Teaching Writing in the Digital Age

Let's talk about the elephant in the room, teaching writing to today's students. Teachers of today's students have students who have been texting, tweeting, and tumbling for what feels like forever. Well, forever to them. Pen and paper is "ancient" technology, so how do you go about teaching "writing" to generations who have always had digital technology available to them? While we're discussing this challenge, how many of your students would consider a pen technology? Mine didn't until I had them look up the definition of technology in the dictionary. To them, technology had to be something with gears, gigabytes, bluetooth, or anything digital.

The Pew Research Institute survey about 2500 Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers and found that the majority of these teachers find digital technology to be useful in the teaching of writing. Students are able to share their work with more people and a wider variety of audiences, collaborate with other students (in their class and outside of their classroom), and it encourages creativity and personal expression.The teachers found these things caused students to have a greater investment in the writing process. If you think about it, we all (most of us anyway) are more careful with what post on the Internet. We take the time to carefully craft our message so we can fully convey or point in the limited characters available to us. Think about how text messaging evolved. We had to get creative so we could get our message sent without an extra charge for having too many characters. Our students probably do not know this pain, but they definitely know the frustrations of post on a message on Twitter. Sometimes 140 characters is just not enough!

On the flip side, this creativity often causes frustration as it makes its' way into formal writing. This generation, and future generations, will not know what it is like to not be connected to the world on some level. To them, all communication is informal as the entire world can read their tweets or status updates at anytime. It is important that we teach our students why informal communication is not always the appropriate way to express themselves.

Some other obstacles are the idea of digital technology as toys instead of tools and equal access to digital technologies. My four year old niece can operate my mom's iPhone better than she can. My eight year old cousin is also handy with his iPad. He probably knows more about it than I do, and I'm pretty handy with technology. Tablets, smartphones, laptops, and gaming consols are standard equipment for most students these days, but not all. I can remember being excited about going to the computer lab in elementary and playing Oregon Trail on the floppy disk. I can also remember it took my brother and I several years to convince our parents to get us a Super Nintendo for Christmas. Some families simply cannot afford to have the latest technology, and not all school districts can afford to provide each student with it either. 

Another large obstacle is plagiarism and fair use. Most of my students thought that if it was on the Internet, then it was common knowledge so they didn't have to cite their sources. I had to explain to them that it didn't work that way. I also had to explain to them that just because not everyone on the Internet cited their sources, doesn't mean they didn't have to cite their sources. 

Since we have all these digital resources, what constitutes as "writing". According to the Pew survey, writing (in the eyes of teens) is basically anything students do for school. This can be short essays/responses, daily/weekly journal entries, research papers, narratives, plays, etc. These can be hand written or digitally written. Most teachers assign some sort of short response weekly and longer written responses on a semester or annual basis. English and History/Social Studies teachers are more likely to assign longer writing assignments and mixed-media (using more than one media format to complete the assignment) assignments while Science and Math teachers assign more specialized writing such as lab write-ups and mathematical proofs.

One of the crucial questions I found from this survey was if longer formal writing is still important. Students are fairly good at informal writing as the text, tweet, and post on Facebook constantly! Formal writing, according to the teachers in the survey, require students to think at a deeper level and organize their thoughts. As a former middle school History teacher, I would have to agree. I had students who write in circles, students who assume I know exactly what they are talking about and shouldn't have to write more than a sentence, and just about everything in between. I also spent the entire first six weeks each year reminding them how to write using complete sentences. As the spend more time texting and posting on social media, the more they want to slip into informal writing in the classroom. To them, they will never have to write formally outside of the classroom because they currently to do not need to. They've never had to turn in a budget analysis, a grant proposal, or even a letter of intention for a job. Formal writing to them is what they have to do for standardized tests, so it won't be needed outside of the classroom. Those of us who know better, have to give them some real life uses or we will not be able to convince them that formal writing is important.

Since some social media platforms, such as Twitter, limit the length of a post, we have to get creative with how we spell things, so often times students will bring this "creative spelling" into the classroom. My friends' daughter is even being taught this in her dual language classroom. I am not a fan of this, but I am also not a fan of limiting creativity. There is a time and place for creative spelling just as their is a time and place for correct spelling. 

With the importance of formal writing comes grammar and spelling. Teachers have been fighting this battle for years, but technology these days provides students with an out for not knowing how to spell words correctly. When I was in middle school, one of my teachers gave use a paper showcasing why relying on spell check was not a good idea as it did not catch mistakes like using their instead of there when talking about going somewhere. Back then, word processing programs did not pick up on those type of grammatical mistakes. Today, you see a blue squiggle under words when you use the wrong word, so learning the difference isn't a big deal to most students. 

On the whole, digital technology is getting students interested in writing. As with any advancements, the digital age brings forth new challenges as it solves others. We have to embrace what we have and learn to adapt the technology we have so that we are educating students to be productive citizens in this digital age.

Purcell, K., Buchanan, J., & Friedrich, L. (2013, July 16). The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing is Taught in Schools. Retrieved November 30, 2014, from http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/07/16/the-impact-of-digital-tools-on-student-writing-and-how-writing-is-taught-in-schools/#

Brittany

Mining PEW Progress:  69/150