Tech Integration: Writing, revision and collaboration in schools
This is one part of my project to map out a plan for teaching with technology in schools. I introduce this project here.
Grades K-2
Let’s not ask students to use digital technology directly. Let them create with their hands, their voices, their acting and their ideas while the teacher works the machines.
Students should see teachers use writing tools. Teachers should think out loud, and visibly think on the screen. Type out your thoughts, revise them. Highlight a word and change it. Say: “You know what, I think I’m going to make a list of these. That’s what these little dots mean; they’re items in a list.” Say “period” when you type a period and explain why the period goes there with a space afterwards. In effect, the students are watching a dramatization of the writing process. Whatever tools the school supports for student writing (Office, Google Docs, whatever), use that. Every once in a while, “forget” how to use a feature and let the students call it out to you. Let the students interact: Call out a word, decide the punctuation, suggest a whole sentence or a rewrite.
What creative ways can you use cutting, copying and pasting to build structure? Let’s take the example of a formulaic poem. Watch:
Just as the computer is holding phrases in its “memory,” we can invite students to do the same: Try to remember what text we’re pouring from one place to another. In essence, we are animating the structure of a piece of writing. We could do the same with a questionnaire, or parallel facts about different things (“Life on [planet] is impossible because…”).
This kind of demonstration works for teaching spelling. Establish a pattern: rate, hate, fate, late, pasting the ate throughout. But then great. Uh oh! Then wait, bait... Uh oh! Use the mouse to highlight what changed. Cut and paste the words into columns so the students see you organizing. Then return to that document and add to it as you discover new words. Later, print it for students. They’ll remember seeing it being made.
Teachers should digitize students’ writing. Imagine: A kindergarten teacher takes a student’s piece of writing, walks it over to the document camera and puts it on the screen without explanation. Maybe it is a drawing with only one letter, and the teacher says the letter sound while pointing. At this point, I would bet that students will make their own drawings so the teacher will put them on the screen as well. If the teacher chooses more drawings with letters, and only those, students will start adding letters to their drawings to be part of the process.
Over time, the teacher can draw out student writing a bit at a time. You may reach a point when students are writing words and the class is reading them. This won’t go quickly; many repetitions will do it.
In later grades, aim to make polished product out of the work students draw or write at their desks. If, for instance, you give each student a sheet of construction paper and ask them to fill it with words and visuals on a subject, you can take a snapshot of each and build a document or slideshow out of them. Or use a camera to capture students’ best math explanations with drawings or manipulatives. The teacher should organize them well, so students’ work compounds into visual dictionaries or comic strips or other diagrams with captions.
When students see their work coalesce into useful forms, they will want to make those forms themselves.
Summary: Teachers should write as part of the teaching process, so students see it and get used to it. Teachers should digitize student work so the students contribute without using technology directly.
Grades 3–5
At this age, students become aware of words, and their power to define reality. We learn this when we learn to revise: We change our words, and change the world they describe.
Provide the students with an editor. Make the most use you can of tools that let the teacher leave comments or suggestions. They may seem silly compared to walking across the room and talking, but the fact that it is formal helps. Think of tools like the comments or suggestions in Google Docs. The teacher highlights some text, suggests a different phrase, asks a question, or even adds a link to a dictionary entry. This makes the writing and editing process visual and tangible.
We can use these tools to connect students to editors from anywhere: Scientists, authors, journalists.
Over time, teachers can transfer these editing skills over to other students, who then constructively engage with each others’ work. Without time and training, students will struggle or interfere with each other this way. So put in the time, and model .
Pull students’ work into a finished project: Think of a book of essays, a newspaper issue full of articles, a timeline in a museum full of illustrated points in history. Or think of something crazier: a town full of monologues from different residents, or a plausible reconstruction of a debate from a time in history. In any of these projects, the teacher is providing the larger context that pulls students’ work together. Context enlivens writing; it eases the fear of the blank page with too many possibilities.
Finally, consider how easy digital tools make it to give students a starter text from which to branch. Give students a confusing paragraph to revise. Give them a series of sentence starters. Give them 10 copies of a skeletal sentence structure, (e.g., “Unless ____, ___ will never ____.”) and have the students flesh out each copy differently. Then let the students create either of the above themselves and share that with the class.
In all of the above, think of how a digital document is fluid, manipulable and shareable in ways that writing on paper is not. Seek out the potential in digital documents, particularly those that can be shared easily. A lot of this potential was not relevant even five or six years ago and is still emerging.
Summary: Introduce students to technology, along with the skills to use it effectively. Leave it to the teacher to coordinate their work into shared forms.
