Entry 2

At my last teaching assignment, my students were middle-schoolers who were generally very eager to learn.  While not all of them were great writers, the majority of my students gave their best attempt whenever they worked on a writing assignment.  As far as Hicks’ (2009) references to technology are concerned, my students usually were more familiar with new technologies than I was.  I distinctly remember an instance when I wanted to create a worksheet in a T-chart format with a line down the middle of the page and two equal sides.  I was having trouble making a straight line down the page of the Word document; the line would always end up a bit off to one side.  One of my students was able to figure out how to create this chart correctly on the computer.  At this point, I realized that my students probably knew more about current technology than I did. 

While we only had three computers in my classroom, most of my students had computers at home and had access to computers at the library and other venues.  Additionally, many of my students had cell phones and were familiar with texting.  I would often hear discussions about Facebook and other social networking sites while students were gathered in the hallways between classes.  My students did not seem as familiar with using blogs and wikis, as the main new technology for the school at the time was the SmartBoard.  The school only had one or two SmartBoards for the faculty to share, and I did not have the opportunity to utilize this technology during my placement at this school. 

The school was a very traditional private school, and generally only essays and other standard forms of writing counted as writing.  My class did not create any digital texts, such as web pages, videos, or audio.  However, for their final projects for a unit on King Arthur, students were able to design a knight’s shield with symbols that represent their own lives and families.  It would have been interesting if I had been able to make this assignment a digital assignment in which students could design their shields online.  Then, students could potentially share their shields with one another and comment on them. 

Looking back, there are so many ideas that I would have loved to incorporate into a digital writing workshop for my class.  However, I did not have enough computers for the class, and I am unsure if the school had a computer lab other than the room in which they had their technology class.  In addition, I would have had to spend more time focusing on writing and teaching students how to utilize the technology used for our digital writing workshop.  Typically, I spent relatively little time teaching writing mini-lessons.  If I were to have implemented Hicks’ (2009) digital writing workshop, I would have had to spend more class time on writing than I had previously.  My main concern is that there never seemed to be enough class time when I taught this class, so taking away more time to devote to writing is a daunting idea.  Once I started to implement the digital writing workshop, I would likely feel more confident about time management and my ability to add workshop time to my class schedule. 

The students’ desks in my class were already arranged in groups of twos and threes, which would help to facilitate sharing and partner activities incorporated into our digital writing workshop.  To make the workshop successful, I would need to have a schedule in place and decide how much time to devote to writing, as well as how often students would be participating in the digital writing workshop.  In addition, I would need to determine how assess students based on the type of digital media they are producing.  In spite of these shortcomings, I feel that, had I known enough about digital writing workshops at the time, it would have been an interesting and successful experience for my classroom.  I definitely plan on implementing a digital writing workshop in my future classroom.

References

Hicks, T. (2009). The digital writing workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Johnston, J. (1980). King Arthur: His knights and their ladies. New York, NY: Scholastic.