Starting Points for Teaching Writing with Technology

Students working in a computer classroom are working differently than they would in a traditional classroom. Copies of text are easy to share. Words can be copied and pasted, deleted, and revised with ease. Online discussion tools—class email lists, Web boards, MOOs, chatrooms, and so on—provide places to record conversations about course topics, the writing students are doing, their research projects, and more.

Consider some of the following ways to use technology to enhance writing, thinking, and communication in your classroom.

• Teach students to store and manage files.
  Gets to the heart of drafting, sharing work for peer review, and keeping a portfolio.

• Teach students to copy and paste.
  Addresses internal reorganization of an essay, addresses copying text from other sources and pasting it into one's own writing—what are tips and strategies writers can use to both wisely?

• Teach students to modify grammar checkers.
  Teaches the uses and limits of grammar checkers and helps students break up their reading during proofing stages. (Hacker's A Writer's Reference can help with this.)

• Teach students to insert images and graphics into their essays.
  Addresses not only how to do this (which is pretty easy), but more importantly, why, what kind of images to use, when to use them, and where to use them. What rhetorical parts will the images play?

• Have students do peer review on screen.
  Students can share files by saving them to a network drive where classmates can access them. Or they can simply trade seats to read classmates' papers. See our Teaching Peer Review Workshop.

• Try radical revision exercises.
  These exercises give students a break from their own writing, and help them to re-see their texts and ideas in a new light.

  • Have students take their final paragraph from a draft, copy it, put it in a new window, and then write a new draft with that final paragraph serving as the first. If their final paragraph merely repeats what is their current first paragraph, do the same exercise with a middle paragraph.

  • Have students copy just the first and last paragraphs from an essay into a new file. Have them swap files and fill in a classmate's essay—in other words, based on the first and last paragraph, what do they think the argument is and what will the essay say? Or, have them post their first and last paragraphs in a discussion area, and then they can talk online with one another about what they expect to see and why.

  • Ask students to revise a paragraph so that it's one long, grammatically correct sentence.

  • Ask students to revise sentences so there are no uses of the 'to be' verb.

• Create idea-generating online discussions
  

  
  
  • Use a discussion board or chat tool and ask students to write quickly on a topic. Choose a topic that invites them to think out loud, where there can be many interpretations or valid ideas. Harper's Index is a good place for prompts for this type of exercise. You can ask students to write for a few minutes on their own, then post three ideas from that writing to the discussion space, and then respond to other ideas that have been posted.
    
  • Save the transcript of the discussion, and invite students to paste useful ideas and comments from it into their essay draft. They might pick up a counterargument they should consider, or find a supporting argument for an idea they have, or see something that takes their thinking in an entirely new direction.
    
  • See our Facilitating Electronic Discussions Workshop for more ideas.

• Use Discussion Tools to Comment on Readings.
  
  

  • If you use readings found online or in digital format, you can post the reading in the body of an email message to a class list, or as a message on a bulletin board. Ask students to use the reply key and to include the original message in the reply. Tell them to intersperse comments on the reading in their reply. After posting their own messages, students can then go into one another's messages and reply to and comment on their classmates' replies and comments.
  • See our Using Microsoft Word Workshop for ideas on using commenting and other features of Word.

  These last two suggestions offer activities that move writing directly from conversation and discussion to essay. They help writers imagine an audience and make real the metaphor we often use to talk about writing: that it is a conversation between the writer, the ideas under consideration, and the readers.