Ed Tech Geek

I have recently read an excerpt from Linda Hoyt’s Make it Real, Strategies for Success with Informational Texts, and I currently have all kinds of wonderful ideas for teaching writing floating around in my head. Many of these ideas are sending memories flooding back to me from my own days in grade school, and some of the strategies my own teachers used. I love watching a class participate in a shared writing assignment together. It is always interesting to see what a whole class can collectively create. Now the big question is how can you integrate technology into these ideas in a way that supports the lessons, but is also transparent and unobtrusive to the process?

Using technology in language arts has always been very interesting to me, but I also find it one of the more challenging subjects in which to use instructional technology. When I have discussed language arts with teachers in the past and ideas for using technology to support their writing workshops, modeled writing and even reading comprehension prior to a writing response I tend to find a common answer amongst many teachers…”our students use technology in language arts more then they do in any subject because they type up their final papers,” or “students take so long to type that they get to spend plenty of time on the computer for writing.” Yikes! This response just leaves me scratching my head and trying to decide how I can turn the conversation around.

My own personal experience with technology as a child was that prior to honing true keyboarding skills, the computer was actually a bottleneck for all of the ideas and thoughts that I was trying to record. I could web, write, rearrange and organize my thoughts so much faster on paper and the thought of sitting down to a blank word processor and being told to start writing was terrifying to me. It is very interesting that now I much prefer to do all of my writing on the computer because I can now type faster then I write, but I digress.

Inspiration software or any other software for graphically mapping out concepts and ideas is a great way to actually incorporate technology into the process of writing, and not just the creation of the final product. The one area that I love to see technology support in language arts is visuals. This doesn’t require students to compare their typing skills to the student next to them, and look at the clock to see just how little time they have left to finish their paper. Instead, it just encourages them to think. As a class or in a small group guided writing could greatly be enhanced by the use of some projected photographs, images or even a well structured diagram. You can ask students to describe, explain and get the words flowing based on what they see.

The common concept that I found throughout Hoyt’s writing was to actively teach writing, and have students actively participate in the process. This seems so profound, but in reality it was interesting to see how many different ways there were to do this. The majority of the ideas incorporated a wonderful final product that could be utilized by the students as a resource. In many of these ideas, the group was creating this product together. I think it would be useful for a class to use technology as the medium to create this final product, because we are now in a world where we are learning “24-7” and students are going to be practicing writing at home as well as in school. Capturing that resource digitally so that it could be accessed both from home as well as in school could enhance the result of the lesson.