Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

4.18.11 | In “Writing Re-Launched: Teaching with Digital Tools,” Education Week’s Liana Heitin explores how teachers across the country are incorporating new digital modes of expression and presentation into how they teach writing.

Seventh-graders in Maryland, for example, conclude their research project on the challenges minorities faced during World War II with oral presentations using interactive posters and word clouds. Advance literature students in New York write poetry and shoot video while visiting a local nature preserve and then use the raw material to make their own short films. And in California, second-graders learn narrative by making virtual puppet shows on the classroom’s iPads. 

Advocates say expectations of how we communicate are changing, and it’s important to arm students with the skills they’ll need as future employees and citizens. That means teaching digital literacy as a core part of writing instruction.

“Just because the tools we use to write and publish might be getting easier to use, doesn’t mean writing itself is getting any easier,” Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, director of national programs and site development for the National Writing Project, says in a recent video.

To be able to write well, educators say students need to understand purpose and audience. Writing is still about thinking and composing, but it has also become about integrating pictures and sound and weaving all media together.

“Now that we can all actually see our writing be published,” Eidman-Aadahl said, “we probably have to engage with the fact that we really are writers. When we put something on YouTube we really are a video maker. When we build a website we really are a content publisher. We have to be really attentive to craft. We have to take more responsibility for what we put out there.”

Educators such as Joel Malley, a high school English teacher in Cheektowaga, N.Y., say that because it assumes audience, digital writing helps students learn to write more clearly and with purpose.

“When they’re blogging, they’re not just writing for me,” Malley told Education Week. “They found out last year that the more compelling their voice was and if they were funny and insightful, the more readers and comments they got. That drives them.”

Joseph McCaleb, director of the University of Maryland Writing Project, told Education Week that digital tools help his students to address issues they care deeply about, “for example by filming a public service announcement about recycling or creating a slideshow about the challenges of finding clean water in Haiti.”

“It’s so much easier teaching writing when you’ve got kids feeling purposeful,” he says. “Digital media is so ripe for that.”

Eidman-Aadahl, who is also interviewed in Education Week, says assignments should match the writing experience students have in the world outside of school. They need experience writing “in a form people will actually read,” she said.

In the past, collaborative writing was often considered cheating, Eidman-Aadahl said. But today it’s a necessary skill for the workforce. Google Docs, for example, allows students to easily share information online and add to and edit each other’s work. It also allow teachers to work closely with students during the writing process. One high school English teacher is assigning collaborative research papers to pairs of students to work on in Google Docs. [For another example, see this Spotlight video].

Though there are many edtech bloggers and advocates recommending myriad apps and digital tools to teachers, few organizations have been as involved and skillful at guiding educators through this transition as the National Writing Project. The NWP’s network of teacher-led local writing project sites supports quality professional development that helps teachers learn to weave information technology into pedagogy in a meaningful way.

As the Education Week piece notes:

“The caveat to using digital tools, many tech-savvy educators note, is to keep focused on instructional goals, and not use technology simply for technology’s sake. It’s best to “find the appropriate technology to mesh with what the teacher’s already doing well,” says the University of Maryland’s McCaleb, “not to force it in.”

Plus: We’ve covered NWP’s work quite a bit before, including the bad news that Congress eliminated direct funding for the NWP and a number of other education programs. You can learn more about the fight to continue to provide this vital support to teachers and students at NWPworks.ning.com. If you’re an educator who has benefitted from one of NPW’s programs, now is the time to share your story.