Looking Through the Writing Process Lens
Sportswriter Red Smith said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” Short of opening a few veins, how can teachers help students become better writers? Unlike Red Smith, our students have much more powerful tools at their fingertips but are they really taking advantage of the technology or is it just a substitution for paper and pencil or even a typewriter?
Most people who have access to a computer have used it for word processing. In fact, for many of us, it’s the first thing we learned to do on a computer and it’s one of the first things we teach our students to do. The problem comes when we confuse word processing with writing. Word processing is all about how the words look on the screen and, if you choose to print, on paper. Word processing is preparing your writing for publishing. The actual writing happens in many stages, some of those stages occurring before any sentences are formed.
One thing we’ve learned in seven years of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative is that students who use their laptops for all stages of the writing process score better on writing assessments than those who just type their final copies in a word processing program. They may use software and web tools to brainstorm ideas, to do research, to organize information and ideas, to storyboard, to outline, to write drafts, to give and get feedback on those drafts, to revise, to edit, and finally to publish. And often the published piece is something other than the conventional written story or report.
In the next few months we’ll be looking through the lens of the writing process at digital tools, strategies and teaching practices that can help our students become better writers. We’ll explore ways that the software on our MLTI image as well as some Open Education Resources (OER) can support all kinds of individual and collaborative writing efforts across all curricular areas. We hope you’ll join the conversation and share your experiences and expertise in this blog, and in our webcasts.
