, this push is working. In a survey I conducted, 66.7% of respondents reported they had been “asked to create projects or complete assignments that utilized technology outside of producing a traditional paper or presentation” in their English classrooms. The results from the survey can be seen on the “Survey Results” page, and I also have a podcast discussing the implications of the results.

Whether focusing solely on technology or not, multimodal writing using new media should be a focus in our writing classrooms. As these authors have shown, it is time to move beyond assigning our students writing prompts that only ask them to answer a question instead of asking them to solve a problem and justify how they go about presenting their solution. If we do this, we are preparing students to much more effectively tackle all types of writing assignments, and we are teaching them about the impact their choices have on the reception of their final product.

For examples further examples of digital writing in the classroom, check out this blog post by Rachel Bear, who provides links to her class wikis at the top of the post.