Late State Focuses in Student Writing
This journey with automated writing technologies has been keeping me on my toes and making me think about both technology and language beyond the sort of general everyday acceptance I have of them.
I know both technology and language are extremely complicated systems. And I will never uncover all the truths about them, but they are so intertwined. Binary code and the linguistics of languages have similar rules that have allowed them to do very complex systems and tasks with very simplistic rules and characters. The more I think about it, the more mind-blowing both these technologies, their potentials, and the complexity of human language is. The fact that through basic rules they have been able to evolve and had so much impact on human understanding, culture, communication, and the world as a whole.
But, I think it's safe to say that these technologies will never be a human reader or writer, no matter how much work we put into them. So, this leads me to think about what I want my students to do with them.
What do I think are the best usages of these technologies for my classroom and for my students to become the best human readers and writers they can be?
I’ve come up with a few goals for them. The first is for them to use them for what they are, final grammar checkers. The technologies are fine at that. But you have to take their suggestions for what they are: suggestions. You are the author, not the computer. The computer doesn’t know everything and you need to remember your own intention with your writing. This is something that can be done as early as a first rough draft all the way to just before submission of the assignments.
The second goal I have is to continue the communication and writing process with peer editing. In my writing project group, Chippewa River Writing Project in Michigan, we have been working with Writable as a writing assistive technology as a group. We have been seeing what we can do with it as a team and with our students. Writable has some incredibly interesting features with peer editing and getting feedback from peers as well as the automotive technology and the teacher. With education, the way it is this year, with students being so divided, this kind of anonymous and focused peer feedback feature it has can help students feel more connected to a writing group and community. The additional of sentence starters that Writable has in the peer editing section will also help them become better feedback givers and think about the writing in different ways.
This also takes the pressure off of everyone needing to be ready on a certain day for a peer editing session as well. If I have students turn in a draft of a paper on Writeable one week and then the next week do the peer edit activity, it will allow the piece to sit. This has the added benefit of students approaching it with new eyes as well allowing for the synchronous pace this year demands. Then, doing the editing and revisions to the final draft the following week after that, students can utilize the AI features of Writable.
My third and final goal is to make my students feel like writers. I talked about this in a previous post, but many of my students this year told me in a previous writing assignment that they wanted to feel like writers to know what that was. They want to be better at it. And I think giving them real-world and authentic examples of what writers do for a drafting and writing process will help. I don’t think there is a writer alive at present that hasn’t ever used one of these writing assistance technologies. So making them see that process and understand it by doing it as well will help us both reach that last goal.
All that time and feedback will help students build better papers.
Since an ongoing goal of mine is to make students do more peer editing, I think Writable is the perfect tool to help me with that as well as understand these technologies more. I will have to come back to how all this goes since my students are beginning to draft their very first papers as we speak. We started the year off with poetry writing and independent reading as a way to establish our rhythm and flow in this very strange year.
