blog 11

This week’s reading: Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change and Assessment in the 21st century classroom
I generally like to begin at the beginning so I read chapter one first. For someone as old as me to be called a “newcomer” is exciting even if it is referring to one new to technological writing. The evolution of writing does seem frightening at first. Newspapers disappearing and the internet as mode of research does seem strange, but I enjoy new things and still have a sense of adventure. This outlook helps to keep me young and requires me to continue learning and challenging myself. I must admit, I am somewhat of a dinosaur as I still love the feeling of a page in my hands when I read. I have yet to part with books adorning my shelves at home. Although I appreciate a rapid cut and paste editing session, or a high speed highlighting session of downloaded materials while reading, I repeatedly long to write in and on the text. Welcoming the conveniences of technology, I still feel attached to the older ways and wonder if they will become obsolete.
Next I wondered about the so called “social worlds” of "email, cell phone, text messaging, on line gaming, blogging, etc.” As much as I enjoy the convenience of these worlds, none of them can compare to being with those people face to face. I like that as a teacher these forms of communicating and writing are available, and do believe they will help to encourage many new and interesting writing assignments and will help peer relations, but the part of the chapter about the difficulties monitoring behaviors using these methods, was disconcerting. It seems with every positive for technology, there are drawbacks as well.
Most troublesome was the discussion of how out of sync standardized testing seems to be with how students need to be assessed. There seems no end in sight, but voices against these standard forms of assessment do seem to be getting stronger and that is encouraging.
Also promising are the many original teachers’ ideas about how to make technology useful and meaningful in students’ writing, and I look forward to the projects that they will be able to create with technologies available to them. With that thought in mind, I looked to chapter seven about Multimedia Presentations from Yearlong Research and Community Based Culminating Projects. Since I have been involved I many programs like this with original theater troupes and school projects in the past, I was really looking forward to getting better ideas about how to effectively run these types of programs. I enjoyed reading about the student’s projects and am always surprised by what students produce when they are given the chance to spread their wings in these ways.
In the conclusions section, I was reminded how necessary teaching these skills are to the lives of our students and to learn them ourselves.