Chapter 3: Collaborative Digital Writing

It is too easy and ingrained in most of us when we are revising papers to dive right into corrections of diction, grammar, usage, etc.  The students I am currently tutoring struggle hard to eek out typed words on their current essays.  To offset this anxiety, I have conversations with them before writing to talk out their essays.  What really has struck me is how fluently they can convey their arguments but the absolute brick wall that confronts them on the assignment.  "Don't worry about grammar," I advise them, "let's just get your ideas down and then we can go back and polish."  As easy as this sounds, it is really difficult for them to convey ideas without trying to make them perfect. 
For this reason, I really enjoy this idea of technologically savvy peer editing.  If students need to meet deadlines for their peers and not for teachers, they will begin typing.  In a students' mind their peers have suggestions, while their teacher has the right answers.

Chapter 12: Technology, Change, and Assessment

Tuesday's class fit right into this chapter for me.  My grandmother has been penning book reviews for me recently, and now we will be using Dr. Kearney's new revisionary methods to assess my grandmother's current work as an experiment for assessing the papers of my future writing students.   If it works for an 85 year old, I figure it will work for a high school student.  I worry about using computers in the classroom and how to properly back up a lesson plan that relies heavily on usability.  Yet, this is all part of the needed flexibitly of the teaching profession.  In any lesson, if students begin falling asleep one needs to be able to fix the problem immediately.