Week 9: Writing with technology.

Today's students are totally different , they have different learning needs and styles. Teaching writing in the old fashioned way is just boring to them. They are used to new forms of text like images, videos, because these are the main components of their digital worlds and as teachers we need to make sure we include these components into teaching not only for writing but any other skill.

With writing  we need to engage our students in interactive and social processes of planning, drafting, and revising texts of different genres that will serve authentic communicative purposes. It is also important to increment awareness by exposing our students to some model texts so they begin to identify the features of different genres, for example persuasive, expository,  cause and effect and narrative texts.

But with technology and Internet we have an advantage that  can be used in a variety of ways to support process writing as students develop their writing skills in various genres.

For example, blogs are an ideal resource for the teaching of writing because it makes writing easier to share, and receive  feedback, and collaboration for peers. Also  web-based social networking tools offer excellent opportunities to plan the pre-writing, drafting, peer review, and revising steps of the writing process. 

To conclude, I just want to share something that I am learning through this course and it is that blogs are almost essentially designed to encourage writing and that is the purpose for which they are created after all, I think. As I have said before, we as teachers need to get our of our confort zone and why not creating a class discussion blog and turn it into an online writing workshop for the whole class as we are doing it and  also remember that most of the  students are already familiar with those kind of tools.

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