Guest Post: Using Technology to Teach Writing

Guide for Teachers: How to Teach Writing Through Technology?

As a teacher, you can either choose to assign pointless papers to your students or inspire them to think and facilitate their ability to write. The current writing crisis in our schools comes from one main cause: academic writing being taught as a mechanical process of research, writing and editing. If you want to teach your students to start learning through the writing process, then you need to adjust your teaching style to their needs and learning potential.

As part of every student’s life, technology should not be excluded from the teaching process. By forcing your students to research the library and neglect online tools and resources when writing papers, you are making the entire process boring right from the start. Since your students are being engaged by infographics, videos, hyperlinks and images, you should infuse that digital world to bring some fun and more effectiveness into the classroom.

Although technology doesn’t have all answers to the writing crisis, the right tools can still help you inspire your students to write more and write better. These awesome tools will help you start the revolution:

TitanPad

Your students will love collaborating on writing projects through this platform. The features for instant editing and sharing make the process easier than ever, and you can join the process and monitor their progress in real time. There are eight distinctive author colors to choose from, so the input of each student will be clearly recognizable.

NinjaEssays

As a teacher, you can also rely on the assistance of NinjaEssays when you need to create perfect coursework material.Carissa's Note: I would NOT give this site to students as they essentially are given the option to buy essays.

Zoho Docs

This is another online tool you can recommend for collaborative work. It enables the users to perform bulk uploads and save a lot of time on the go. The other features include: secure file sharing, online file storage, presentation, file synchronization, spreadsheet, Word document, task management, and more. 

Google Docs

Even though there are many writing tools and platforms you can start using, sometimes it is better to start from the basics. No, that doesn’t mean Microsoft Word! Google Docs has a simplistic, clean interface that makes the writing process distraction-free. In addition, your students can also use Google Docs to collaborate on a team project in real time. 

Edublogs

Your students love reading blogs about the things that interest them, so why not use that potential to teach them something really useful? Edublogs is a student-friendly blogging platform that can replace the paper newsletter. You can inspire your students to find interesting online material associated to the concepts they learn at class and write weekly blogs. That is the best way to inspire your students to write, but you’ll also find that the best blogs will lead to fantastic discussions. 

Glogster EDU

This is another great platform that enables its users to explore and create educational content online. You can use some great posts from Glogster to show your students that writing can be fun, and then inspire them to create their own blogs. You can also create teams and assign blogging as a team project.

Improve your teaching methods with the help of technology!

Educational technology offers endless benefits for both teachers and students. It’s no secret that today’s schooling system is burdening students with more writing assignments than they can handle. The only way to help them approach academic writing with enthusiasm is to start relying on technology and infuse some elements of fun and effective collaboration throughout the process.

  

Robert Morris is an English teacher from New York. Find him on Google+.

                  

Technology and Our Memories

Who was the 30th president??

I don't think students need to memorize everything. I distinctly recall numerous teachers telling me not to worry about memorizing dates and facts. It was much more important to them that I understood the basic ideas rather than exact facts. "If you ever need need to know how high Mount Everest is, or how many wives King Henry the VIII had" they explained, "you can look it up in an encyclopedia."

In this day of smart phones most of the time we don't even need to find an encyclopedia. We turn to Google or Wikipedia and find the information we need, and usually I am OK with this.


Many students take this one step further. They don't even feel the need to take notes. Instead they use their smart phones to take a picture of the board.

While I do encourage the use of Google or Wikipedia to help a student understand a basic grasp of something, is technology altering the way our memories work?

A recent study done by Fairfield University shows that when students take a picture of something they are LESS LIKELY to remember it later. This "photo taking impairment effect" is something I discuss with my students the first day.

If they take a picture, and then go home and re-write the notes they will likely remember the information. However, simply by taking the picture they are, in part, telling their brain the information is stored elsewhere and they do not need to remember it.

What about Google? Is Google making our memories weaker? It turns out there are good parts and bad parts to the ease of accessing information online. Since our memories are fallible, it is a way to double check things and be sure that we are using the correct data.

On the other hand, when students aren't taught to properly weed through information on the internet it is very probable that they will find false information and reinforce that. Also, the lack of a basic set of knowledge makes comprehension of the topic (and thus deeper level thinking) much harder to achieve. The infographic below is from www.onlinecolleges.net and does a pretty good job at showing some of the affects.