Grades 6–8
Student writing expands into new media. Over the many years, students progress from forming letters to forming words, to building sentences, to making well-built paragraphs and the occasional story. The multi-paragraph has always been the next form we expect in the progression. But also expect forms that we don’t recognize from school. Consider what you are reading right now: A set of linked essays, organized by sections and main points.
We’ve always been able to ask students to write in many forms. The question is: How do these forms hang together? Now a student can create a web page; or write a series of blog posts; or can easily consolidate several documents into what amounts to a short book. We should be actively exploring literary forms beyond the essay or book report.
Students can revise over longer cycles. The fluency of the revision process in digital form lets students start from a sketch and build incrementally. It also means that students can revisit information. They can start with hints, questions or key ideas. By revisiting the work in multiple cycles, they can develop these starting points into fully developed works.
Many of us—namely, those of us over a certain age—retain the model of a hand-written draft, followed by a typed draft. Perhaps there is an outline in there. But writing in electronic media is expandable from within: Add a paragraph between two existing ones; or create a new link forward from this piece of writing to that new one. We can emphasize that we don’t really start and stop learning in the span of time it takes to research and write an essay. It’s a longer cycle, with many small cycles within it.
Students should begin practicing connected writing. Take a moment to marvel at the wiki. It came from a brilliant insight from programmer Ward Cunningham: What if we could pick a word or phrase and link it to something that doesn’t exist yet? What he found was that when creating links was cheap and easy, connected thinking proliferated. Wikipedia, based on this model, took about 6 years and a few staff members to become the largest single repository of knowledge in history. Clearly something about rapid, connected, collaborative thinking gets people energized.
So should we set up wikis and have students edit them? No harm there, but not only wikis have this connected property. Look for anything that A) allows for links from one marker to the next; and B) makes developing links very easy. We could reach this point with index cards and a Sharpie on a corkboard. But technology makes connected writing, and thinking, lightning-fast.
Look for more than software tools or skills. Look for entire self-organizing systems (Wikipedia is an example). The jargon is stigmergy: indirect coordination, as when ant colonies show advanced complexity just by following pheromone markers. Teach students to “claim” concepts that need to be fleshed out. When your work is seen and acted upon, that is a powerful social marker. With these elements, and some experimentation, we can build a complex living system.
Students see teachers model critical thinking with and about writing. The ability to reflect on literary forms is developing at this age. Students need to see teachers modeling this process. Teachers should think out loud about different literary forms, including some that we don’t automatically think of as literary: online comments, game walkthroughs, blogging, and so forth. Weigh the value of text vs. images, charts vs. numbers, the visual explanation vs. the paragraph.
High school
Students write critically and analytically. We want to lead students to a place far above the roots of the writing process. From here they survey the landscape of literary forms and judge how they fit together. It becomes the student’s role to parse out the nature of different forms of writing, including emergent types that technology enables.
With sophistication in thinking comes commentary. The connectedness of online writing makes it easy to compare seven different views of the same subject, or compare a summary of an event to primary sources. Commenting directly on text is as easy as highlighting this sentence and typing a comment. These features enable close analysis and argumentation. These same features also raise the need: There is too much text from too many sources on the internet to make sense of it without a strong critical eye.
Students learn to branch their writing. Good programmers develop their code by branching it: Spin off a copy of some code, try out some changes on it, and either fold the new branch back into your code or discard it. There is no cost in trying something new, since the code can live in multiple versions all at once. At some point, someone has to reason about which code lives where, but this is a normal part of the process.
The concept of “drafts” is simplistic by comparison. Instead of pushing your writing forward along a straight line, what about making a branch from your main version? In this branch, turn one of your basic ideas upside-down and see what changes. Create a branch of a story in which a character lives instead of dies. Use a branch to audition some ideas that feel tenuous or strange to you, and see how they work out. Even on a small scale, exploring this way can transform writers.
Use the tools of linguistic analysis to understand their own writing. Using computer programs to analyze texts was once an exotic discipline. Now tools such as Hemingway App, Grammarly and Voyant Tools generate instant statistical insights into the vocabulary, style and semantic features of a text. Of course we should not simply accept the verdict of these sights, but use them to perceive something about our own writing that may not have been obvious (words of an unusual frequency, grade level of writing).
Teachers connect to professional writing communities. Teachers: Expose your research. Share where and how you gather information. Subscribe to RSS feeds and go over the day’s results. Conduct searches through online libraries. Of course, share your links so students can initiate their own explorations. The long-term goal is to invite your students into the wider community of writers in all forms.